But still. It’s not every day that a hawk drops its prey literally outside your patio door.

The Southern Man saw it happen. Standing inside, just happened to be looking out, the way you do. A sharp-shinned hawk had grabbed a McBunny — a name I coined when my kids were growing up, referring to the fast-food aspect of young bunnies who feed on tender grasses in wide open spaces with absolutely zero self-preservation instincts — but for some reason, dropped it. From a pretty good height.

Before my husband could step outside, the bird pounced again. Jumped on the little bun with its razor-sharp talons. Then took flight with it clutched in its grip, only to drop it again on the ground.

This time, the gentle man opened the door and went to the injured rabbit. I followed close behind as he explained what he’d just witnessed. I saw the hawk waiting in the magnolia tree a few steps away and told her, plain and simple, there was no meal here today. She could leave.

When we looked at the small frightened creature, we saw the visible wounds. They were bad. I hardly thought it had a chance.

The Redneck said we should move it to the back forty. Give it some space. Give it a chance to recover, if it was going to.

But I watched the little one take a few wobbly steps to the edge of a raised garden bed and cower in the shadows. And I said — nah. We let it stay right here, safe in the garden. It can pass away peacefully. There’s no point in moving it.

We agreed. We both went inside.

A little while later, the Redneck got up and stepped outside with intent to go check on the ailing little bun. But before he could even peek around the corner, he stopped.

Because there, on the railroad tie stairs that led up to the back 40 path, sat the biggest rabbit.

She looked at him the way a mama looks at anything that stands between her and her baby. Sizing up the threat. She wanted to go down. But unlike her offspring, she had self-preservation instincts in full working order. So she held eye contact — strong eye contact — and slowly backed herself up, as if she’d reconsidered the whole rescue mission entirely.

The Redneck, understanding exactly what he was witnessing, came back inside quickly.

Wide-eyed.

She came for her baby, he said. She wanted to carry it back to safety.

That’s not possible, I said. Rabbits don’t carry their kits.

And I believed that. It’s actually widely cited — mother rabbits don’t relocate their young the way cats carry kittens. They nudge. They nurse. They stay away deliberately so predators won’t follow them to the nest. Carrying a kit? Not really their thing.

But speaking from whatever quiet backwoods knowing he carries around like a pocket knife, he told me she wouldn’t have come for the baby unless she knew it could survive. He was convinced she was coming to bring it home.

A little while later, we both went out to check on the wounded little one.

It was nowhere to be found.

It certainly couldn’t have made it up those steep stairs on its own.

The mama came for her kit. Just like I told you, babe.

I smiled. Nodded. Made some vague, supportive sounds. I’m not subtle — my poker face is basically a neon sign — but I kept my disbelief mostly to myself, because it was a beautiful story. And for days he told anyone who’d listen about the baby rabbit that was carried home to safety by its mother.

And I let him. Because sometimes a story doesn’t need to be true to be necessary. Sometimes the world is grinding and relentless, and what gets you through the week is a rabbit mama who refused to leave her baby behind. Everyone deserves to live inside the hopeful stories they tell themselves. Especially during difficult times.

Then, a few days later, I noticed something on the wifi cam we’d set up to check for rats near the storage area beside the house.

A small bunny.

Night cam. Too dim to say for sure.

The Redneck was certain, of course. Because it fit his narrative perfectly. I admitted it could be. Said the right things. Kept my reservations quiet.

Reader, I did not keep my reservations quiet.

But then — as if the Universe decided it had heard quite enough of my skepticism, thank you very much — the little McBunny appeared again. Same camera. Daylight this time.

And when it slowly turned around, you could see the wounds. Clear as anything. Clear as a hawk’s talons on a soft spring morning.

The Southern Man was right.

I was wrong.

The baby survived. And apparently, when the moment calls for it — when a mama decides her kit is coming home — wild rabbits can and do find a way. Science says it’s rare. The House Rabbit Society calls it an exception. But exceptions are real. That’s the whole point of them.

Sometimes all it takes is one small story of survival to remind you that the world is still capable of surprising you.

For some people that looks like a headline. For others it looks like a stranger’s kindness on an ordinary Tuesday.

