I've been watching the fragility of nature lately. We have a yard full of birds, and nests everywhere. There's a robins nest on top of our brick wall, under a tree branch. Three eggs disappeared, no chicks. Another robins nest fell out of a tree during the hail storm. Both eggs broke. And now the one I've been most concerned about, the cardinals nest outside our front window, has had a tragedy. The two chicks hatched, but one disappeared mysteriously. And now the second has been dead in the nest since at least yesterday.

This has been happening while a friend of mine celebrated her pregnancy and then mourned its passing.  I've been thinking about taking things for granted. Our world is so savvy, so quick to intervene to prevent the worst (or even just the undesired) from happening. I wonder if we were less developed, more accepting of the way nature works, if our attitudes would be more joyful.

If the norm in our civilization was that pregnancies didn't come to term, it was very hard to get pregnant, babies might not survive the winter, etc, then maybe instead of having a stigma on infertility and issues with getting pregnant, we would just be that much more grateful and incredulous and amazed when our babies make it.

Just thinking.