There are two very young robins in my yard who have recently learned to fly and who are in the brand new process of feeding themselves. And -- when it comes to eating mulberries straight from the tree -- also in the process of learning how to keep one's balance while feeding oneself!

Gosh, they are so amazing to watch.  When the Orkin guy was here Friday and he saw the mulberry tree stretched out over the back roof and basically coming right in my bedroom window, he said, politely (b/c I sense he was already briefed that I was the Crazy Lady on the Telephone earlier that day): "You know, having trees touching the house like that can help critters come right up to your house."

Well, I do know that. It's also a potential fire hazard, so I don't recommend this to anyone else. If my insurance guy were to come out to the house today and saw what was going on with no less than three trees touching my various roofs, he'd go into apoplexy. But the good news is that having trees "touching the house like that" can help critters come right up to your house!

For instance, if you feel like waking up at 3 AM some night, you can see a badger dining on your roof right outside your window. However, I'm guessing you can live a full & happy life without seeing that.

But...  You can also watch mulberries go through the complete growth process, from start to finish -- and it is fascinating, gang. It really is -- how a mulberry starts as a  wisp of a feathery green thing and gradually becomes a berry that ripens and either falls to the ground or gets eaten, etc. And knowing --assuming you don't cut down the tree, or something -- that the process will continue in exactly that same way, year after year; Well. When you consider that "what applies to the individual, applies to the whole," this process will tell you a lot about the nature of your own life, your own existence and perhaps what you might call "re-incarnational" existences (or what I call "simultaneous" existences b/c of what I believe about the nature of Time). Think of it: perhaps an entity of some kind, larger than us in its consciousness (for lack of a better term), can watch us go through the complete growth process of life & death and it knows, that season after season, we will be back in a slightly different version to go through it all again!

Well, back to the robins... In case you don't know this, if you live around trees and birds and such, and you realize that you keep hearing a peeping sound, over & over & over -- no tune or song, just a bird peeping with absolute regularity; then you have a baby bird around whose mother is busy gathering food to bring back to the baby and then feed it. The peep is a sort of homing device for the mother. All varieties of baby birds around here do this: cardinals, robins, sparrows, starlings.

Well, yesterday, I heard the peep through the window screen and looked into the mulberry tree outside my bedroom window, and there was one of the young robins in the tree and the mother was right there. But this time -- this was so cool!! -- instead of feeding the baby, the mother would pluck a mulberry from a branch, eat it, and then hop over to the baby and point at the baby with its beak. Then go back to a branch, pluck a mulberry, eat it, and then hop back over to the baby and point at the baby with its beak again.

Then, sure enough, the baby hopped to a branch that had a mulberry on it and began pecking at the berry with its beak. It was too young to pluck the whole berry off the branch, but it kept pecking at it and eating it a little bit at a time, and occasionally almost losing its balance.

It was so amazing to watch. After a bit, the mother flew off into the yard somewhere. And then, a little while later, when a group of sparrows also flew into the mulberry tree and began to eat, the mother robin flew back and just sort of perched close to her baby until she saw that everything was fine, and she flew off again. (Interesting that she knew what was happening in the mulberry tree from out there where ever she was, isn't it?)

Honestly, if I didn't have a tree coming right up to my house like that, I wouldn't be able to see all this stuff because the birds generally "freak out" whenever I set foot in the yard.

Gosh, it's all just extraordinary, isn't it, gang? The things we think of as being the "ordinariness" of life, are in fact showing us what is so extraordinary about it at every single turn.

[Not my young robin, but mine looks just like this. Young robins are pretty big!]



[A robin, fully-grown.]