Hummingbird Wisdom ... And Not

Every April, it seems like some kind of miracle. Birds so small they weigh less than a nickel (I often mistake them for a carpenter bee) fly sometimes thousands of miles from their warm wintering places to more northern spots to nest.

Just last week, we stood at our evening window and a male hummingbird hovered outside at eye level and stared us down. “Dude,” he said, “Where’s the goods?”

Frank makes some excellent signature dishes: cuban black beans, red sauce with olives and capers, a crusty seed bread that is impossible to eat without sighing and hummingbird sugar water. So when surprised by the unexpectedly early first arrival, he ran to the kitchen to make a batch of his famous bird brew. Within the hour, the first returning male was eating alone at the feeder.

A day after the emergency feeder filling, this poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer dropped into my inbox:

Then What Might I Do?

There is nothing more hopeful
than hearing the whirr of the first black-chinned
hummingbird returning to the feeder,
knowing he has flown five hundred miles
to arrive at my porch within hours
of the same time the black-chinneds arrived last year
and the year before and the year before.
What inner directive is still intact,
despite the chaos that breeds all around?
I want to show up that faithfully.
Want to listen to the wisdom within
that says This is the way, now go,
go, go, and trust I have the strength
to do so, though the way is long,
though the world is vast, though
the trip must be made alone. If
this tiny bird can fly through cold fronts,
headwinds, hard and heavy rain.
If it can wing across vast open waters.
If it can arrive and make a new nest.

Nature, of course, offers wisdom. These tiniest of birds, these expert aviators, follow a deep knowing and trust that even though the way is long and hard, it is where they need to go. They do not doubt that they need to keep going even in the face of incredible distances and raindrops that outweigh them. I can learn from that determination, that unshakable certainty.

And yet.

A week later, there are a handful of males all puffed up and aggressively running each other off the feeder even though there is plenty of Frank’s cooking for all of them. What is it with prettily plumed men and their hoarding of resources?

Soon the females will join them and they will make minuscule nests of lichen and spiderwebs from which they will launch their babies. Then they’ll all be diving at each other – two generations now -- everybody trying to keep everybody else from resting and eating their fill, which each of them could if only they would let each other.

I’d like to have the hummingbird’s hearty persistence through adversity but with less of the machismo and spiteful greed. I’d like to have the self-guiding principles and inner knowing with less of the hoarding and unkindness to my own kind. Even if I am angry at them for leaving us in a shocking mess, for inviting in a ruthless hawk to rampage the neighborhood, I hope I could summon the generosity to let them eat.

They act like assholes to each other, but even so, I love to watch them fly and perch and pause and eat and fly off again. Because I get it. I get the anger. I watch them dive and zoom at each other and I hope I can rise above the reflexive lurch to protect, to hurt back. Can I not rush at you to keep you away from what might save me … even as I fly away from it to drive you off?

May these little bug-birds teach me both what I do and do not want to do at I move through the chaos and cruelty of the world.

---

Ten Fascinating Facts About Hummingbirds

Uncertainty’s certainty

“Sticking with uncertainty is how we learn to relax in the midst of chaos, how we learn to be cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears. We can bring ourselves back to the spiritual path countless times every day simply by exercising our willingness to rest in the uncertainty of the present moment – over and over again.”~ Pema Chödrön , Comfortable with Uncertainty

---

Since January 20, 2025, the US stock market has plummeted. As historian Heather Cox Richardson recently reported,

The threat of instability if Trump tries to fire [Federal Reserve chair Jerome] Powell, added to the instability already created by Trump’s tariff policies, saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average fall 971.82 points, or 2.48%; the S&P 500 dropped 2.36%, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 2.55%. The dollar hit a three-year low, while the value of gold soared. Journalist Brian Tyler Cohen noted that since Trump took office, the Dow has fallen 13.8%, the S&P 500 is down 15.5%, and the Nasdaq is down 20.5%. (Letters from an American April 21 2025)

Journalists and financial folks say “business does not like uncertainty,” and “uncertainty is the worst thing for business.” Which kind of cracks me up. Since who does like uncertainty and what’s more, when was the last time we were certain about anything?

We might feel a sense of predictability or stability but I would argue that those are illusions. If someone had asked me early in March 2020 if I felt like things were relatively stable and predictable, I would have said yes. And then, the world shut down in a way that was completely unprecedented and chock full of uncertainty.