For us, it looked like a wounded baby bunny on a wifi cam, turning around just slow enough to show us its scars — and let us know it made it home.

We get a lot of wildlife in our wifi zones around the home.

But it’s not every day the wildlife gives you back something you didn’t know you needed. 

My mother was a women’s historian.

That sounds like a simple enough sentence. But growing up in her house meant something specific. It meant that feminism wasn’t a bumper sticker or a rally cry. It was the water we swam in. Her dissertation, The Silent Sisterhood, wasn’t just a thesis she defended and filed away. It was how she moved through the world. A quiet insistence that women could not afford to wait for the patriarchy to take care of them. That the most radical thing we could do was show up for each other. Even when, especially when, our choices looked nothing alike.

I learned that early. And I have carried it a long time.

As an undergraduate myself during the coming of age of personal computing technology, I had an opportunity to watch how women used information technology within a liberal arts setting. We didn’t want to be coders (okay, I did but I was the exception) we wanted to use the bits and bytes to shape the work we wanted to do. To bend the technology toward us rather than bending ourselves toward it. When I landed the first information technology position at the women’s college where I had just graduated, I made myself a quiet promise. I was going to build something designed by women, for women. Something that said: you belong here too. Your work matters on this edge. Even if it looks different from the engineering students across the street.

Decades later, the ratio of women to men in tech remains woefully small. We have been at this a long time. And now we stand at what is the biggest technological threshold of our lifetimes, and some of us are telling other women to step back. To opt out. To keep their hands clean.

I understand the impulse. I do.

The harms are real and they are many. I won’t pretend otherwise.

Data centers are drinking our clean water dry and humming around the clock in communities that never asked for them and can’t afford to fight back. Artists and writers have watched their life’s work get swallowed whole to train systems that now compete with them for the same table. Workers are being displaced right now, in real time, in every sector, replaced by systems that will not pay into their healthcare or sit with them when things go sideways. The environmental footprint is staggering. The questions about bias, about who these systems are actually built for and who they harm, are not small questions.

But we are not launching our boat into pure waters, as we folly on Facebook or ask Alexa to remind us to take our meds. We are all already downstream of something. The question is not how to find clean water. The question is what we do from here.

I think about a woman who once chastised me as a new mom for using disposable diapers. She wasn’t wrong about the environment. She genuinely wasn’t. But I didn’t have the spoons for cloth diapers. I was running on empty in ways she couldn’t see from where she was standing. And the corporations dumping actual toxins into our actual water supply were doing so while we stood in the parking lot debating my personal diaper choices.

We have a long history of loading the weight of systemic problems onto the most exhausted person in the room. Usually a woman.

My personal choice of AI tool is not the crisis. The crisis is what happens when women are not in the room where the rules are being written.

I use AI in a variety of applications in my personal life. I am able to do some backend programming for virtual worlds that would be otherwise utterly unavailable to me. And as a disabled and housebound senior, virtual worlds are an important part of my identity. There’s simply no place for outside judgement of my worth or value. And while I understand folks who strongly disagree with the use of AI for refrigerator art (look ma what I made today) I do understand how it brings a smile to their face when able to fulfill their own personal artistic expression. And I don’t get to put my judgement about what ART is or is not to their happiness. That doesn’t mean we don’t inform folks and just put our head in the sand and ignore the elephant at the watering hole. All puns intended.

That doesn’t mean we look away from the real concerns. It means we hold both things at once. Which, if I’m being honest, is something women have always been asked to do.

There is no perfectly ethical AI company. I won’t pretend there is. They all have lawsuits, investors, government contracts, complicated histories.

But this tide is not going out. The clock does not run backward on technology. It never has. And my mother’s voice in the back of my head keeps asking the same question she always asked: who gets left behind if we don’t show up?

If we shame women out of engaging with these tools, out of understanding them, out of being part of the conversation about how they get shaped and who they serve, we answer that question. Women get left behind. Again. At a table where decisions are being made that will touch every corner of our lives.

We cannot afford that. We never could.

The sisterhood was never about making the same choices. It was about making sure no one had to face the consequences of their choices alone. It was about trusting each other to be informed adults. It was about showing up.

