When Nature Does Its Thing

What a joy to witness it.

Good morning!

It feels like the universe has been pulling all types of shit out of its bag of tricks lately, and life has just felt a tad more complicated than normal. Anyone else? If you’re the astrology type (I dabble), a three-week-long Mercury retrograde just ended on May 14, so maybe that explains some of the high-strung weirdness that has been going on. Conversations with a few close friends this week have confirmed that I’m not the only one feeling this way: people are going through it, for whatever reason. This is our collective reminder to be gentle with ourselves and the people around us.

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The other day I was driving home when the car in the opposite lane stopped abruptly in the middle of the road. As I got closer, I saw they had stopped for a very good reason: there was a large goose ambling across the street at a glacial pace, putting one webbed foot carefully in front of the other, looking around bewilderingly, as if she couldn’t understand why she had an audience and more importantly, why we were getting in the way of her commute.

As I got even closer, I noticed she wasn’t alone. Three impossibly fuzzy baby geese were following her, or rather, zooming around her legs, roaming aimlessly with feet that looked way too big for their little bodies. One was going one direction, one was going another, and the third one looked rather perplexed by its existence. It was clear that Parent Goose wasn’t going to wrangle Children Geese anytime soon, but none of the humans seemed to care because we were all jacked up on the dopamine that flooded our brains the minute we saw those fluffy little beings hobbling across the street (Please, do yourself a favor and Google an image of a baby goose).

As I was basking in baby geese fever, I noticed two guys suddenly pull over, throw their flashers on, and get out of their truck a little further up the road. I’ll admit, I immediately got nervous upon seeing them, for one reason only: These guys bore close resemblance to the white men who stormed the Capitol on January 6 (iykyk). In other words, they were terrifying. These big, burly men, with hair longer than mine and beards that would put Santa’s to shame, were walking with a PURPOSE toward those baby geese, and they did not look happy. I have seen my fair share of impatient and self-important people take their frustration out on animals, and for a split second, I was worried they were about to do something I would never unsee.

Lo and behold, I jumped to major conclusions, because these men two knelt to the ground with the grace of feathers, scooped up each little baby goose in their hands, and started transferring them, one by one, to the sidewalk. Then they escorted Parent Goose out of the street, over to Children Geese, and stood around the entire group to protect them from oncoming traffic in case one of them tried to make a break for it.

Be still my freakin’ heart. The geese were safe, the traffic resumed, and all of us drove on a little gentler than we were a few minutes prior. There are a lot of lessons in this story; I’ll let you decide for yourself what they are, but here’s the deal: I love being pleasantly surprised—by nature, by people, and what both parties do in the presence of one another.

Look up, but also look down. Most importantly, look away from your phone!

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A different day this week, I was walking up the stairs to my home and noticed a movement in the grass. The grass was long in the way it is when you haven’t mowed it yet this season (as Aaron says: we’re re-wilding, okay?), so I couldn’t see what it was, but there was lots of rustling and some subtle chomping sounds. I was intrigued.

All of the sudden, a little head popped up, and the tiniest baby bunny emerged from the grass, looked around, hopped a few inches away, and went back to chomping. It had to be about four inches long, at the most. It was adorable, and I sent a silent congratulations to the large rabbit with the giant belly I had noticed in the yard weeks prior who I now realized was probably pregnant. Not long after that, I looked out the window into the backyard and saw two more micro-bunnies, so small and so delicate, munching away on dandelions.

I’ve been seeing them around the yard for the past week, and it makes me happy to know they’re finding a little home on this plot of land, too.

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This past Sunday, I was doing my weekly cold plunge in the Puget Sound with friends. We got lucky with an insanely beautiful early summer day: high in the mid-80s, no humidity, the beach filling up by 10:00am—the kind of day that makes you feel like you’re on top of the world. As we were neck-deep in the briny yet clear water, a sea lion poked its head out not too far away—as if it were surveying all the humans at the beach—before diving under again. About twenty feet away from that, a sweet Black lab was swimming and playing catch with its owner. Upon seeing the sea lion, it started swimming towards it: the domesticated animal chasing after the wild one. The sea lion popped up a few more times; both were intrigued, but the owner called the dog back, and both animals went on with their lives.

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These little vignettes of animals doing their thing in nature while humans sputter around concerned with the mundanities of daily life always put a lot of things into perspective for me. It reminds me of one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems, I Go Down To The Shore:

I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall—
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

Nature has work to do. And it’s a privilege that we get to bear witness to it.

Hope you can find some gentle and joyful moments outside this week,

Elizabeth