So, yes, business is uncomfortable with uncertainty because most people are uncomfortable with uncertainty. This is why Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön calls getting comfortable with uncertainty the warrior’s path, a spiritual path. Since who of us could stay “cool when the ground beneath us suddenly disappears”?

It is a practice, to be sure.

That practice is to remind ourselves that uncertainty is the way it is. Historians might point to precedent and economists might point to trends. We might chart our uncertain course by these markers but the reality is that nobody knows what or how it will unfold. We are all, to paraphrase meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg, one phone call away from our lives being completely upended.

Living in the United States right now is like getting that phone call every day.

Rebecca Solnit writes about uncertainty with reassuring wisdom:

I know we don't know exactly how and when [something more than the current protests] will happen, but I suspect it will, and I suspect it will start with something small, with a ‘one more thing/one last straw’ kind of incident. No one knows when or where.

Think about your life. Think about all the things that have happened to bring you to right now. Some of them may have been planned and expected – education, graduations, maybe the pursuit of a career — but none of them were certain.

And even if those expected things happened, are you still on the trajectory you thought you were on when you were 20 (and if you’re 20 or younger, 5 years ago)? I’d wager not. I suspect that you unexpectedly lost a job or got one. I suspect you were once surprised by the end of a relationship or the start of one. That you started something you thought would be temporary until it wasn’t, or you started something that you thought would be permanent until it wasn’t.

So humor me: assume that everything is uncertain and always has been. If that’s the case, what do we do? How do we live day to day in that kind of wobbliness?

Solnit suggests that we just keep going,

“...I don't know. Neither do you. No one does. All we can do is keep showing up, keep speaking up, keep donating, keep connecting, keep our values close and our courage strong and keep an eye out. And not give up, including not settling into this as though it's normal or permanent or we're helpless. I think I said here before that it's like we can pile up the fuel for the bonfire but it's lightning that will ignite it.”

I won’t lie: there are days when the barrage of soul-crushing atrocities and cruel arrogance of this country is more than I can take. There has been ugly crying and black moods, believe me. But most days, I do my best to keep checking in with my values and to keep showing up.

The words of teachers like Ani Pema, Heather Cox Richardson and Rebecca Solnit remind me of what I already know: uncertainty is the way of this world but that doesn’t mean we don’t have agency. As Solnit writes,

I know a lot of people these days are uncomfortable with uncertainty, but I'll take the true knowledge that is we don't know over the false knowledge that we do. No one knows the future. But we do know the past, which tells us that things happened no one anticipated, that history itself is made out of surprises that only seem obvious or inevitable in retrospect.

When in doubt or confusion with swirling, ever-present uncertainty, think of the things in your own life that now seem inevitable but were, when they were happening, unexpected, surprising and made no sense. That’s just what it’s like living here in the uncertainty of now and it can be scary and confusing...which is why we simply must keep going together.

---

Sources:

Comfortable with Uncertainty by Ani Pema Chödrön

Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American April 21, 2025

When Hope and History Rhyme by Rebecca Solnit

More Essays on Uncertainty:

Recognizing that I hardly wrote this essay but rather quoted some beloved writers/teachers, I offer two other of my essays on Uncertainty:

Anniversary

Adventures Unplanned

Laughter: Soap of the Soul

“As soap is to the body, so laughter is to the soul.” – Yiddish Proverb

---

Texting with a friend after she’d had a rough night of despair at the state of the world. I asked her how she slept and what she’s doing for herself. She writes back:

“I go through the alphabet and choose calming words - awareness, breath, etc. When I got to Y, the first word that came to mind was yodeling. That's positive, isn't it?”

I get to giggling and texting yodeling memes.

---

Trouble knocked at the door, but, hearing laughter, hurried away. ~ Benjamin Franklin

---

At dinner with a friend. Talking about the reckless destruction in our country, our loss of humanity, the cruelty. Then somehow I am telling stories of my brief elementary school theatrical career.

In 5th Grade, I’d wanted with all my awkward 11-year-old heart to be Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. When I hadn’t gotten into the play at all, I cried for so long that I gave myself a sinus infection. When someone unexpectedly dropped out of the show, I got to be in the chorus. You could see my chapped nose from the audience.

In 6th Grade, I was cast as Snoopy, complete with a costume hood with ears that flew up when I pulled a string (every time the wires got more hopelessly tangled in my hair). At some point in every performance, I’d look around the silent stage and think, “SOMEbody’s forgotten their line.” It was me. Every. single. time.

The world is still a hopeless mess. But my friend and I laugh until we are breathless.