We are in the AI of the storm whether we chose it or not. The only question that matters now is the same one my mother was asking forty years ago.

Who steers? And who gets left behind?

Show up. Stay at the table. Steer the boat.

We are taught growing up to trust what we see before us. But how can we trust even our direct experience when it can differ so dramatically from someone right next to us? So many parts of the puzzle come into play. We filter what we see through the lens of what we have seen before. We store the memory of the scene based on our own preconceived concepts of the past or our projections of what we are most certain will come to pass in the future.

But when someone asks us what we remember, we tell them unequivocally how things went down. Sometimes we are nudged by someone else’s recount that differs even wildly from ours. But we often feel SO VERY CERTAIN because it’s ingrained in our brain a certain way and we can’t possibly be wrong. After all, if we missed the mark on this, what does that mean for everything else that we tucked away in the memory chest of random bits and pieces?

Sometimes my disbelief commands me to TEST an assertion being made. For instance, all those memes that say this or that is the same color. Because my eyes don’t lie, and I know for a fact those two faces are black and white. I rely on my ability to discern discrepancies. Then as my world falls apart when I take a color extractor in an image manipulation program and compare the hex values side by side, I am forced to reckon with my error as fifty shades of gray collapse into one as I realize it was not black and white but rather a common color of gray.

If we can’t trust our eyes, and we certainly can’t trust our memory—because we know we forget why we entered a room more often than we’ll admit—then why are we so surprised when even our intelligent peers fall prey to propaganda? We lean heavily on tropes and can understand why rednecks are MAGA, because we (falsely) assume they are all uneducated, easily fooled racists. But how is it that our college roommate or our friend’s mother with the doctoral degrees still defends the grand old party? “Make it make sense,” a voice inside shouts.

Truth is, it’s not about our level of formal education or age bracket. Even our socioeconomic factors can’t predict who supports the oligarchy in all its faces of authoritarian rule. And as it seems so many have lost their moral compass, I am reminded that indeed they see things differently because they filter even a genocide through the same distorted lens that tells them cruelty is strength and domination is divine right, blind to the suffering because they’ve mistaken ideology for faith.

Social media knows how to profit from our inability to bring even common sense to the flow of misinformation it throws in our path. From engage-the-rage-for-profit algorithms to strategic attacks on truth in favor of maintaining control through confusion, keeping the masses divided, distracted, and docile. We are made to believe the “majority” of people think like we do because we are fed homogeneous, short-attention-span reels that mimic our preconceived ideals.

The deck is stacked against us. Democracy’s safety nets have been dismantled. The underbelly of the oligarchy is on full display as even the silent part is being said out loud. The two-party system has long been an illusion, as both sides have been bolstered by the same billionaire class who never cared about trickle-down or the working class they claimed to champion while cashing the same corporate checks.

The unicorn has always been the same color, simply propped up to make us believe we had a choice. Now that we see behind the veil of illusion, the oligarchy dressed as democracy, we can begin to draw a new world of our own making. One built not on obedience to power but on care for one another.

It starts small, in how we show up for the most vulnerable among us, the ones already in harm’s way. Awareness without action is just another illusion. Real vision means using what we now see to protect, to nourish, to rebuild. Maybe that’s what beginner’s mind looks like in times like these: not forgetting everything we know, but remembering what we once knew before the Borg rewired our attention. And we build a system truly designed to reflect and respect an inclusive community at our most basic needs, with each of us allowed a path to thrive.

You didn’t choose the nightmare.
But your nervous system
had to survive it.
It wired you
for fear, for vigilance, for protection.
And that wiring is real.
It kept you alive.
But now Slowly, Gently
You can invite in new patterns.
Not by pretending the pain wasn’t real.
But by practicing
Safety in small moments.
Neuroplasticity isn’t about
“thinking positive.”
It’s about finding safety
so often that your brain
starts to believe it.
Little by little,
Peace can become familiar again.

