Spring has sprung!
The robin doesn't overthink it
Found on my morning walk:
A robin’s egg. That trademark blue. I’d know it anywhere.
I knelt down and picked it up. Turned it over in my hands.
There was a hole in it. Small, deliberate-looking. And inside, the membrane — this thin, silky thing that had been holding everything together — was dried and shriveled against the shell.
I stood there thinking about what it must have taken to make that hole. Not just through the shell, but through the membrane in particular. The thing that had been keeping the little body safe. Moist. Protected from everything on the outside.
To break through that — from the inside — you have to push against the very thing that has been holding you.
The robin doesn’t overthink it.
But I do.
Do I have wings? And if I do, will they work?
I’ve been watching a lot of people poke through lately. Babies being born. Old folks dying. A high school graduation. Someone deciding to leave a job they’ve outgrown. Big changes, all of them started by a single small act.
The shell gets too small. That’s just the physics of it. You could stay — but you’d die in there eventually. So the poke isn’t bravery, exactly. It’s survival.
But that’s not the whole story either.
That robin isn’t just surviving right now. It’s stretching new wings. Learning what it can do. Pretty soon it will fly.
Flourishing is what comes after the poke — but the poke has to come first.
Here’s what I didn’t expect when I picked up that egg.
The outside: beautiful. That even, saturated blue.
The inside: a mess. Dried membrane clinging to the shell. Sediment piled on one end. Not beautiful at all.
Transition looks like hell from the inside.
What a relief.
When it’s time, I’m going to poke through.
I sure hope I have wings.
🕊️
SAM
p.s. I’m kicking into summer hours! Posts will be fewer and farther between as I shift energy to my kids and my book. I’ll be back in force in September!