---

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

---

Friday night at the end of a long, depressing week. I listlessly scroll through my email and find this poem linked at the end of Lael Jepson’s blog post:

At Albany Bulb with Elaine

By Alison Luterman

Side by side on a log by the bay.

Sunlight. Unleashed dogs,

prancing through surf, almost exploding

out of their skins with perfect happiness.

Dogs who don't know about fired park rangers,

or canceled health research, or tariff wars,

or the suicide hotline for veterans getting defunded,

or or or. We've listed horror upon horror

to each other for weeks now, and it does no good,

so instead I tell her how I held a two-day old baby

in my arms, inhaling him like a fresh-baked loaf of bread,

then watched as a sneeze erupted through his body

like a tiny volcano. It was the look of pure

astonishment on his face, as if he were Adam

in the garden of Eden making his debut achoo,

as if it were the first sneeze that ever blew,

that got me. She tells me how her dog

once farted so loudly he startled himself

and fell off the bed where he'd been lolling,

and then the two of us start to laugh so hard

we almost fall off our own log. And this

is our resistance for today; remembering

original innocence. And they can't

take it away from us, though they ban

our very existence, though they slash

our rights to ribbons, we will have

our mirth and our birthright gladness.

Long after every unsold Tesla

has vaporized, and earth has closed over

even the names of these temporary tyrants,

somewhere some women like us

will be sitting side by side, facing the water,

telling human stories and laughing still.

---

Ski goggle kitty.

I mean, come on.

---

“Laughter connects you with people. It’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you’re just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.” ~ John Cleese

---

Laugh. Find something. Anything. Go watch the ski goggle kitty again. No matter how low brow or silly, choose something that gets you to giggling. “[Y]our mirth and [y]our birthright gladness” is a radical act of freedom.

Consistency Over Intensity (Or, Be An Ant AGAIN)

“Most people need consistency more than they need intensity.

“Intensity:
-run a marathon
-write a book in 30 days
-silent meditation retreat

“Consistency:
-don’t miss a workout for 2 years
-write every week
-daily silence

“Intensity makes a good story. Consistency makes progress.” ~ James Clear

If you were to come to me to ask my advice about improving your fitness, strength or mobility, here’s what I would say. “Only start something that you think you could do for the rest of your life.”

Not for a month. Not for a year. But all the rest of your days.

That might sound absurd in a culture that is enamored of quick fixes, “one weird trick,” and odd bro-biohacks. But if you really want to make a difference, consistency not intensity is your friend.

I could give a zillion examples of this, from nutritional changes to increased strength training, from improving endurance to increasing joint mobility. And that would be boring. Literally. Consistency is, practically by definition, boring. It’s doing the same thing, often a small thing, over and over and over. But darlin’s, the cumulative impact of consistent commitment to something? That’s what moves freaking mountains.

Because the power is in this consistent commitment, I also encourage people to do these things with other people. It takes energy to keep going. It is easier together.

And this is not just true for physical and health pursuits, of course. It’s anything you want to do better. Want to be a better writer? Write a little every day…and check in with a writing buddy. Want to have a better relationship? Put your phones down and spend time talking every day…and help each other not slide back into old patterns. Want to make the world a better, kinder place*? Keep showing up, standing up and speaking up every. single. day. with. your. people.

Almost exactly 11 years ago, I wrote an essay that I think about all the time now that we are eyelash deep in an American political crisis. Be An Ant was about making any change but when I went back to it, I read this excerpt from an activist’s point of view:

In 2001, my corporate job and I parted ways.

Don’t you like how I said that? Actually, I got fired. Which stung a little. But the truth was that both of us – my corporate job and me – were not happy so it was just as well that we broke up.

My dream was to teach [mindful movement]. I wanted to help people – big rooms full of sweaty smiling people. Back then I had only a couple of classes. So in between learning routines and teaching twice a week, I worked with my husband, Frank, renovating old houses.

Here’s what I know about renovating old houses: nothing.

Okay, that’s not quite true. I know that it’s messy, dirty work and that there are power tools involved. I know that Frank takes houses so heinously ugly that I can barely look at them and makes them into homes I pine for. That’s what I know. Not much of a resume, I grant you. But I had an in with the owner, so he took me on to do unskilled labor and make lunches that I brought to the site in the kids’ little red wagon.

