Winged Wisdom - The Sting of Reflection

Spring - Week 15 - On Missing Home, Bee Stings and Being Patient

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.

Photo by Bianca Ackermann on Unsplash

There's a particular type of heartache that comes with airports. I felt it again this week as I boarded my flight home from the UK. A nameless grief that lives in the space between belonging in two places and fully belonging in neither. It's the silent cost of choosing a life elsewhere, a tender bruise that throbs most acutely when I say goodbye to my dear Mum.

As the plane descended across the Eastern Plains, I caught my first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains, their familiar ridges and valleys welcoming me home. It's deeply nourishing to see them again, as if their solid presence grounds me after floating between worlds. But even as I drink in their beauty as we get closer on the way home, I'm aware of my empty chair thousands of miles away, and the pause in Mum's voice when we said goodbye. Those careful moments where she stops herself from asking - when will I be home again?

My life has grown wider here in Colorado. Richer in ways I couldn't have imagined, but there's always an invisible tether that stretches my heart across oceans, pulling at me. Leaving Mum behind gets no easier with practice, and I know there will never be a departure that doesn't ache quite so much.

Within hours of returning back to Boulder, I've been greeted by two curious encounters that feel like they're trying to tell me something. The robin has returned — the same one, I'm certain, who spent countless hours last year battling his reflection in our kitchen window. There he is again. Wings beating furiously against the glass. Trapped in a loop of territorial defense against an opponent who mimics his every move. His persistence would be admirable if it weren't so futile, so ultimately self-defeating.

I find myself pausing several times a day to watch him, feeling a strange mixture of fascination and distress. There's something deeply unsettling about witnessing a creature expend so much energy fighting a battle that cannot be won. Is this what we do sometimes — flinging ourselves repeatedly against reflections of our own making; at problems that exist only in our mind? The robin sees a rival that isn't real, yet his experience of the threat feels genuine - his exhaustion certainly is!

And then yesterday, as if the universe decided one natural metaphor wasn't enough, I was stung by one of my own bees - right on my eyebrow. The irony isn't lost on me that these creatures I tend and care for, whose well-being I've invested in for years now delivered such sharp pain for my troubles. Now my eye is swollen shut, and I'm navigating my familiar home with impaired vision, bumping into corners I know are there but somehow can't quite gauge.

I find myself transformed by temporarily losing sight in one eye. The world looks different, depth perception altered, shadows falling in unexpected places. I'm forced to move more slowly, more deliberately. I'm not safe to leave the house. This reminds me of those first months after my accident, when my broken back forced a similar slowness, a careful recalibration of movement through spaces I once navigated without care.

And so confined again at home, the robin's relentless assault on his own reflection haunts me more than it should. For two and a half years since my fall, I've been watching myself beat against invisible barriers, trapped in patterns I couldn't seem to break. There's a painful familiarity in his futile persistence. How many times have I thrown myself against the same walls of frustration, depression, and resistance? How many hours have I spent fighting reflections of my own fears, my own limitations — both real and imagined?

Between the robin fighting his reflection and my own partially blinded state, I can't help but feel I'm being nudged toward some insight. The depression that settled in after my accident wasn't just about physical pain, it was about identity, about losing the person I was before, about resistance to becoming whoever comes after.

April Theory

Maybe January was never meant to be the beginning.

Maybe the year starts slowly on purpose -

a quiet stretch, a deep inhale, the soft heartache of waking up.

Maybe February was shaking off,

and March was the gathering of strength -

a slow return to ourselves.

And maybe April is when it really begins.

When the light lingers, when our hearts beat louder,

when we are truly ready to start again -

not because we should,

but because we're finally warm enough to want to.

— Kaylin Weir

The mountains that welcomed me home are ancient, patient witnesses to my struggle. They have watched countless beings rise and fall, heal and transform. They've watched me, too, these past years, trying to find my footing, trying to reclaim some sense of self after everything shifted beneath me when I fell.

Perhaps what these creatures are showing me is the difference between battles that heal and battles that harm. The robin exhausts himself against an opponent that doesn't exist. The bee, following its nature, has temporarily changed how I see. One is futile repetition; the other forces new perspectives.

Maybe the lesson lies in recognizing when persistence becomes self-harm, when fighting becomes its own kind of falling. Between what must be accepted, and what can still be transformed. Between seeing clearly and being blinded by reflections of old pain, and even older stories.

As I sit here with the ice pack on my eye, listening to the tap-tap-tap of the robin's beak against glass, I'm reminded that life rarely offers straight paths. The robin doesn't understand why his reflection won't yield. The bee didn't intend to leave me half-blind. Neither creature meant harm, yet here we are — all of us caught in moments of confusion, of misunderstanding, of distress.

Perhaps that's the thread connecting all these pieces — is that life isn't straightforward for any living thing. We're all just creatures trying to navigate by instinct and experience, sometimes getting it wrong, sometimes hurting ourselves or others in the process.

In a few days when the snow has passed, I'll check my bee hives again, more carefully this time. I'll perhaps place a covering over the window where the robin fights himself, a simple act of mercy for a creature caught in its own reflection. I'll try to bring the same patience to myself that I offer these creatures. The understanding that we're all doing our best with limited vision, with hearts that ache, with the confusion of belonging and separation.

There's no perfect resolution to the pain of distance, no simple answer to the robin's confusion, no way to undo the guard bee's instinctive defense. There's only the gentle acceptance that this is how life unfolds — in complications, in contradictions, in moments that sting alongside moments that nourish.

And somehow, in accepting the complexity rather than fighting against it, our hearts might finally find a place to rest.

---

—> 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