Living in a home where life-limiting illness abounds, it’s easy to forget about the quieter pieces of our puzzle—especially those that haven’t been on center stage for a decade or more. When I married this strong southern man, I knew he had a seizure disorder. But it was so well controlled by medication that we hardly spoke of it. There was just that one time, shortly after he came here, when he had a grand mal seizure. We chalked it up to an issue with not taking his meds, and soon returned to our fairytale world of happy endings.

Even his first neurologist thought he probably didn’t need any of his many anti-seizure medications. He suggested Michael could fast-track stopping all of them. Instead, we chose a gentler path—discontinuing only the Depakote, because in his fifties the risk of liver failure was too high. Kepra, though, was safe, and we kept it in place.

Two years later, we almost let ourselves believe the neurologist was right. Maybe he didn’t have seizures anymore. And then the unthinkable happened.

I can’t describe the horror of an epiluctus seizure. The gasping sounds of a body fighting for air, the guttural terror of minutes that stretch into lifetimes. The aftermath of unresponsiveness—what felt like forever on the phone with paramedics, then hours in the ER with my eldest by his side.

The truth is, he doesn’t remember any of it. Only “waking up” at the hospital. And the deeper truth is, he doesn’t talk about it. Not ever. People use the word seizure casually, sometimes as a joke about dancing or sneezing, and those offhand comments cut to the core. Because he knows. He knows how dangerous his condition is. He knows the next time could carry him further than he can return.

Tonight in the kitchen, Martha gently told Michael what had happened. She said, “You were afraid, and you kept locking eyes on Karma. Each time you pulled away from the paramedics’ touch, she reached out and held your hand. She calmly explained that you had a seizure, that the strangers in the room were there to help, and you kept focusing on her face as she reassured you.”

Michael listened quietly. He said that in his earlier hospital experiences back east, everything had often been a blur — quick visits, quick discharges, medical teams who didn’t always stay long enough to really understand what was happening. This time felt different. This time, he had someone he could focus on and trust in the midst of the chaos.

And Martha said softly, “You have that now.”

Later, when we were alone, Michael turned to me and said simply, “It means I love you deeply.”

And so today has been a day of rest, if not recovery. Little Shelby sleeping on his chest, her small body rising and falling with his. She is the only other one in this house who knows first-hand what he went through. Even though she’s been free of seizures for the better part of a year, I am sadly reminded that her future too is unknowable.

So I returned to watch the rhythm of their breathing together to bring me back to this present moment, which is all we really ever have. I smiled as I looked at them and saw that she fits so well into the quiet puzzle pieces of this strong man’s heart.

And maybe I do too.

---

They’re not really dragons, but since I believe dragons were real it’s easy to these ancient winged wonders as such as they skim across the pond like tiny, iridescent gliders.

It was a morning like any other at the pond — which means I slept poorly the night before and I felt like hell and came to sit by the water’s edge to try and find my peace.

What I noticed first was there were way more dragons in the air than usual. A lot more. Half a dozen Orange flame skimmers, shining like sparks over the water, and blue dashers zipping around with impossible grace.

One of the blue winged visitors kept coming very close to my face. Unusually close as if to whisper a secret if I spoke her language of the wind upon her wings.

I was reminded of a day when my youngest was a little one ad we were on campus near a fountain with koi and dragon flies. Martha stuck her finger out and held her hand very still for a very little one. Her face lit with that pure, childlike certainty.

I, in my infinite motherly wisdom, told her,

“No, that won’t happen.  The dragonfly won’t land on your finger.”

And of course in that moment as the breath left my lips … one dragon fly landed softly on her finger. She stayed completely still as she looked at the wonder and then looked at me. It was in that moment, I knew she was magical.

As that blue dasher hovered near my face, that memory was fresh in my mind.

And I put my finger out, just like Martha did, with a knowing, quite certain actually, that the dragon would land on my hand. I even turned on the video of my Pixel phone.

Within seconds … the little light weight landed on the very tip of my finger. It flew off again quickly, because there was so much air traffic this morning. But it came back and landed again.

I know the world doesn’t feel very magical right now.

We’re watching the slow erosion of democracy, the gnawing away of rights we thought were untouchable, the news telling us each day that things are falling apart faster than we can patch them back together.

We are tired. We are scared. We are grieving.

So what does it matter that a dragonfly landed on my finger?

