Take a glance out of the window.
What is there to behold?
Stop the process of housework for
Long enough to see the baby bird peering at you.
Head cocked to one end, very interested in the shiny
dishes--functionality aside.
This gray nimble fuzzball would’ve been left
uncategorized in the accounting of my mind,
had it not been for a glimmer behind it
that shocked the monotony away. 

An award-winning interior designer once wrote that
every room needs either a speck, or dollop, or a whole 
piece that flaunts the color Red. It rescues every room
from the dull. 
As is true in the sparse and frayed cottonwood.
Where the male cardinal hops from branch
to branch. A majestic kind of Red seldom found 
in nature. Making it the only bird I can regrettably identify. 
Peering down at me, clinging to a haphazard 
standard of cleanliness, was a baby cardinal
under the watchful eye of Red and maternal worry.
A family of three. 

One glance away.
Vanished.  
And something within me
knew why. 

Flight training.
The helicoptering parents gave it away. 
Running outside with my dish towel still hung over my shoulder,
I watched this baby bird go from stringed lights 
to its home on the cottonwood to
the edge of the rooftop. Followed diligently by mom and dad
like a pair of F-22s protecting a payload. 
The peering, the color, the family angst, it screamed of a design. 
One that I was familiar with in my own habitat. 
And yet, as much as I was drawn into it and could spell out the beauty,
it felt impossible to forcefully stir up the sense of wonderment.

Fixating harder wasn’t cutting through the core.
The veil didn’t have an opening that day.
This is an insecure place where I have found myself:
Able to objectively identify beauty without feeling
its movement course through my chest and create
a lump in my throat. 
A nostalgic childhood trait where wonder wasn’t 
as much on command as it was common. 
The adult days of this are different.
Acting now as an invitation at random,
only noticeable if I am willing to look out the window.
I’ve found the readiness to be invited into childlike wonder
qualitatively more transforming than the feeling of wonder itself. 

Sometimes the rare invitation surpasses expectation and
the beauty takes flight in my soul as it ought to, but not today.
Today felt more like training, and that is just okay.