First Breath: A Season for Gentling
Spring - Week 21 - On The Fragility of Beginning and A World That Needs to Soften
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.
She was smaller than my palm, this tiny rabbit we found in the barn. Her heartbeat pulsed against my skin like a whispered prayer, rapid and desperate and utterly trusting. When she began to suckle my finger, searching for the milk that wasn't there, I felt the raw urgency of new life meeting an indifferent world. Here was hunger without understanding, need without navigation, trust without judgment. Here was life at its most vulnerable threshold, taking its first breath in a world that offers no guarantees.
Spring arrived with fanfare weeks ago, bringing the great northward migration that transforms Colorado into a thoroughfare for millions of birds. The red-winged blackbirds announced their return with territorial calls that cut through morning air, grackles shimmered in confident flocks, and pelicans glided across our Colorado lakes with prehistoric grace. These triumphant migrants crossed continents and claimed their familiar territories with the assurance of experience, knowing exactly where to find food, where to build nests, how to navigate the ancient highways carved through sky.
Now, as we cross the threshold into summer's unofficial beginning, these confident travelers have turned their attention to the work that brought them here. Raising the next generation. And suddenly the landscape fills with a different kind of urgency: the quiet intimacy of beginnings.
For every confident grackle in the chattering flocks, there are countless creatures drawing their very first breath. In hidden nests tucked under highway overpasses, baby mud swallows open eyes that have never seen sunlight. In the mountain chickadee's weathered box on our siding, eggs pulse with heartbeats that have never felt air in tiny lungs. And, somewhere in tall Front Range grasses, deer fawns take wobbly first steps on legs that don't yet understand how to balance.
The world must become gentle around these beginnings, especially in this tender season between spring's arrivals and summer's full heat. It must soften its edges, lower its voice, slow its pace to accommodate lives that don't yet know how to duck when hawks circle overhead or where to find water when thirst comes. This is what late spring asks of us as we edge toward summer. Not just to celebrate the return of the familiar, but to shelter the emergence of the utterly new.
That tiny rabbit in my hands embodied this profound fragility. She had somehow been separated from her mother's milk, her siblings' warmth, the security of the nest where she belonged. Yet even in her displacement, she continued the work of living. Heartbeat by heartbeat, breath by breath. When she pressed against my palm seeking comfort, she wasn't expressing doubt about her survival. She was simply following the blueprint written in her cells, the one that says: find warmth, find food, keep breathing.
We placed her carefully in an empty stable, creating what shelter we could while hoping her mother would return. The not-knowing settled heavy in my chest. Would this tiny life find its way back to safety, or would she become one of spring's quiet casualties? The question haunts me because it unveils the season's cruel paradox: the same warmth that calls life into being offers no promise of keeping it safe.
The still damp morning air fills with the buzz of newly hatched insects, their wings still soft from emergence. These protein-rich clouds draw the returning swallows, who dart through traffic intersections with acrobatic precision as I drive to the horses, feeding their own hungry young. The cycle reveals itself in these moments. How the vulnerable feed the strong, how new life feeds old wisdom. Life doesn't just begin in spring's urgency; it offers itself up, again and again, in service of something larger as the world turns.
I think of the robin who spent weeks battling his reflection in our window, his territorial instincts overriding all reason. Then suddenly the attacks stopped, and I understood, somewhere nearby, his fierce energy had turned toward the tender work of raising young. His silence became its own announcement: new life is happening here, requiring all his attention and care. The warrior had become a guardian.
This is what this turning season teaches us about gentling. How protection requires presence, how nurturing demands we put aside our own urgency to attend to lives more fragile than our own. The blue jay who watches us make morning coffee, the chickadee who darts in and out of her nest box, the swallows timing their hunts to traffic patterns — they have all learned to negotiate human spaces while tending to their most vulnerable.
But it's not just the creatures that gentle themselves around new life. This season of transition asks the same of us. When we hung that bird box during the pandemic's uncertain early days, we were practicing a kind of faith. Believing that small acts of care could create bridges between ours' and the wild world's needs. When I held that rabbit against my palm, feeling her heartbeat synchronize briefly with my own, I felt like I was being asked to become shelter for something I couldn't fix or control.
The great migrations will continue, ancient and assured. Pelicans will find our impossible mountain lakes, orioles will set the cottonwoods ablaze with orange, hummingbirds will arrive like jeweled bullets to claim their feeders. These are the stories that make headlines, the spectacles that draw our cameras and wonder.
But the truer miracle happens in the spaces between. In empty horse stalls and weathered nest boxes, in the soft hollow of a human palm and the patient darkness of unhatched eggs. Here, life practices its first movements, draws its first breath, offers its first tentative trust to a world that hasn't yet earned it.
The rabbit in my hands wasn't just seeking sustenance—she was teaching me something about seeing clearly. Her tiny heartbeat against my palm carried no judgment about who I was or where I came from. She simply recognized warmth and reached toward it. In her desperation, she showed me what it looks like to trust without conditions, to seek help without shame, to need without apology.
Perhaps this is what the world is asking of us: to see past the surface to the beating heart beneath, to recognize that hunger and need and hope look the same in every creature. To offer the same instinctive gentling that surrounds new life. To walk softly around what is fragile, to create shelter where we can, to recognize the difference between when to fight and when to tend. The same instinct that moves us to shelter a baby rabbit might help us notice who else needs sanctuary, who else is taking their first trembling steps in an uncertain world.
We placed her in that quiet stall and hoped, creating what sanctuary we could while acknowledging what lay beyond our control. In a time that often feels harsh and divided, maybe this is our most essential work: learning to see the vulnerable hearts around us, extending our hands as shelter. Sometimes gentling begins with the courage to recognize that we are all, in our own ways, small creatures seeking warmth in a vast and indifferent world—and that choosing again and again to become the kind of gentle presence that life needs to take its next breath might be the difference between between reaching out and giving up, between tomorrow and today.
—> 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