Summer was late this year in Colorado:
- We had cool, wet weather through mid-July.
- The Rockies still have snow on them. (Hiking season to the big peaks has been weeks late.) And,
- Mr. and Mrs. Robin just bid adieu to their 3 chicks last week.
Do you get a little off-kilter when things don’t go as planned? I know I do. My sense of time passing has to do with clocks and calendars: when it says Memorial Day weekend, I’m ready to officially start the summer. Unfortunately, nature had a different plan and summer waited to arrive here until mid-July. Mrs. Robin knew about the change of the plans, because she built her nest in the crook of the molding on our front porch in late June. If we’d been wise, we would have duly noted the late arrival of summer; instead we worried about her.
We didn’t expect to see a nest so late in the season. Isn’t spring when nature’s babies arrive? What was she doing? As a Feng Shui specialist, I admired her choice in location – it was completely covered and protected from wind, rain and hail stones and it was very high up (the views must have been fabulous!) plus no cat, fox or squirrel could attack the nest. She had covered the Feng Shui basics: safety, comfort and beauty. We saw her sitting out there day in and out and wondered if she was actually sitting on eggs. We worried that she’d missed the spring baby deadline.
Who are we to question nature? The baby birds arrived right on time – their perfect, natural time much to our (and I’m assuming their parents) delight! Seeing three beaks poking out above the top of the nest and watching Mr. and Mrs. Robin swooping in with cherries from our neighbor’s trees, worms from our garden and water from our fountain gave us weeks of joy. We had to stop sitting on the porch, of course, so we watched from the dining room window. And, soon enough they were too big for the nest. I started worrying again – was it too soon for them to fly? 
We didn’t see them take off from the nest, but we saw one perched in our back garden in a flowerpot (resting perhaps after the first flight?). Again, my worrying was for naught; nature knew that it was time to fly. Now, I can’t tell them apart from any other robin that visits our garden and bathes in our fountain but I like to think that it’s our robin family out there cooling off.
As for summer, it arrived in all its glory when it was time. Watching our robin family build their nest reminds me that an easy way to remember the basics of Feng Shui is to take a cue from nature, just as the ancient Chinese masters did in creating a beautiful system for helping us to find balance and harmony in our own lives, in our own time.
Hope you are reveling in the glory of summer!
