Impermanence

I can’t stop thinking about yesterday’s squirrel. Thich Nhat Hanh says we must surrender to impermanence. I’m trying. I just wish this lesson would stop presenting itself to me in such a violent way.

Like one day last May, my friend Erika looked in a bush beside her deck to find a nest, lovingly and painstakingly constructed by, she would discover, a mama robin. And the next day, resting inside the nest was an egg, about an inch long, turquoise.

Twenty-four hours later, she looked in the nest and found two eggs.

The third day, three.

A few days passed. She spread the branches and found three tiny, ugly-ass animals, with feathers and everything, eyes open, all smooshed together.

She shared each development photographically on Facebook, but I, as the mother of her dog Barley’s favorite playmates, got to witness in person the tiny miracle unfolding.

Each day, those little dudes became more and more undeniably birdlike. They chirped. They flapped. They opened their beaks in anticipation of morsels.

Their mom would scold Erika and me from another bush every time we came too close to her treasures.

Then one day in mid-June, as I was about to hitch up the dogs to take them home from their playdate, my friend and I peeked through the leaves one last time to ogle Mother Nature’s work.

I guess the birdies had developed enough to feel fear and to do something about it, because before we could blink, one baby robin had flopped itself out of the nest in a whole-hearted, yet thoroughly ill-advised, attempt at flight. It made a large arc but plummeted very soon to the ground, where to our horror, Redford plucked the shrieking thing up in his mouth. I started screaming. Erika started screaming. Redford dropped the flitting bird on the ground, and he and Barley barked emphatically at it. I ran at my dog and smacked his big head, and the robin limped through the air over behind a bush.

And for the second time in a few weeks, I stood there, watching a bird draw its last breath.

Its leg was broken. I don’t know if a broken leg kills a baby bird, or if it sustained internal injuries, or if it had a heart attack from terror. I picked up the dead body, no saran wrap this time, realizing in that moment that Redford had killed the one at my house too.

I spent awhile trying to process the simultaneous red-orange rage and steadfast love I felt toward my dog. It remains hard for me to fathom that those two emotions can exist at the same time in one psyche, but they say it’s true for parents of children who do terrible things. They love the child but hate the act. Love the sinner but hate the sin.

I was also mad at myself for scaring that bird out of its asylum.

But the fact is, as my brother told me after Boonie died, each animal acted according to its nature. Humans are curious about the wonder of life. Birds try to fly. Dogs kill birds.

Squirrels run in front of trucks.

It’s all nature, and the nature of nature is that everything’s impermanent.