The Marvels of Nature

Excuse me while I wax sentimental over the miracle of life and dab my tears.

This winter, right outside my bedroom window, we discovered two jelly-bean-sized eggs tucked into a hummingbird nest in our backyard. Allen’s hummingbirds, to be exact — fierce, territorial little dive-bombers with iridescent flashes of green and orange who apparently decided that this yard, this tree, this narrow strip between the house and the grass, was the right place to bring life into the world.

But the nest held.

The Bamboo I Misjudged

It was built into a plant I’ve spent two years resenting: a Heavenly Bamboo shrub that grows too fast, too full, always forcing me to duck as I walk by. I’ve cursed that plant. Now embarrassed, I remember asking Husband several times to remove it. And yet — there it was, doing exactly what it was made to do. While pines snap and eucalyptus shed by design, Heavenly Bamboo absorbs motion, disperses force and whips without breaking. Pure gold for a hummingbird mom!

After I found the first nest a year ago in our rose bushes, my curiosity took over. I read everything I could find about these tiny neighbors, following one thread after another the way I always do when something captures my attention. Learning is my default setting — the heartbeat of EdIcation — and understanding these birds felt like another way of honoring the life happening within my little community.

What the Hummingbirds Know

I learned that Allen’s hummingbirds often return to the places where they’ve successfully nested before — or where they themselves were born. Hummingbirds choose places that can bend without breaking. Only recently have I learned that I don’t need to brace myself to feel safe. The idea that they’ve chosen this yard again, that they’ve marked it as safe, feels like its own quiet affirmation that I’ve grown into a mature and safe home-maker. (Yes, this mama is 100% personalizing that!)

When I consider all of the self-doubt with which I started my mother journey – everything I didn’t know about how to be a mom or an adult – I marvel over how animals just know how to do life. Allen’s hummingbirds build nests with spider silk — flexible, elastic, stronger than steel by weight — so the nest doesn’t fight the wind. It moves with it. (Yes, I will also try to stop kvetching about the heavy amount of spiders and webs we get.) The shrub’s slender branches bend instead of breaking. The nest is impossibly light. The mother becomes part of the structure, lowering her profile, riding out the storm.

Learning to Bend

Survival favors not the rigid, but the ones who can bend.

There’s something humbling about watching an animal act on knowledge it never had to learn consciously. No Googling. No therapy. No trial-and-error parenting manuals. Just ancient, embodied wisdom passed through DNA: this is how you keep life safe.

And I couldn’t help drawing the parallel.

I’ve spent years in therapy and 12-step recovery learning things my parents couldn’t teach me — how to self-soothe, how to set boundaries, how to create stability. I still Google how to clean my oven. I still puzzle through family finances. My learning has been slow, deliberate, often painful.

And yet here I am, watching a hummingbird do in weeks what has taken me decades: build something flexible enough to survive chaos.

Not by being strong.

But by being responsive.

Light.

Well-placed.

Willing to bend.

I think that’s the marvel.

The Marvel

Sometimes the miracle of life doesn’t look like grandeur or certainty. Sometimes it looks like a tiny nest outside your window, held together with spider silk and instinct, surviving a storm because it knows not to resist it.

And sometimes, the things we’ve disliked the most turn out to be exactly what was needed to hold life all along.