Freedom in Nature's Hands

Summer - Week 26 - On True Freedom and Our Responsibility to Defend It

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 osprey cuts through morning air with ancient precision, its wings catching thermals that rise from the warming earth. In its talons, a trout writhes, fins still beating against invisible currents. As if the sky might yet transform into water, as if momentum alone could carry it back to the depths where it belonged. The fish's gills pulse with desperate rhythm, and I watch from below, witnessing this moment suspended between liberation and capture, between the bird that soars and the creature that struggles against an element it cannot navigate.

We speak of wild things as though they exist in some pure state of freedom, unencumbered by the constraints that bind us to our small, ordered lives. The birds that cross our skies appear to mock every border we've ever drawn, every fence we've built. They know no passports, no visas, no customs declarations. Their territories are written in wind patterns and star charts, in the magnetic pull of the earth itself. Yet even as I marvel at their apparent freedom, I can also see the invisible threads that bind them too.

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Yesterday afternoon, there was a knocking at my window - sharp, frantic, urgent. I sighed, expecting the familiar robin's return, the one who spends his hours attacking his own reflection, mistaking it for a rival that must be driven away. But instead as I descended the stairs I found a young blue jay trapped inside my house, its brilliant feathers dulled by panic and exhaustion. It had somehow found its way in, lured perhaps by the promise of shade and shelter, or the confusion of reflected sky in glass. Now it beat itself against the windows, desperate to return to the world it could see but could not reach.

The very glass that shelters us becomes a source of bewilderment for them. This invisible boundary that holds our warmth in winter, our cool in summer, while confounding creatures who know only the honesty of open air.

The jay's predicament reminded me of something I'd forgotten: that even the freest among us can become prisoners of our own seeking. The bird had entered of its own accord, yet once inside, every instinct that had served it in the wild now worked against it. It sought the sky through barriers it couldn't understand, growing weaker with each failed attempt at escape.

When exhaustion finally stilled its frantic movements, I was able to approach. The jay sat quietly in my cupped hands, its heart beating so fast I could feel it through my palms. In that moment, it was neither free nor captive, but something else entirely. A creature suspended between states, trusting in the strange mercy of a larger world.

Outside, I opened my hands like pages of a book, and the jay paused for one profound second before lifting into the air. It didn't look back, didn't circle in gratitude or acknowledgment. It simply returned to being what it was meant to be, as if the interruption had been nothing more than a brief, necessary dream.

But the memory of its weight in my hands stays with me, that surprising heaviness of hollow bones and feathers, the warmth of a wild thing's trust pressed against my palms. There was something profound in that moment of stillness, when the bird's entire being seemed to rest in the cup of my hands. Not the weight of captivity, but the weight of responsibility, of connection, of being briefly entrusted with something precious and fragile.

I think of that osprey too, and its struggling catch, how even in nature's most primal moments, there are complexities that resist simple categories of freedom and bondage. The bird must hunt to survive, the fish must swim to live, and in their meeting, something larger than either of them unfolds.

These moments have made me notice how the world is full of such paradoxes. The spider webs strung across my garden path each morning, perfect geometric prisons that make visible the dew that would otherwise remain unseen.

These webs fascinate me in their dual nature. They are traps, yes, but also marvels of engineering, catching not just insects but the first light of dawn, transforming droplets of moisture into tiny prisms that fracture the world into rainbow fragments. Before the Colorado sun climbs high enough to burn away the dew, these gossamer snares become something approaching art - beautiful, temporary, and deadly all at once.

All of this reveals something essential about freedom. The trout in the osprey's talons is no less magnificent for being caught; the jay in my house no less wild for being temporarily trapped; the fly in the spider's web no less a part of the intricate dance of survival for being snared.

But what strikes me most about the nature of freedom itself is how fragile it can be, how easily we can take for granted what others are fighting to keep. I think of neighbors who now speak in whispers, of friends who carry their documents everywhere, of families who've begun to look over their shoulders in places that once felt safe. The borders that birds cross so effortlessly have become walls for so many, the sky that knows no boundaries suddenly carved up by fear and suspicion.

I'm reminded that freedom is not a given - it's something we must protect for every living thing. The jay trusted me with its life in that moment of exhaustion, just as we must trust each other with our vulnerabilities, our differences, our need for shelter and understanding. What shelters us should not become what excludes others.

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The morning light shifts, and somewhere overhead, a bird calls across the vast, unmarked sky. Its song reminds me that freedom, for all its complications, begins with the simple act of making space for others. Holding it lightly, ready to open our hands when someone needs shelter or the chance to soar. The jay pausing in my cupped palms before lifting into air, there's something sacred in that exchange, the offering of safety, the gift of possibility. Our responsibility to those who deserve the same boundless sky.

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—> 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