All spring I’ve been watching these blue jays build their nest on our back porch, squatting really, in an old robin’s nest left behind two years ago. The robins built their nest on the top of a rolled up bamboo shade, left by the previous owners of the house two years before that. This house sits on this small piece of earth once inhabited by the Massachusett people who didn’t believe in land ownership, and has now been bought and sold many times over the past century. All of us squatters really, here to tend this place for a moment in time, with a strange misconception that we could own a piece of earth. The bluejays know better. They’ve just come for the season to birth their young.
Their nest is scrappy. Somehow I find comfort in this scrappiness: pieces of plastic garbage hanging down haphazardly, much like the house inside and my messy and imperfect life that unfolds in it. The porch itself, home to the hand-me-down shade housing the hand-me-down nest is rotting. Wood from generations past, giving way. Soon we’ll tear the whole thing down, once the birds have moved on from this temporary home. The whole thing a small reminder from nature that sometimes even these most sacred moments of transformation are messy and fleeting. I watch this unfolding in awe as my own winter comes to a welcome end.
All along there have been so many sign posts that I would make it through. The earth is so reliable in this way, teaching us this lesson of rebirth over and over again each spring. First the bulbs that push through giving us flowers and wild onions in places that appeared dormant days before. Then the trees with their long drawn out reveal — buds, then blooms, then the final opening of bright spring green leaves. I trust this unfolding slightly more than my own. Somewhere deep inside I know it will come, but the path is less predictable. Eventually I remember I am of her, this earth. My path back to myself is my path back to her after too many cold months of tensing my body against the cold, growing sedentary in the empty comfort of my warm house.
I’ve watched them cautiously, sometimes forgetting, stomping clumsily as humans do, only to be reminded by mama bird’s nervous song: “Get away from my nest!” I retreat respectfully, not wanting to interfere with this small miracle happening not more than six feet from my kitchen sink. Somehow this watching has become a marker. I remember so well the magic of the baby robins being born just weeks after returning from my first trip to Cortes Island for the Evolutionary Leadership Retreat. I delighted in this re/birth happening inside and all around me.
One morning, I remember to take my practice outside, lugging tea and my yoga mat into the backyard where the birds are alive in chorus. I join their chorus with my own morning song, arms outstretched in salute of the sun (toes cold and wet from the morning dew). This is the weekend that the baby birds will hatch, and as I look up at mama bird and sing my morning prayers, it comes to me- my priestess name, “Spreads Her Wings.” All of the sudden in this moment I have clarity. Spreading my wings is not a destination, a final outcome of my work towards liberation, it is an action, a practice that I can choose to take each day of my life.
In the afternoon I go to dance class and my teacher asks me for a movement and a word. “What do we need?” she says. “Flight,” I answer, moving across the room, wings spread, opening and closing my wings to the beat of the drum, a flock of dancers flying with me.
Later I share the story of flight with my teacher, receiving my name that morning. She looks me in the eyes and shares that she is leading a workshop next weekend called leadership in flight, that includes flying trapeze, “You have to come,” she says. My YES is unquestionably bursting from inside my heart.
I am learning to be in practice of listening for these moments of YES. Listen and then notice the many No’s that follow to dull the YES. (I can’t leave the kids, not realistic, too self indulgent, and on and on). This time the YES is so clear that I will find the way to go. I find out there’s a children’s program and take my daughter Rose.
Rose & I fall in love with each other and this place, we find the peace that has been missing in our relationship and our house all year. I FALL IN LOVE WITH FLYING TRAPEZE! We’re scared to return home, to lose this magic. On the last morning I’m walking to class lost in thought about the anxiety of returning home and I come face to face with a deer. We lock eyes for a minute before she dances away across the field and into the woods.
We watch the birds each day, bringing food back to the nest, feeding their young, beak to beak. They take turns, one protecting the nest, keeping the babies warm while the other goes off to find food. One morning I look and they’re both gone. ‘It’s too soon’ I think to myself and I begin to judge the birds (or myself?). Do they really know what they’re doing? Raising baby birds in this scrappy second hand nest? Two weeks go by and we see one of the babies edging out of the nest, though we don’t see it fly.
On the weekend we go out to the back porch and notice one of the baby bluejays didn’t make it. We bury it in the backyard, singing it back home to mother earth.
Jen Kiok
Jen Kiok (she/her/hers) reaches for justice through her work as an educator, a community leader, a mom and a partner. She currently serves as the Executive Director for Boston Workers Circle, Center for Jewish Culture and Social Change. Jen is a Hebrew Priestess in training, co-conspiring with her ancestors on the path to collective liberation.
