Nesting to Cultivate Inner Sanctuary and to Love Being Home
- Laura A. Weber
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Aaaand, we're back! Springtime in the Midwest means our avian kin are scoping out the holly bushes and evergreens, overhangs, gutters, window frames, door wreaths and bird houses where nidification is probable. Building a nest is a biological urge to provide a safe haven for sheltering offspring, for territorial orientation, proximity to food and water sources, and for weathering storms.
A well-fashioned nest is a work of art, a magnum opus to perseverance, resourcefulness and creativity. It is taking what is available and making it absolutely magnificent. A nest is a home to return to for comfort and protection, snuggling and warming, where nurturing, feeding, and incentives for growth stir new life into fuller, more mature form. It's where we feel safe, known, held, and loved. It's where chicks and fledglings learn to move around and stretch, peep and screech and push boundaries before taking flight.
Intricately woven, a patched detritus of leaves, twigs, pollen, webs, seeds, and grasses, a nest represents all of life, the best of life, interconnected, repurposed and artistically reimagined to become the very essence of sanctuary and home.
We're like the Springtime birds - both the Mamas and the Papas, and the sweet little Babies - when it comes to nesting. As excellent providers and nest-builders, we work diligently, sometimes to near-exhaustion to create a safe space for our young, both our biological offspring, and our fledgling ideas, goals, and dreams. Creating a nest that will nurture and inspire growth is how many of us cultivate our inner sanctuary, making it safe and inviting to return again and again to the comfort of familiar surroundings, practices, and habits. Our daily routines of reflection, meditation or centering, Nature immersion, exercise, healthy eating, creative pursuits, imaginative play and restful sleep contribute to our overall health and welfare. And we want to provide and extend that sacred space for protection and care to our little ones, our vulnerable ones.
We can be awesome nest-builders because industry, self-reliance, and ingenuity are rewarded in our cultural ethos.
What about those who require the protection of nests?
I think of the vulnerable among us, refugees and homeless, marginalized and disenfranchised, mentally and emotionally challenged, spiritually bereft, orphans, widows, the old and the very young, impoverished and war-torn. What about our more-than-human kin, our creature-kin, the soil, water, air, and trees? What about our inner selves? We are overwrought by a posthuman context that moves at the speed of microprocessors, demands constant "on," leading to anxiety, inability to focus, concentrate, or relax, held hostage by fear, compulsive obsession, depression, even despair. Our slow-growing soul is compromised by a fully digitized, binary world, mostly inhospitable to a moderate pace, respectful self-care, daily meditation, healthy eating and sleeping habits, gentleness, kindness, compassion, creativity, and critical reflection. All of us are vulnerable, all in need of nesting and protection from day to day overwhelm.
We are neophytes in the nest each time we feel vulnerable, lost, sad, experience disorientation, pain, or trauma. If we are experiencing something that requires starting over, learning, or if we are faltering, feeling weak, or just out of our element, we are like babies in the nest. Sometimes, it is enough to lift our heads into the sunlight, or to duck beneath a wing for protection in a storm. Being vulnerable elicits great courage to open ourselves to help, to feeding and watering, bathing and salving. Perhaps blind to the possibilities ahead, we must trust the benevolence of those who love us to take care of us and give us what we need. It's where we first learn to trust, and to push outward toward the edges. It's the launching place to wing into the sky and - aaaah - lift off!
While we are remaining at a reverential, quiet, and gentle distance during this time of Spring nesting in the natural world, let's take a collective moment to celebrate the new life happening all around and within us. We can cultivate the inner sanctuary as fervently as the Cardinal pair ("Mom & Dad") who are nesting in the burning bush in our garden right now. We may be the nest-builders or the nest-beneficiaries, or both. But while the nest is our sanctuary, love it, love it, love it. Be at home.
Long Afternoon At The Edge Of Little Sister Pond
by Mary Oliver
As for life,
I’m humbled,
I’m without words
sufficient to say
how it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these
and over and over,
and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries
beautiful as eggs in a nest,
still unhatched
though warm and watched over
by something I have never seen –a tree angel, perhaps,
or a ghost of holiness.
Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort –along with human love,
dog love, water love, little-serpent love,
sunburst love, or love for that smallest of birds
flying among the scarlet flowers.
There is hardly time to think about
stopping, and lying down at last
to the long afterlife, to the tenderness
yet to come, when
time will brim over the singular pond, and become forever,
and we will pretend to melt away into the leaves.
As for death,
I can’t wait to be the hummingbird,
can you?
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