Every morning I drive east along the Columbia River to get to work. The haze of early light casts the rocky landscape in gray and blue lines. Mount Hood’s perfect cone is sometimes visible in front of me. Since spring, a large nest and birds have also become part of the landscape. The forty-inch nest rests on a platform constructed above a power pole. Before spotting the nest and birds, I knew nothing about them. I was awestruck and curious.

I walked slowly from booth to booth, middle of the first day of the wellness expo. It seemed like I was the only customer; everyone else behind a table or at a workshop in the adjoining rooms. Big eyes and welcomes met me as I passed, and my heart was so thin that day that I would have let any one of them take me home to a nest for safekeeping. Then a woman beckoned me.

The spider has repaired its web in the upper corner of the back door. Four mosquitoes are caught, one moves to free itself. I want to intervene and help but in another moment, I'd kill it if I could. Compassion arises when the suffering is seen; what is it in me that wants to free the caught and kill the free?

I see hummingbirds, two and three at a time. Shiny green backs, shiny like beetles, one with a red spot on her throat. They wait on the tree limbs above me while I water in the morning, then buzz down inch-by-inch to the stream of mist. Closer and closer, finally diving into the water, moving in and out like children playing in a summer sprinkler.

I sit in the front window of this vegan cafe on Hawthorne, the land of excess, beggars, skinny jeans, vintage, and breakfast all day. I watch a man wake up from his flattened cardboard across the street from my perch. One shoe on, the other I spot on the sidewalk in a jumble of things; I wonder if he knows where it is, if I should tell him. I notice he's in front of a store called Harmony, a place that sells meditation pillows and incense. He begins arranging things, moving between the sidewalk and two grocery carts heaped with plastic bags, and as he does his cargo spreads out even further. People step around him.

He forgot how good I looked on him

My birthday and I drove myself to the city wearing red on red. A shoulderless, backless red silk shirt from my 30th and red pants from Portland. Brown open toe heels. Purple purse. Pink and purple shawl. It was no time for subtlety.

Another dead bird. Feathers everywhere. One claw left. Another mess for me to reconcile. What was I doing when it happened, inside looking at a screen? A few times I thought I heard something, water dripping, ice melting, a scream. Then I thought, no, it's a child playing in the snow. Was it really death I heard, the shrill of last possibilities?

Long lush gentle sloping ridges and fat bunched craggy ridges. Pointed tops. Flat tops. Quick narrow lines and wide slopes. An indescribable patternless pattern belonging to a language of sight and feeling.

At a coffee shop the other day, I sat alone with nothing but a latte in a brown cup, hands on the table top. It felt radical in the din of clangs and coffee pumps, conversations and phones. I remember a time not that long ago when having a coffee was an event, when sitting alone and looking at each other was the reason to be there in the first place.