Tending to Tender Hearts
Our vulnerabilities are also our strengths
I am writing this while sitting in a classroom. The Sixth Graders are working on vocabulary words on their Chromebooks, and it’s unusually quiet for this age group who treat school as their only social time, and frankly, I don’t blame them. In a world full of digital communication, void of genuine connection, they thirst for engagement with their peers. No longer do you see latchkey kids roaming in packs. Actually, if you see teens roaming in packs in Chicago, it’s more likely that you will witness a store about to get ransacked than see a group about to explore the nearest river. I have a follow-up to The Edumacation of the United States of America to cap off my school year, but this post isn’t about that.
This post won’t feature my cynicism or usual dark humor/defense mechanism as I make observations about the world. This post will be soft.
I had a small break earlier and quickly penned a promised email to Barbara Sinclair of The Quaker Poplar fame, and since I couldn’t shake the experience I was retelling, nor the now relived feeling the email conjured inside me, I thought I’d also share it with you.
A little back story:
Barbara writes about her walks in nature and the animals that she spots or who come to visit her in her cabin in the woods. She often talks about a morning dove she has called Claire and has written in her Substack about the meaning of the spirits of these animals. When I got sick last year, two doves started visiting me in the spring. They would coo and play around, and eventually, there was a nest above my hammock in the grape pergola I built. I shared photos of them with Barbara, and I told how I think they were telling me it was all going to be ok. In return, Barbara shared a deeply intimate and moving story about her that resonated with me.
About two weeks ago, I emailed Barbara this photo and told her that Claire (we know it’s not the same Claire, just shorthand for the spirit of the dove) had returned and nested again. This time, it was a bit of an unusual location, but what was done was done, and my children were happy to be able to see her at eye level rather than needing a ladder to look in her nest.
And this is the email I just sent:
Dear Barbara
The day got away from me yesterday as I spent what I could outside, gardening since it was balmy and with perfect outdoor conditions for manual labor. I am at school now but have about 30 minutes before I have to pick up the class from their essentials period so I want to jot down a quick note.
Two days ago, I was tinkering around in my garden building new raised beds, and I went to see how my friend Claire was doing since she had built her nest at waist level in my little outdoor BBQ shelving alcove. As I came up to her, she seemed distressed, frightened of me. This is bizarre because I've been bringing her water and seed close to her so she didn't have to go far to feed, and she has let me pet her; I thought she actually rather enjoyed my company.
And then she fluttered and flew away. And then I saw them -- two grown babies -- with feathers and all, not newborns, and I was surprised - I just assumed she was still sitting on the eggs because she had never moved from her location before. And then I realized the horrible truth and the reason for her distress. The babies weren't moving. It was windy so it furled up their feathers which looked damp and matted against their tender pink skin, but they were both dead.
I was so overtaken by sadness by this scene. I know it's nature, and nature is cruel, and it was probably pretty chilly the day before, and they maybe froze to death - what makes two brand new babies die at the same time with the mother around? There was no sign of a predator. It has to be environmental. But it made me sad nonetheless. I jiggled the little metal plate that the nest was built upon just to make sure, and I looked around for Claire, who now just watched me in silence from the backyard. And then she flew up and away. As if she stayed just long enough to show me what had happened to her babies. As if she wanted me to bear witness to her grief. I bawled for some time while I buried them in our backyard pet cemetery.
I know it's just a pair of birds. Birds I never even met. And they annoy the eff out of me because they peck on my tomatoes and shit all over my hammock. But there they were, these two who never even got a chance to see how damn beautiful this life is. And I felt the same way when that pregnant rat drowned in the kiddie pool a couple of summers ago, and its babies were littered all over as if, in the final act of life, she ushered in her cubs. And it got me thinking about babies in Gaza, and the millions of babies lost in wars and famines around the world. And it got me thinking about abortion, the ultimate betrayal of a mother to a baby, even though, yes, I am pro-choice, it sure is one heavy choice to make, with some choices only made slightly easier by circumstance. It makes me infinitely sad to see how blasé that choice is made by some mothers, some multiple times over.
And then, all of that got me thinking about my own living children, seeing how quickly they grow up while I'm still trying to soak up every little moment, every little first, and every little last too, for there is a last time they come and snuggle with you at bedtime. And there is a last time they hold your hand crossing the street. And I'm trying not to get emotional as I think that there was a last time Claire saw those babies alive too, because I'm writing from school and there's nothing more that makes 6th graders smell blood than a substitute with tears on her face.