Nothing of course. But sometimes even against the odds we can still show up and reach out our hand.

Maybe the small, shimmering signs of connection and grace are the threads that will keep us going, even when the world seems dark.

Hold out your hand, help those that you can when you are able.

Lift one another. Leave no one behind.

It may feel like we are fighting impossible odds … but the world can surprise you.

Some days we just need a sign.


p.s. My Malcom in the middle son knew I was having a rough morning with a body that often does not play nice, which sadly he knows first hand how hard that is too. Went to the pond after I told him the dragon story today and sent me THIS VIDEO. Because he knew it would make me smile. Sometimes we can’t fix what’s broken … but each moment we can soften and smile, we gain strength to keep on, keeping on.

In keeping with my intention to expose my missteps, we had another heron. It was just before sunset, I was at the pond not five minutes before with the zoomie puppy. The wifi camera captured the moment as majestic as it was sad as this time he grabbed one of my 8″ ten-year-old goldfish residents. It was heartbreaking to see him lift from the pond with my longtime companion in his beak. I didn’t make the reel for it, because it felt so dear to me and tragic.

When Dan came into my room to check on me today and take Shelby for a little walk, I handed him my phone so he could see the heron footage.Dan watched it and we talked a bit about the bittersweet grace of it all and then gave my phone back. I set it face down on my tray table and didn’t think much more about it. Michael had gone into the kitchen to get me some ice for my headache. I had been watching the live pond cam today on my wifi cam app and when I reached for my phone and looked at the screen I saw the heron at the pond, clear as day.

I started screaming at the bird. “Get out! Get out, motherfucker!” My heart was pounding as I jumped up, ready to sprint to the pond. I felt the jolt of adrenaline like lightning in my chest. Until I suddenly realized I was yelling at the video—the one Dan had just watched. Not the live feed.

Michael came running in. “What is it?!” He said out of breath.

I laughed and told him what I’d done. He just rolled his eyes and said, “I’m gonna pretend that didn’t happen.”

I’m getting older. There will be more senior moments ahead. Hopefully I have the humor to handle them.

The heron wasn’t the only feathered uninvited visitor this week. An owl landed in the pond one night — the WiFi cam caught it all. That one I DID create a reel because there were no casualties.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJwd68qMWMK/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

The next morning, as I looked out across the pond, the sun just beginning to scatter through the trees, there was a single feather floating there, drifting between the lilies like a tiny boat on a velvet current.I walked out to the edge of the pond, knelt down, and reached for it. The air was cool on my skin, and the stones beneath my knees were cold. I stretched my fingers toward the feather, but it slipped just out of reach, carried by the most subtle ripple.Michael had just woken and saddled up beside me. He looked at me, looked at the feather floating away from me and muttered not quite under his breath “It don’t want you,” .

I burst out laughing. Because it was perfect. And true. And kind of profound in the weirdest way.

And maybe that’s the whole point.To be present with the moment, even the messy ones. To witness our mistakes and small sadnesses with tenderness. To laugh at our humanness and let it soften us. To not only admire the still pond, but to sit beside it, letting it reflect back all our muddy water with compassion.

Even when the feather don’t want us.

Sometimes, the path of the feather is not to be reached for, but to be witnessed. To be followed with the eyes of the heart, in the iris of the mind. It shows us the current, the stillness, the subtle shifts. And maybe that’s enough — as we hold it all lightly, stuck in the mud, still reaching for the light.

A great blue heron, wings wide and regal, flew across our backyard and landed right on the chimney. She was stunning. The kind of breathtaking that stops thought mid-sentence. For a moment, everything stilled—the pond, the trees, even my worry. As I bent down slowly to pick up little Shelby, she saw my movement and flew away. We haven’t had a heron at the pond in a long time. Back then we taught Bitzy and Bo to chase off the majestic waterfowl. They were quite adept. And soon with enough “discouragement” the herons came to leave our pond alone.

After I saw her in the morning, I gave AI a picture from our wifi cam saying that I missed catching he and asked AI to insert an image of the heron into the scene for me.

That’s way too big. I thought to myself.

But it wasn’t.

