Inconvenient Beauty

Today my friend invites me to observe the robin's nest on her back porch. It's a funny story: she leaves the porch screen door open, and in the time that it stayed propped open, a brazen bird builds a nest in that space.

So there's an enormously inconvenient nest between her door and her screen door.  It's not just enormously inconvenient; it's actually just plain enormous with its tangle of nesting that drips down the door and the wall. And she cannot close that screen door at all.

But she places a ladder nearby, and we can climb up and peer into the glorious nest that holds four bright blue eggs.

I think about the inconvenience of beauty. It often comes wrapped in packages of discomfort, trouble, or difficulty. It often meets our eye in that very place of awkward, unexpected, all wrong kinds of situations. There's something about truly astonishing wonders that requires a bit of inconvenience.

My neighbors might have torn apart and discarded that nest and quietly shut their back door against these robins. They didn't. Something too beautiful and enchanting would come if they embraced what inconvenienced them.

For a woman who hates to be inconvenienced, I'm looking at it differently--through the bright blue lens of these eggs--from now on.