Anyway, I thought I'd write this out to you because I knew you would understand the nature of this feeling and when you see your Claire, please tell her I'm sorry and if she can tell my Claire that too since I haven't seen her since. All Claire's know each other, right? :) Now that I've written my heart out here, I might even put this experience out as a post. I know my readers are mostly dissident badasses, but it's all this raw that makes us so, in the end, eh?
This raw and tender emotion was very much alive and present during an Apocaloptomist Club meeting yesterday. It got me thinking that as we tend to tender hearts, is it possible that it is exactly our vulnerability that makes us so strong? It’s the things of suffering, the knowing of suffering, every cauterized wound that has once bled open, and every scar that serves as a reminder that we’ve pulled through. I stare at my own stretch marks on my stomach, once in perfect youthful mid-rift, now loving mementos of the time that body carried twins and almost a decade later, a third boy to term in a forty-year-old womb. It makes me giggle that when I was younger, I wouldn’t have used a word like “beautiful” to describe the deflation, but when my five-year-old runs his fingers on those tracks, he does it with the love only a tender heart knows how to procure and those stretch marks become a masterpiece.
And I would trek a scorched world over a thousand folds for that love, the same one that makes me cry at the sight of dead baby birds because it’s the same soft spots that my shield is made of.
I hope wherever you are today, you tend to a tender heart or allow a tender heart to tend to you.
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Dear Tonika...I'm crying all over again. 😭 Life is so tender...with our human friends, animal friends, tree friends, etc. What would life be like if we didn't experience the tender heartaches? Your heart touched Claire's heart, and in turn touched mine, and now everyone else who will read this. We hurt, we cry, and then our energy fields sparkle and expand, flooding the Universal field.
I emailed you back to tell you about a friend who called me yesterday about a dead Cuckoo bird on her balcony, and the fact that a healer she's working with reported that the same day, he also had found a dead Cuckoo bird on his balcony.
And, just now, my friend, Amanda, who writes Whispers on the Wind, messaged me to tell me that a Hawk just flew by her patio and swooped up a Mourning Dove. Feathers flying all around. 😭 I call her Bird Woman because I have never known anyone who (on a daily basis) sees Hawks, Osprey, Eagles, Blue Heron, etc. https://amandagaleotti.substack.com/?utm_source=global-search
Signs and messages abound.
From Ted Andrews' book Animal Speak:
"Birds are the bridge between humans and the divine, the Earth and Heaven. They are the symbols of transcendence, the rising above lower natures. They reflect a taming or rising above a juvenile nature. Oftentimes, liberation from any state of being that is too fixed, final or immature is reflected through bird symbology and appearances. They are the ultimate symbols of transcendence and release from any patterns of existence to a more superior one…Birds are a source of creative imagination, and they have the ability to awaken within us our own flights of magic.”
This was the post that began our Mourning Dove journeys together: https://barbarasinclair.substack.com/p/a-healing-dream?utm_source=publication-search
Big Love to you, my friend, and thank you for sharing your tender heart with us all. 💗
This isn't in the bird or animal category but since Ronnie says I'm the keeper of miracles, I think this is the place for this story. I told part of it before: I had a 36" Wolf range that was the bane of my existence for 20 yrs. Despite replacing the igniters, it had to be lit with a match. I was afraid to use the oven because it always seemed ready to explode. I had to turn off the electricity to use the burners or the igniters would keep clicking. It had a small gas leak, did I mention that?
My daughter finally convinced me that I'd paid my dues and I bought a new stove. But when it was delivered, the old Wolf was too heavy for the moving guys to get out. But it happened that my son-in-law's dad does commercial kitchen installation, so they were going to come do it.
At the same time my espresso machine went kaput, and all our internet advice didn't help. The repair shop, who didn't work on machines under $2K, told me to whack it. That didn't work either. So the morning my Wolf was scheduled for the dump, I was at the coffeeshop oversharing my story with the barista, as is my wont.
A woman overheard and said her son was into fixing things and wanted a Wolf. It turned out that his house was on the way back home for my SiL & his dad. Then we figured out that his wife was friends with my daughter in HS. They've since gotten together, and the friend is now expecting her third baby (baby mania, I'm telling ya, depop is failing!)
And the reason I'm telling you this now is that the new owner just sent a photo of my old stove. It's clean and beautiful! He fixed the igniters and found the gas leak. He converted it to propane. I can't believe this gorgeous hunk of metal almost went to the dump!
I don't know why those two baby birds needed to not thrive. But how much better that your mourning dove had someone to mourn with! They could have been out of sight, out of reach, with no one to see their passing. And oh, your poignant stories, Tonika, tug at my mom heart. In some form those baby birds are coming back. Maybe in an even better form.