N is for Nest

        (My A to Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Bittersweetness & Light, my new collection of hope-filled, joy-inducing fantasy and sci fi short stories, poems, and art.  I’m

sharing lots of excerpts of art, stories, and poetry, plus some of the background on why we urgently need joyful stories that remind us of positive possibilities.)

        This one is a true story, about the robin’s nest built in the forsythia right outside my front door during the COVID lockdown in 2020.  I watched it every day, and took pictures as the four eggs were laid and hatched, and the chicks grew their fluff and then their feathers, and finally left the nest.  Here’s an excerpt from the middle of the poem.

         The robins by the door don’t share

     This silent, covert storm that stopped our lives inside,

     Suspending our days and their activities.  We wait,

     While they, from nest to eggs,

     From eggs to blind and hungry beaks,

     Day by day keep feathering themselves

     And jostling as usual toward flight.

        I already wrote a whole post about the illustration, which is a rubber block print with watercolor.  You can read Robin’s Nest in the Studio to find out all about it.

        N is also for Negativity Bias.  It turns out that humans are actually hardwired to pay more attention to bad news than good, and to focus more on the next disaster than on the equally valid and realistic reasons for hope.  As a survival strategy this has kept people alive since prehistory, but as a strategy for thriving it turns out to be less than helpful – especially in a time when a global 24-hour news feed is built on the assumption that only bad news is important news.  Humans consistently give disproportionate weight to negative facts - which is exactly why we need constant reminders that good things do actually happen all around.  This book is just one small attempt to encourage you to remember that love, generosity, connection, joy, and hope are real and powerful, even when your ingrained negativity bias may tell you that they aren’t.

        Marketing Moral: Stay in touch with your favorite indie authors by signing up for their Newsletters.  We love to connect with our readers.  Want to join my Infrequent Newsletter?  Here’s the link.  As the name implies, I send email infrequently, maybe about once a month, but it’s a chance to let you know what projects and events I’ve got coming up, and to share stories and poems that have been published.

        Proper Moral:  The early bird gets the worm.  But even more importantly, you can tell a person’s character by how they treat the weak.  Do unprotected eggs or helpless chicks (or marginalized people) elicit cruelty or tenderness, scapegoating or inclusion?

        Of course I have to ask the eternal nest-themed question: which came first, the chicken or the egg?  Got an opinion?

[Picture: Robin’s Nest, rubber block print with watercolor by AEGNydam, 2024 (Image from Bittersweetness & Light, but originals are still available at NydamPrints.com).]