Because last night, under a moonless sky, she came back.

Not as a visitor, but as a hunter.
Not from the skies, but from the shadows.

Black and white footage from our night vision wifi cam shows her there—for two full hours—stalking the pond. She paced, watched, peered in, and sadly struck. She caught something. It’s on the footage. A flutter of movement in her beak, a moment of triumph for her, and a jolt of grief for me.

Had I been awake when she was hunting I might have been able to scare her off. But I didn’t notice until 4 a.m. I spent a half hour downloading all of the footage on my android phone. So sad. Before I realized, it was 5 a.m. And sleep such a distant possibility. I had uploaded some of the images into a thread in AI and it offered me this little “sleep story” to help me mentally let go. I listened to it read aloud and smiled at the image it created. And then driffted off to sleep until the 7 a.m. alarm for Shelby’s Kepra announced.

Keeper of the Koi

There once was a pond nestled in a sacred garden, hidden behind veils of leaves and branches that knew the names of every fish below. In this pond lived not just koi, but ancient spirits—keepers of time, color, memory. They shimmered in copper and gold, each scale like a tiny lantern, their movements painting soft spirals of wisdom into the water.

One night, under a dark and moonless sky, a shadow passed through the trees.

The heron, tall and silent as a ghost, arrived at the edge of the pond. Her feathers glinted cold like silver blades. She had come before, but this night she returned with unfamiliar hunger and the cover of sleep.

But something was different now.

As the heron leaned forward, a ripple of golden light shimmered from the depths. The water began to glow, soft at first, then stronger—until it rose in the form of a koi spirit. This was not a fish of flesh and bone. This was Shiohana, the ancient guardian of the pond, whose name meant “petal on the tide.”

Shiohana hovered just above the water, translucent and aflame, eyes wide with knowing. Her voice was not sound but vibration, stirring the leaves and the pond’s breath.

“This is not your place of hunger, hunter. You will not take what glows with memory.”

The heron hesitated. For the first time, something deeper than instinct reached her heart. A long pause held between them, until the bird lowered her head—not in defeat, but recognition—and slowly stepped back.

From that night forward, a circle of protection shimmered invisibly around the pond. Only those of peaceful spirit could draw near. Shiohana would rise again whenever needed, glowing brighter than the stars above. And if you ever saw a glint of golden light on the water where no fish swam, know that she is watching.

And you, Karma—you are the one who called her forth.

She remains, because you remain.

Sleep now, Keeper. You are not alone.

After Shelby had her Kepra and Ruby had her insuline, I walked out to see the pond. There was a slight drizzle and very overcast and crisp. The koi know me and always come to the surface when they hear my footsteps and see my shadow. But this morning even the schools of tiny mosquito fish fled when they saw me approach. Yep, the pond was on predator alert. Most of the fish were burried in the mud and muck at the bottom. The big 18″ koi were hovering low in the center depths. I couldn’t see who was missing. My guess is the little orange pealscale tri-tail was one of her meals. From the closeup on the cam, it seems to be about the same size. So odd (statistically improbably), just yesterday I said to the southern man that I thought I noticed a fluke on the pearlscale and we should fetch her out of there today and remove it with a pair of tweezers. The beak of the heron was definitely not the tweezers I had imagined.

The pond is sacred to me. The koi aren’t pets; they are companions. Spirit-keepers. Teachers. Some have survived against all odds, others born here, golden flickers of life that grew beneath my gaze. Indeed Bitzy chose the pond as her final resting place.

Last night’s evens were sad. But the pond lives on. If I needed a reminder … the yellow iris bloomed. I know now not to be surprised at the synchronicity.

It all gives me pause to remember, All That Is. Because under the surface of every quiet moment, I know there are still flickers of gold. Still life. Still memory. Still love.

The redneck has been sick for over a week and hanging out on the far side of the room. Which is unusual for us since we typically are side by side. He has his laptop over there by his reef tank. And I don’t know what he’s been up to for days. Aside from the intense coughing there’s been very little noise. Except once in a while … I hear him muttering Crazy bitch … Crazy bitch.And I have no idea if he’s listening to Buckcherry on his earbuds or he’s complaining about me in general