Have you ever wanted to be a nest?

I’m grateful for the exceptionally kind and insightful responses to last week’s issue, It's 10 pm. Do you know where your solace is?

I never know what will come up in my personal journal that will shape what I share with you, nor do I know if what moves me will be helpful to you.

Writing is like fishing, at least for me and my daily writing. I put out a barbless hook and let it be carried by whatever current is moving through that morning.

Then when I feel a tug, I reel in. Whatever’s on the hook, drips into my little notebook. I’m a catch-and-release kinda gal, so once I’ve released what needs releasing, I cast my line again.

What I heard, a lot, was how so many appreciated the links I shared.

Great! So, let’s start our time together with a link to piece I discovered earlier this week that might make for a calm soundtrack as you read. See what you think ‣ "Free Bird" Instrumental 24 Strings.

From my journal | Mid-May 2025

Is wrong to try to write about a wing, about what it is?

More than its mechanics. The why of it?

To comprehend its feathers, each shaft with all the tiny filaments, seemingly hollow yet filled with a wanting for flight?

Would I need audacity to express that understanding?

You can’t even draw your way out of a paper bag. Ah, the mind has many voices, and at least one finds pleasure in telling you what you can’t do.

“So what,” I answer, out loud. One of the most powerful phrases on the planet. No kidding, try it.

I wasn’t thinking about drawing, though words can come from pen and ink, or in my case, mechanical pencil and lead.

A paper bag. That used to be a purely mundane item.

But anything can be imbued with meaning.

Waiting with the firewood and kindling in the living room, so many small white bags shape my current life, a story about toting home the prescriptions that keep my husband keeping on.

Twisted and ready to start a fire, one bag calls to me.

Taking it to my desk, I smooth it crinkly-flat. Torti girl hops up to see what I’m doing, rubs her check on my hand, paws at the paper, then settles down, her cat-body asking, Now what?

I start drawing. One thick line, arcing up then down, as if an eyebrow, though it’s the beginnings of a wing. Humerus then ulna. Bird architecture (not too unlike our own). Scaffolding for flesh and feathers.

“You’re right. Now what?” I say to Torti-girl. Dozing, she responds with, “Mrrrackk!”

To the snarky voice inside I offer, You’re right, too. I can’t even draw my way on a paper bag.

Letting go of the pencil, I rub a fingertip over the grey arc on the bag, as If I can feel what it means to fly by just touching a crude wing-line.

Looking at my finger, a smudge of lead. I press its tip back down on the white paper. A sooty bird head. I sketch one eye, toss in two eyelashes, then a beak, slightly smiling.

Both of us, poet and pencil-bird, amused.

In a meditation yesterday, there was a white downy feather falling down through my body.

Fluffy, curved, the feather began as light, as sun on the crown of my head, pouring into a still-busy brain, which is real and touchable inside its bone-cave.

Rays, traveling more than 93 million miles to find me on my deck with the broken gate, reached into my mind, which is real but untouchable and cannot be contained.

Suddenly just a white feather, wafting, slipping behind my eyes, slowly swirling clockwise in my cheeks, down the tunnel of throat into my heart-space, which swelled, expansive.

Breathing in, my heart was a mouth wanting oxygen, pulling air right through fleecy vest, cozy henley, porous skin into that hidden, pulsing place.

Opening eyes. All around me, a gusty-windy spring day. Rhody petals shaken loose were magical flying carpets of magenta, landing bright and delicate in Sword ferns.

See how almost anything can bloom?

Closing eyes again. I let the wind come through me—sternum, ribs, shoulder blades, spine, and every juicy bit of tissue, all permeable.

The body more a prayer flag than a prayer maker.

All the while that soft feather inside, whorling round and round, in some eddy of air, cove of imagination.

Down it dropped into my belly, and I felt it, tickling and unsettled in the nest of me.

Have you ever wanted to be a nest?

Have you ever wanted to create something, fledging out of your messy middle, that you protect and nurture, that you love and let go, knowing something of you continues without you?

I don’t mean children. I don’t mean legacy.

Those are meaningful, of course, though there’s something more.

Do you know what I mean?

Pure creation. Play. Curiosity. Inspiration. Imagination.

I mean something new, arising out of you, seemingly out of nothing … though there’s never nothing. There’s always a nest to begin from.

The very word, nest, draws it’s origins not only from the idea of a nurturing space, but also from a sense of refuge, a centering place more generative and creative that simply a starting point for life.

Envisioning twigs and lichens, bits of moss and scavenged deer fur, a few iridescent dragonfly wings, I play at creating my inner nest, that solitary white feather in the center.

Some say the world we know was divinely made. Others say it’s an apathetic evolution of inanimate stuff into life forms and sentient beings, including homo sapiens, leading to you and me.

Made? Evolved? Adam or Atom? I don’t know. Could be either, both, neither?

