I REMOVED a bird’s nest from its position above a light fixture on our back wall recently. The birds – a family of American robins – had left. All that remained of their industry was this woven bowl and some splattered stains on the wall. Birds have no outhouses or plumbing. They have no bathrooms or living rooms, kitchens or bedrooms. One room serves all their purposes and it is open to the skies, so that the baby bird can direct his hunger and grievances not just to parents but to the heavens, to God himself.

Once the fledglings can fly, the bird breaks with his nest completely. Neither parents or offspring come back and search for the destroyed dwelling. This has been true of all the squalid nests I have removed from birdhouses and crevices and shrubbery after their fledglings have left. So much work and the bird departs without a backward glance. What the bird loses in domesticity he gains in freedom. The air is his home and it fills his lungs with the trivial song of independence. Birds are the quintessential bohemians. 

The robin or wren quickly returns to the air and to the recesses of shrubbery. He calls out from the forest at daybreak: Here I am. Here am I. His twitterings and choruses are sound without sentiment.

We could live in the secret shadows of the forest. We could survive. But the heart demands a home. The bird can sing, but the man covets what he loves. The delights of the forest grow within. The human being soars in his woven nest. At home, pinned in place, he is borne aloft on the currents of time.

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