They Were Always Here

It has been so cold.

The kind of cold that settles into everything. The ground, the air, the quiet. Snow has been covering the yard for almost two weeks. I have not stopped noticing the bitter cold, but I did not recognize the stillness. The way the world outside my den window had gone completely, utterly silent.

I hadn’t heard a bird in months. Not one. And somewhere along the way, without even realizing it, I had stopped listening for them. I stopped looking. The window became just a window. Something I glanced past on my way to my computer and my to-do list. The outside world had gone silent and I had simply accepted it. As if that was just the way things were now. As if the silence was permanent.

I didn’t even notice the grief of it until it was interrupted.

Yesterday morning, my husband set a pile of birdseed on the table outside the window. Just like that. No big production. He walked out into the cold and put the birdseed on top of the snow covered table and left it there. I don’t even think he thought much of it. It was just something he did. A small, simple act. The kind of thing that doesn’t feel like it means anything in the moment.

Almost immediately, they were everywhere. Sparrows first, then blue jays, then cardinals. Seven different species, and even a pigeon.

A whole community of birds I had not seen or heard in what felt like forever, suddenly landing, eating, living right outside where I had been sitting and working this entire time. I watched them from my den, one after another, hopping through the snow, pecking at the seed, sometimes pausing and looking around as if to say, oh. So this is where we do this now.

I sat there watching them and something quiet and enormous hit me.

They were always here.

Through the cold. Through every single day I looked out that window and saw nothing but white and stillness, they were here. Surviving. Holding on in ways I couldn’t see and didn’t know to look for. Tucked into places I never would have thought to check. Waiting, maybe not even consciously, for something to change. For something to land on.

All it took was something on the table.

This is a lot more than just birds.

I think about the parents I know who are showing up every single day. They are making the calls. They are traveling for visits. They are sitting in the family sessions and logging on to meetings and writing the letters and doing everything they have been told to do. They are putting food on the table, over and over again.

And sometimes it feels like nothing is coming.

They are right there. They are connected. They have not left and they will not leave. But there are days when it feels like they are standing on the other side of a window, watching their loved one struggle, and none of it is landing. None of it is sticking. The love is there. The effort is there. And the birds still aren’t coming to the table.

I know that feeling. I lived inside it.

I know what it is like to do everything right and still feel like you are watching through glass. To be present in every way you know how and still feel the distance. To put the food out again and again and wonder if anything you are doing is actually reaching the person you love most in this world.

And I know what it feels like, on the hardest days, to start to believe it never will.

Not because you have given up. Not because you don’t care. But because the cold has made you believe that nothing is changing. So you go through the motions. You close off a little. You try to carry on, and the silence just gets louder.

But here is what I know now. Sitting in my den, watching a cardinal land on a pile of seed in the snow, I know this:

They don’t disappear. They go quiet. They wait. And they are so hungry to come back, if we give them somewhere to land.

The act of putting something on the table is not a small thing. Even when it feels small. Even when no one sees it. Even when you do it and nothing happens and the snow just sits there, untouched, and you think, see? Nothing. I told you so.

You do it again tomorrow. You put the food back out. Not because you have proof it is working. Not because anyone is thanking you or telling you it matters. But because something in you still believes there is life out there. Something in you is still listening, even when you can’t hear anything back.

That is not weakness. That is the bravest thing a person can do.

This morning I woke up early. Mark will put more food on the table later today.

But I keep coming back to something. My husband put a pile of birdseed on a table. That is all he did. One small, simple act. And what came back was not just one bird. It was birds. So many birds. A whole world of life that had been out there all along, waiting for exactly that.

Think about that for a moment. He did not set out to wake up a whole world. He just put something out there. And look what happened.

That is what we are doing when we show up every single day. We think we are just making a phone call. Just going for a visit. Just sitting in a room and trying to get through it. But we do not know what that is doing. We do not know what is stirring because of us. We cannot see the full picture of what we are waking up.

We cultivate what we feed.

And it will grow.