One of the first things Frank taught me when we were working together was “be an ant.” He would get us started on a project – move all this lumber from here to there, say, or scrape this linoleum off of the kitchen floor, or unload this gravel from the back of the truck – and I would kind of wilt, wide-eyed at the prospect. “Be an ant,” he’d say. “Just do what’s right in front of you. Take one more board, scrape this square foot, shovel this shovelful. Don’t look at the whole thing. It will just make you lose heart and energy. Just be an ant and do it one little bit at a time.”

Be an ant. It was simply amazing what we could accomplish with this one little instruction.

Stinky, disgusting rooms were transformed into lovely spaces. Falling down porches or odd concrete platforms became inviting places to sit and relax. Wildly overgrown yards became welcoming, landscaped gardens. All just by being an ant. [Read the whole essay here.]

When in doubt, when in overwhelm or even when in despair (although if you’re there, go drink some water, walk outside, call a friend or lie down in the grass first), be an ant.

Be an ant who commits to showing up consistently. Be an ant who chooses to do the little thing over and over rather than one big thing. Be an ant who regularly goes to actions and volunteers at events and donates to fundraisers — not go to one protest and nothing changed overnight. Be the ant who sees another sad or despairing ant and invites them to come with you to choose regular, consistent action.

Be a consistent, connecting, joyful badass ant.

Be An Ant

Originally published April 27, 2014

In 2001, my corporate job and I parted ways.

Don’t you like how I said that? Actually, I got fired. Which stung a little. But the truth was that both of us – my corporate job and me – were not happy so it was just as well that we broke up.

My dream was to teach [mindful movement]. I wanted to help people – big rooms full of sweaty smiling people. Back then I had only a couple of classes. So in between learning routines and teaching twice a week, I worked with my husband, Frank, renovating old houses.

Here’s what I know about renovating old houses: nothing.

Okay, that’s not quite true. I know that it’s messy, dirty work and that there are power tools involved. I know that Frank takes houses so heinously ugly that I can barely look at them and makes them into homes I pine for. That’s what I know. Not much of a resume, I grant you. But I had an in with the owner, so he took me on to do unskilled labor and make lunches that I brought to the site in the kids’ little red wagon.

One of the first things Frank taught me when we were working together was “be an ant.” He would get us started on a project – move all this lumber from here to there, say, or scrape this linoleum off of the kitchen floor, or unload this gravel from the back of the truck – and I would kind of wilt, wide-eyed at the prospect. “Be an ant,” he’d say. “Just do what’s right in front of you. Take one more board, scrape this square foot, shovel this shovelful. Don’t look at the whole thing. It will just make you lose heart and energy. Just be an ant and do it one little bit at a time.”

Be an ant. It was simply amazing what we could accomplish with this one little instruction.

Stinky, disgusting rooms were transformed into lovely spaces. Falling down porches or odd concrete platforms became inviting places to sit and relax. Wildly overgrown yards became welcoming, landscaped gardens. All just by being an ant.

One thing about this approach: one of the ants has to have a vision. In this case, it was Frank. He could see clearly the house that was waiting to be uncovered under all the filth, decay, and strange decorating decisions. (Green floral paper and mirrors on the dining room walls? An outdoor hose bib in the stairwell? How do these things happen?) All I could manage was to put my head down and scrape the next square of lino, but Frank? Frank knew what we were creating and every day we took one more step toward that. Frank was our visionary ant.

The principle of being an ant is as true in our bodies and our lives as it is in renovating houses. But we have to be visionary ants. First, imagine what you want to do, create, feel, be and then take a step toward that. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small step that you take. It doesn’t matter if all you do is write about where you want to be in your journal – or on the back of your grocery list. It doesn’t even matter if it’s the wrong step or one you retrace later as long as it is an honest step toward what you want. What matters is taking a step consistently, persistently, every day.

Whatever you want to do -- eat more healthfully, get stronger and more flexible, create a new career, travel around the world, whatever it is – be an ant. Do what’s in front of you. Take one step in the direction you want to go.

These days, I don’t work with Frank anymore. I teach more classes now and I’m writing both blog and book. I never really got the hang of the power tools or carpentry and keeping the site organized and bringing lunch in the wagon only got me so far.

But I think of Frank’s lesson to “be an ant” every day. Whether I’m weeding the front garden or creating a new routine or writing an essay, I often look at the whole project and my heart sinks. It’s so much to do! How will I do it all? I’m not sure what the steps in the middle and end will be. What about when I get to things I don’t know how to do? Looking at the whole thing can be a spirit killer, let me tell you.

Then I take a breath and say to myself, “Be an ant. Be an ant. Be an ant.”