Over the past month or so, I’ve been experiencing one of those little seasons where I’ve felt a bit stuck for no particular reason. Work has been particularly taxing, phone calls aren’t being returned, e-mails aren’t being answered, my art, music and writing projects are not progressing the way I’d like them to be, and overall, I feel less focused and more distracted than normal. The most exasperating part about it is that it is all happening for no reason that is readily apparent.

Feeling frustrated over the whole thing one morning, I brewed some green tea and sat down in my favorite chair for my normal routine of reading, prayer, and meditation when I noticed something out of the ordinary. On the small balcony off of our master bedroom, a pair of mourning doves were building a nest in an outdoor planter. From my perspective, this seemed like a pretty bad idea, because the planter wasn’t big enough for them, and didn’t offer much protection from the elements or from predators. But there they sat, with their heads sticking out the front of the planter, and their tails sticking out the back. The male dove was attempting to bring little twigs and such to construct the nest, but was dropping most of what he brought onto the deck or into the yard below before reaching the nest, and the female perched inside the planter was sort of haphazardly dropping the bits here and there that the other managed to get into the planter. The whole process looked very inefficient and disorganized, to say the least.

Checking in on my bird friends a little later on, their results appeared to reflect their process; the nest was a messy collection of a few twigs and leaves that didn’t have much structure to speak of. In spite of this, the doves seemed satisfied, and two little white eggs appeared shortly thereafter. Over the next two weeks, I watched the dove pair take turns incubating the eggs, one during the day and the other at night. The babies hatched, fledged about two weeks later, and one day, the planter was suddenly empty again. As I sat in my chair and looked out at the empty planter, I found myself missing my little friends.

Reading up a little bit on mourning dove nesting in the aftermath, I learned that the behavior I observed is quite typical. They are known for being sloppy nest builders, and are similarly not terribly particular about choosing nesting spots that offer good concealment or protection. Paradoxically, this lack of particularity that would seem to increase their exposure to various threats has helped them to thrive in an environment of constantly changing habitats and differing climates – they can survive and reproduce just about anywhere. This is especially interesting when one considers that the passenger pigeon, a close relative of the mourning dove, became extinct around a century ago, in part because of the loss of their very specific habitat that they needed for breeding.

While very interesting, the unexpected lesson of the mourning doves was in not their nesting habits. Instead, watching these little birds was a surprising display of resilience. Initially appearing to be rather dumb and inept, they instead showed themselves to be hardy and tough little creatures who persisted through less-than-ideal nesting, heat, cold, rain, wind, storms, and the threat of predators to nest and raise their young. No matter what was happening around them, they just kept going. At one point, I realized that these little birds’ way of being was a good reminder of the value of persistence. Rather than trying to construct some grand existential analogy or derive some otherworldly great purpose for this little season of frustration and difficulty that I found myself in, this pair of mourning doves reminded me that sometimes the most appropriate response is to do what they did: just keep going.

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