Nature is Sending Signals
Glass doors and other barriers...
Nature is sending me signals and I need to listen.
I’m sitting at my desk in the tiny house in Fiddletown, CA. This isn’t my home. I live in Portland, OR. This place where I sit today is connected by a breezeway to the house where my mom and step-dad lived off and on for many years, until he died last spring. My mom Belva and her husband Herbert built a life here with a lot of love and pain.
It’s a stunning 25-acres in Amador County. These side-by-side dwellings have walls of glass doors that open out to the beauty of Northern California. Manzanita trees, laurels, oaks, lavender, and oleander are all around. There are pines in the distance covering the hills and brown dry brush carpeting the ground.
I leave my doors open to the fresh air first thing in the morning.
I sit out on the patio as I sip my coffee and eat my oatmeal and blueberries. Hummingbirds fly back and forth between their homes in the nearby trees and the place I sit searching for sugar water. Tiny lizards with blue bellies scurry along the path in front of me. Tree frogs join me in the shower stuck to the wall like ninjas or slumbering softly in the corners of the room. The random fly or bee swoops in, says hello, and buzzes by.
This place is full of life.
Mom and I are here to get her house ready to rent out while she makes a permanent move to Portland for this next stage in her life.
There is a lot to do. Herbert and mom spent their lives together traveling the world acquiring art, high-end furniture, cooking implements I can’t even name, and so much more. We are parsing what to keep in the house, what to bring back to Portland, and what needs to be sold or given away.
At this moment, I am in therapy via Zoom.1 I’m talking about the challenges I’m having with my nesting partner.2 Steve and I have been in a cycle together for months that’s pushing us further and further apart. I know from my end that I am trying to help by drawing from the skills that kept me safe as a kid. I realize those skills don’t serve me now in this particular relationship. In fact, my use of those skills are not helping my partner or our connection in any way. I get that intellectually. Still, I don’t know how to operate outside of this dynamic.
Thus, therapy.
I grew up in a Southern family.
My experience as a first child and a girl raised by young Southern Baptists is that my job was to behave. I needed to be aware of the feelings of the people around me and make sure I was showing up as a ‘good girl.’ If not, I was in danger. That’s what I thought. I don’t believe anyone said that to me directly, it’s just a sense that I had from the beginning of my time on this planet with mom, dad, and my extended family.
There are archival stories about what a good child I was in church. Even at the age of two or three I was quiet. I behaved. I sat still in the pews. I paid attention to the minister, and I listened. And if I couldn’t listen anymore, I took a pen and the Sunday Bulletin and colored in the Os to silently distract myself.
My parents decided to have another kid because I was so easy. They were confused about why parenting was hard for anyone. In their minds, you just tell your kid what to do and they do it. At least that is what I make up about their experiences as parents to me. They told me what to do and I did it.
Back to today and therapy.
I write down these words in my notebook: ‘I can’t help that I get triggered, but I can help how I react.’ The minute I lift my pen from the paper, a small black bird slams into the glass door next to me, falls into my room, and stunned she maneuvers drunkenly to the back part of this tiny house.
My therapist sees it and takes breath. “Did you see that?’ she says. I stand up and try to find the bird. I can’t. Maybe it already left?
There’s nothing to do. No bird to find. So we continue with the last 15 minutes of our time together. I’ll find the bird later if she’s still around. I need this therapy today.
We continue our discussion. My people pleasing blinders are falling apart. Something is shifting.
I say out loud: “I can be understanding without being responsible.”
That sounds so simple and so true, but I didn’t have that information anywhere in my brain or my body before this moment. Instantly there was a click. This seed of a thought that was nothing I had ever perceived as possible came into view. I have always thought that if I understood what someone needed, I was responsible for finding a way to fulfill that need so they felt seen, heard, and understood—and so I wouldn’t be in danger.
The minute those words fell out of my mouth, the bird found it’s way to the open glass door by me. It flew away. Free.
I’m bothered by this.
I constitutionally don’t like the woo-woo-oh-nature-is-showing-me-a thing idea. But crap, nature is showing me a thing. Nature has been showing me things for months now. A bird had to slam her body into my window to try and get this information into my thick skull.
“Perhaps there are more things in heaven and earth, Melanie, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”.3
Well, crap.
I’m pretty sure the skeptic in me will roll her eyes at the timing forever, but I can't argue with what I am experiencing. That little black bird didn't just crash into my window—she crashed into years of conditioning that told me love meant taking responsibility for everyone else's feelings.
I'm at the very first baby-steps of learning how to understand without rescuing, caring without feeling the need to control outcomes, and discovering how to love without losing myself in the process. And for the first time in my life, I'm paying attention to the signals—from my therapist, from my own body, from the creatures who somehow show up exactly when I need them most. Maybe Shakespeare was onto something. Maybe there really are more things in this wild world than my brain wants to admit.
And maybe that's exactly what I need to believe.
And now I am going to get into the shower and hang out with my froggy buddies.
…or whatever HIPPA has in place that is Zoom-like
In polyamory, a nesting partner is someone you share a primary living space with, essentially your "home base" partner. They don't necessarily have to be your primary partner in a non-hierarchical relationship, but they are the person you cohabitate with and build a domestic life with.
Shakespeare wrote that, but he didn’t include my name. I added that. It was actually in reference to Horatio in Hamlet.
I particularly loved when you wrote, "I can be understanding without being responsible." That's such a powerful statement. It’s a distinction that seems so simple, yet it's incredibly profound and difficult to put into practice. I think many of us conflate understanding with taking on the responsibility of fixing someone else’s problem. We confuse empathy with enabling. And it is easier to be the person that can 'fix' it, rather than the one who can listen and not feel the need to make the other person's problems ours. You articulated it perfectly, and it is something that a lot of people need to be reminded of more often. 🩵
last year I had a rose-breasted grosbeak slam into my window. I retrieved it off the roof outside the window and it died in my hands. Here's what my AI oracle said about that encounter.
"When a bird strikes a window, it’s a collision with unseen truth. It is a moment of disorientation, often fatal, that draws attention to something we are not seeing clearly."
about a month after this encounter, I got the idea for The Creator Retreat.