Once, travelling in the highlands of Peru, I sat with an elderly woman speaking Quechua, who told me, through a translator, how we all came from a divine creator risen from Lake Titicaca who made us out of stones. I asked how we stone-people can be alive. She said all things have what she called Kawsay, sacred energy, suggesting a universal life force.

Existence, the very awareness of our being-ness, remains a mystery. Knowledge and belief are our minds’ two faces.

Whether driven by spirit or subatomic particle-waves, the force is wildly creative.

Diverse. Unexpected. Curious and comic and charming and clever.

Consider Kangaroos, suckling their babies in secret pouches that are warm, moist, and muscular as the inside of your cheek.

Alligator lizards can fling loose the tips of their tails that wiggle and writhe, a crazy distraction, while they scuttle away from threats.

Luna moths, radiant green to moon-ish white, seemingly glow in the night, mouth-less and unable to eat once they grow wings.

Naked mole rats can live more than 30 years (25 times longer than a New York City rat), apparently without the infirmities of aging. Hmmm, let’s have what they’re having, yes?

Elephant trunks are sensitive enough to pick up the scent of a human miles away, and from a tender vine, pluck a berry without crushing it.

There are fireflies with light-up bottoms. Bioluminescent plankton. The Duck-billed platypus—an experiment in absurdity. T-Rexes, massive and homely with skulls bigger than me—gone, it’s true, but also true that they were once here.

Out of the creative, us.

Out of us, the creative.

I create, therefore I am.

What about you?

Looking out at garden and yard, my world is lush and every shade of green, sprouts and weeds drawing bees, blossoms coming in waves, the way migrant birds arrive, the Allen’s hummingbirds, then the Swainson’s thrushes, soon the Black-headed grosbeaks.

Suddenly a childhood rhyme.

The bird is on the wing,
ain’t that absurd,
the wing is on the bird.

So simple and silly. Who wouldn’t laugh?

I always hear that little poem in a Brooklyn accent

The boid is on the wing,
ain’t that absoid,
the wing is on the boid.

No one knows where it came from or who conceived it.

What I know is that being playful is underrated and too often left to children.

Back at my notebook again, and I still want to write about a wing, about what it is?

More than its mechanics. The why of it?

A task for another day, many days.

Today, I’ll create one piece of the story.

A wing is motion, even when still, wind in the feathers, a whistling you can’t hear in the hollow bones.

A wing can be on a bird. A wing can be the idea of a bird sketched on a pharmacy bag.

Inside you, there is a nest, a little messy perhaps, with a single white feather. On the kitchen counter, egg shells.

The way you flutter from one to the other, the inner to the outer, that sweet surging of attention, is flight.

Further thoughts how we’re meant to live as creative beings

I’m not being poetic or clever when I say, “I create, therefore I am.”

And I mean it when I ask, “What about you?”

If I had a nickel for everyone who says, “Oh, but I’m not creative,” I could build a castle out of nickels, filling it with elephants, kangaroos, naked mole rats and luna moths, and all the platypuses from Down Under.

Every thought is a creation.

Every act and how your presence, physically and energetically, holds space in a room is a creation.

The way you make a salad, your singing in the shower or the car, the love note you wrote (and the angry email, too), the awful dance that only you can dance, your hands as they braid your daughter’s hair or flutter in the air as you speak, the stories you tell in your words and with your body’s quiet language—all you, creating.

Yes, one might give birth to a poem or a painting, design a smartphone app, plan a garden, doodle on a napkin, quilt or knit or crochet, tie a trout-luring fly, make a table out recycled maple, pick out a tune on a banjo, turn aluminum cans and ribbons into a quirky sculpture, build a house, or make a home.

So many ways to create one thing out of other things, but that is only a tiny part of what it means to be creative.

You create every time you look at the world around you, your eyes taking it all in, your brain processing the bits of sensory data, filtering photons and facts, your perspective and history sifting all of it, creating a vision that is entirely yours, uniquely you.

Do you get what I mean?

One way through whatever is wrong or right in this world is to remember you are literally a creative force.

Creativity, which is part curiosity, is how you try to make sense of what you can’t understand. And if whatever it is happens to be senseless, then creativity is how you find a way to live with it.

Writing is part of what makes joy possible for me. But even before pencil tip touches paper, I’m leaning as much as possible into now and here, creating my experience of what it means to be alive.

Look up from where you’re reading this, and smile at the first thing your eyes find. Just try it, okay?

Didn’t that tiny act shift something in this moment, in you?

You created that.

Three links to inspire curiosity and playfulness

🎧 Click the colored hyperlinks to watch or listen ...

Bobby McFerrin - LIVE Improvisation at The Kennedy Center

Glowing Garden by Daan Roosegaarde

Brandon Leake Delivers Spoken Word Poem to His Baby Daughter

This week's question

If you feel up to sharing how you're answering this question, comments are incredibly welcomed—and I will respond. Your shared experience may be just the support and inspiration someone else needs.