When Shrubs Shimmy - Stories on Holiness and Home Inspired by Birds

"Holiness"

This week I noticed the evergreen just outside the window shaking . This particular shrub hasn't thrived like its sibling in the front of the house that gets more sun and has room for its roots to take in nourishment.

I love this little evergreen. I didn't intend it as a screen, but it's become that, a shield in a sense where I feel a bit of privacy when in the back room.

For several winters now I've strung clear lights on the evergreen, lights that shine from Winter Solstice through much of winter. Just this week I was thinking it's time to remove them since Spring's light is here. I was thinking of removing the lights when the top of this skinny, already shaky little shrub shook. It shimmied as a cardinal appeared from the top.

Across our small deck and driveway another cardinal, a bright red male, did his cardinal call as if to say, "Are you okay in there?"

She peered out and called back, "I'm busy."

This little evergreen may not have received the nourishment it needs to grow tall and wide, yet it and the birds nourish me.

All week I witnessed the building of a home, a cradle in the top of the shrub. I've witnessed something holy as the cardinal couple goes about building their manger in the simple evergreen a stable for their child.

It is through the simple that the sacred, the holy is revealed.

"At Home"

'If I had a house outside, I would build it in wisteria,' I heard myself thinking this week.

There I stood in a neighbor's yard, drawn by a grand waterfall of lavender. I had not been the only one for in the midst of the blossoms sat the beginnings of a nest or the endings of one from last season. What beauty!

'If I had a home outside,' I thought.

If I have a home outside? I do have a home outside!

All of Nature is my home. When outdoors I'm at home within, a place that is harder to reach when inside the four walls of the structure called home, except when I'm writing, trying to convey an experience or idea often related to nature or when I'm washing, chopping, cooking food provided by nature or when vacuuming or cleaning - tending my home.

Engaged with Nature and tending, I'm at home, at home within and without.

When and where are you at home?

-Dawn! The Good News Muse, 27 March 2011
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