Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Since I'm home right now for most of my days, I get to observe various aspects of avian behavior from our back garden. The birds are teaching me life lessons. I haven't seen the little bird throwing itself against the mirror again, but I have seen our woodpeckers around. We have two woodpeckers, a couple, that live in the partially dead tree behind my house. I was observing them yesterday and today as they go about their business. And it being spring and all, they have been up to some business, if you know what I mean. They are doing what they were made to do. Fly, make holes, find food, and make baby birds. Clearly, they are not sitting on the smooth maple branches laboring over what they should be doing with their lives. They just know. And they do it. I envy them.

As a human, a mammal and part of an ecosystem, I feel like more of my instincts should kick in. I should just want to make a nest, trust that my food for tomorrow will be found tomorrow, and that today I should do some work and relax a little. But instead, I have this brain and this soul and my species has all this information we keep, and systems that we build to make us better, smarter, stronger. And to give us more options for our lives. Options that cloud the instincts and make me fight for the peace that I am living the way that I want to be.

I have taken a new job. It's at a residential design/build firm called Exteriorscapes. My lovely friend Sara connected me to them and it seems like a good fit. More creativity, new materials, new kinds of clients, and exposure to the construction of my ideas. I am excited about the opportunity and the people I will work with, a little sad about not doing public work anymore. It seems much more clear cut, more simple than my last opportunity. I barely got to the interview, first losing my keys, then putting the heel of my boot through the leg of my best slacks as I almost fell down the stairs in my house. Overcoming that bodes well for my future there. My instinct is to take this job and not do other things. I am trying to put other options to rest for now since this is the choice I have made and I feel good about it. The same way the woodpeckers feel good about the holes they make. They just decide, and do.