When I went in my kitchen this morning, I looked out the window and saw birds! A whole flock of fat robins, clustered around my bare hedge, and flipping through the dead leaves on the ground below. What a welcome sign of spring! I turned to make coffee, and turned back to the window -- the flock was gone, maybe startled by my movement in the window. Well, I thought, at least I had one sign. Then I noticed a flutter in the leaves on the ground -- one robin had stayed to flip through the leaves and look for food. As I watched him shuffling through the leaves, more robins came back, until the entire hedge was covered with them again. They were eating the berries that grew on the weedy vine that engulfed my hedge last summer. I so enjoyed hearing them chirp and call to each other. Made me feel like spring is not as far away as I have felt it is lately.
I've been a little down this week; I think the weather has gotten to me. It's certainly not my classes or internship - I've been enjoying them very much. It's not anything else that I could pinpoint; I had a wonderful chat with my son this week, had lunch with a dear friend, had time to do a little knitting. It must be the cold. Winter always messes with me around February.
Some lessons I got from this little vignette:
Sometimes I need to be patient - what I want to see will take a bit to reveal itself.
In nature, especially, change is constant. Spring will come, even if sometimes it feels very far away. Life is that way, too.
What seems like a weed to me may nourish something else.
Oh, and don't make coffee when I'm thinking about robins. I made a mess - spilled the grounds on the counter.
