In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures — and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.
The hummingbirds have turned frantic, where they once drifted through the garden. Now they attack the salvias with an urgency that borders on desperation. They guard the blooms like small jeweled warriors, their territorial battles escalating as August deepens toward its end.
One moment of stillness, a male perched on the fence post, throat flashing ruby in the late summer light, and then the dive-bombing begins again. Chase and counter-chase, the high-pitched chittering of tiny missiles protecting what will soon mean nothing to them at all.
They are preparing to leave everything: these salvias they’ve claimed and fought over and returned to a hundred times this summer, they will abandon them without backward glances. The bee balm that sustained them in June, the specific branch of the blue spruce where the female rests between feeding runs, all of it will become geography they’ll never see again.
Some will fly nonstop across the Gulf of Mexico, their wings beating impossible rhythms through darkness over open water. They will trade this known world for the faith that somewhere south, there will be flowers.
I watch them from my deck and can’t quite fathom it... we are creatures who make homes and make them the center of everything. We choose paint colors and arrange furniture and hang pictures on walls until these spaces become their own small gravity, holding our lives in place. We know which floorboard creaks, which window sticks, where the afternoon light falls on Tuesdays. We fill these spaces with the accumulated evidence of our staying: books we might reread, dishes inherited from grandmothers, tools we’ll need someday. We build not just shelter but significance. We make ourselves belong.
And here are these birds, no bigger than my thumb, weighing less than a penny, who will leave it all on instinct.
There’s no weighing of options happening in my garden. No careful tallying of what might be lost against what might be kept. No late-night wondering if the journey is worth it. If home might be enough. They simply know. When the day length shifts and their internal clocks trigger, they go. The garden that fed them all summer becomes instantly irrelevant. The flowers are just something that used to be important.
They carry nothing with them but their own small bodies, a trust that has kept them alive for millions of years. A certainty deeper than thought: leave, and the world will provide what’s needed. We’ve lost that kind of faith, if we ever had it. We can leave places easily enough. We pack bags and lock doors and drive away. But we never leave with just ourselves. We bring our whole lives with us, carrying our certainties in suitcases
The hummingbirds practice a different kind of departure. One that chooses instinct, that abandons the carefully constructed center of everything because something deeper says it’s time. Maybe that’s the difference between us. Their wisdom is in wings. Ours is in walls.
Nothing they make here will last. No nests at this latitude will survive the winter that’s coming. Even those tiny cups woven from spider silk and plant fibers in May, architectural miracles, will be torn apart by wind and weather. Next spring, if they return, they will start over completely, as though this place holds no memory. They invest everything in their own bodies, their own wings, their own capacity to move. Their home is not a place. It’s a direction.
Watching them, I think about the weight of what I carry. Not just the furniture and framed photos, but the belief that staying equals stability, that roots must go deep to matter. Maybe there’s another way to be held by the world? Alas, I know, even as I wonder, that I don’t think I could ever trust the way they do, with my whole body, with nothing but instinct and the beat of my own wings. I’m invested too much in permanence, and in the comfort of my familiar rooms. But perhaps I can learn to hold things a little more lightly. To build my nests and tend them, knowing nothing stays exactly as it is. To root deep while welcoming what each season brings.
Soon the hummingbirds will leave, and I will stay. I marvel at these tiny impossible creatures with no maps, no backup plans, no way to know if this year’s route will be safe. And yet they will all go. Three grams of determined life, launching themselves into the unknown because the season says it’s time.
I do wonder, if something that small can trust that deeply, maybe my own leaps don’t require as much certainty as I think.
—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.
As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.
Love,
Jane