How It Works

One day a week or so ago, when the temperatures plummeted to zero and below, the wind tore through the trees, bending and breaking boughs and flinging scores of twigs, pine needles, and the last of the stubborn oak leaves across the frozen yard. All night long a firece wind scoured the outer walls of my little cottage

In the morning, a thick layer of ice coated the windows. The sun rose into a cold, white sky. The ice melted slowly, and when at last I could see out, there in the corner where my cottage meets the main house, three fat, orange-breasted robins huddled in a puddle of sunshine, their feathers fluffed against the cold wind. The winter birds - the juncos and nuthatches and chickadees - chirped from the feeders but the robins, dazed by the cold, picked frantically at a bit of exposed ground, looking for something more substantial than seeds. Not finding anything, they lifted and flew awkwardly into the biting wind.

I thought of them often during the day, wondering what drove them to come back before the snows of March had melted, before the ground released sleepy worms, before bugs swarmed and grubs hatched. What drives any of us to go forward before conditions are favorable? Partly it’s genetic inheritance, and in the case of birds, factors such as food supply and a safe place to nest. Come to think of it, that applies to humans, too. We can’t always explain our own journeyings. We respond to some inner urging that makes us flee safety and head into the perilous unknown.

I have a friend who loves that dance with danger. He says it makes him feel alive. He gets restless and begins to make plans that fly in the face of reason. He once bought a restaurant, not knowing the first thing about running one, and made such a success of it that he made it his career for the next few years. He says it’s partly because he didn’t know some of the things he wanted to do were impossible.

We all come to times in our lives when we have to make some small obeisance to bravery. We face a loss or a challenge and off we go into the unknown with our thimbleful of faith, trusting that whatever we believe in will sustain us along the way.

I cannot know what those robins were thinking as they hurried north into unexpected snow and ice, or what survival plans they made as they shivered together in the corner. I hope they find sustenance in some sheltered part of the woods, that food and a place to sleep are close at hand. For my part, I will look for them again tomorrow. I have cleared a space beneath a large pine, a place where the snow was already melting. Perhaps they will find food there among the rotted leaves and the twining roots. Perhaps, unwittingly, I am a contributor to their thimbleful of faith.


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