Early morning, house still quiet. I’m looking out on my sister’s backyard as the winter sun reaches across the southern California desert landscape beyond. Flitting about is a flock of mourning doves. They are having a swim in her hot tub (their secret’s safe with me).
Do you know these birds? They are pigeons’ prettier, if less scrappy, cousins. I have a thing with these birds, despite my best efforts. I’d much prefer the commanding presence of a red-tailed hawk, or the hopeful buzz of a hummingbird over these very pretty but maybe also kind of dumb little birds any day. At least that’s how I’d typically describe it. The truth is I have a sort of secret appreciation for their gentle, no-need-for-the-limelight, happy-to-be-the-wallflower presence.
I know nothing about them save for what I’ve observed from my bedroom window. For two seasons in a row, a pair of them (they always, always come in pairs) built a nest in the plum tree. What I know: in addition to being a bit dumb, they are clumsy as hell. Every time they’d return to their nest, it was never a gentle alighting onto the branches; instead, it was crash landings in a sloppy mess of feathers and a mashed-up version of their telltale hooting. But the thing that had me question their intelligence the most was the one fall where a pair of them returned and began building a nest. What kind of idiot bird builds a nest in the fall? I wondered, as I watched them huddled around their dumb little nest, increasingly exposed with the drop of every leaf. Crows began hanging out in the nearby power lines. More than once, a hawk landed a few branches over, a not-subtle intimidation tactic. One night, I woke up multiple times before sunrise to the sound of branches whipping hard against my bedroom window. Wind. The kind of wind that keeps you from leaving your house if you can help it. The kind of wind that rattles the old windows, slips in through the tiniest cracks. The kind of wind that would rush every last leaf off said plum tree, dark branches stark against the cloudless blue.
I woke up and I heard the wind and I thought, there's no way that little nest made it. But there they were. No longer hidden by leaves. Totally exposed to bigger birds, greater winds. Staying with the nest as the branches heaved them around like a tilt-a-whirl. I talk a lot of shit about those dumb birds in their nest, defiant. But that day I couldn’t help but love them.
Anyway. I’ll let you read into the symbolism of “doves” as you like. All I know is that I’m thinking of humbling down. Taking the earnest, blindly optimistic mourning dove energy forward into the day, and all the days I get.
I love you all and I wish you all my best everything. Would love to hear from you, email me or add a comment below ✨
xxoo dani
⛓ I’ll be honest, these links are, um, definitely not the sunniest. What can I say? Christmas makes me sad, in that familiar melancholy way I sort of like. Holds me close to the bone of life…
🌲 Warm Rooms (and it’s Christmas so no one can fix it). “Christmas is an incredibly depressing holiday, one about desperation and loss, about what we don’t have measured against what we are supposed to have, about how expectation always leads to disappointment, about how everything is money and there is never enough of it, about puny little human celebrations of light and warmth thrown up against the massive and enveloping cruelty and darkness and cold. We try to fight a brutal and uncaring world with small and stupid and useless weapons, presents and songs and lights and decorations, tiny hands joined together, dancing as fast as we can.”
💔 The World’s Greatest. “A good death, I have been taught, elevates all of humanity. So now I wonder: What is the weight of 302,000 bad ones? How low can humanity go and still stay meaningfully intact? I cannot tell if I am struggling more than my fellow physicians or just struggling more openly. My failure to do well by patients in this setting gives me a deep and unsubtle sense of absolute worthlessness, even if I am doing the best I can. Perhaps I am just quicker to name the limit of what I can bear, as if naming that limit, again and again, can push it out far enough to contain all this.”
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Christmas makes me sad too.... sending love your way, right now, Dani.
<3 thanks friend