Dear Friends,
It finally happened – the eagle eggs have hatched. Three consecutive winters of watching the Big Bear Valley Eagles, and pop, here they are, fluffy eaglets looking like sentient dandelions.
I’ve been watching these birds since 2023, which is the year my dad died. The eggs failed to hatch the first two years of observing the nest, so you can imagine how much I had hoped they would hatch this year while simultaneously not wanting to get my hopes up. All the circumstances finally aligned so that these babies could emerge, and they made their first appearance on March 4th, 2025.
March 4th, 2023 happens to be the last time I saw my dad alive. This past weekend marked the 2nd anniversary of his death. This is going to seem silly but the last time I wrote about my dad, I also wrote about a bird then too (an owl, in that instance). An easy explanation is that I simply like birds, but a more nuanced interpretation would be that my father’s spirit was flighty and untethered, so much so that it was to his detriment.
We waved goodbye after this photo was taken and I flew back home, unaware I would never see him again. I was foolishly optimistic that I might be able to visit him once more in a few months or even a year. He died a couple weeks later. My dad had a habit of calling me at odd hours, not realizing that the time difference made it so that he often phoned while I was asleep around 4am. Shortly before his death, I remember seeing a missed call from him and made a mental note to call him back later. It turns out that I missed his last ever phone call, and we would never again have a two-way conversation. I suspect this will haunt me for the rest of my life.
So that’s just one reason March is a loaded month for me. March reminds me of the stark irreversibility of death. Conversely, March also yields all the trappings of new life: flowers, eggs, and the first signs of spring.
March also celebrates St. Patrick’s Day, which meant absolutely nothing to me prior to 2014 but has since become a flamboyant reminder of the three years I spent living in Ireland. I miss Ireland very much and hope to return there with my daughter one day, who, incidentally, would probably not exist without Ireland.
This photo was taken in the tiny Irish village I was residing in, a few weeks before I met Thane. The base of the rainbow is approximately where my flat was located. Thane was living in New York at the time and would be traveling to Ballyvaughan for an artist residency. I had just completed my MFA and stayed in the village to make some extra cash working as a barista before moving to Dublin.
I knew pretty much instantly when I met Thane that he was someone I wanted to share a future with, but at the time I didn’t know whether or not we would even see each other again. It hasn’t been without enormous challenges, but here we are almost 9 years later with Lumi.
During those years in Ireland I saw more rainbows than anywhere else I’d ever been. The more I saw them, the more they began to take hold in my psyche as portals or magic doorways to a fairer world that was ever so slightly out of reach. They became symbols for delight, longing, ephemerality, and the thrill of synchronicity.
Synchronicity is when everything lines up perfectly to create something special, like how a rainbow has to have a precise balance of light and water in order to appear.
The crazy thing about rainbows is that they reveal colors that are always there but are usually locked away – a rainbow is formed when sunlight interacts with raindrops, undergoing refraction and reflection, dispersing the light into its constituent colors, acting as a natural, magical conduit of scattered light that forms a beautiful gradient. Those colors exist within the sunlight in perpetuity, but it takes a specific alignment of circumstances in order to see a rainbow.
I view much of the rest of life like this, for better or for worse. Thane and I met in Ireland under very specific circumstances which, years later, resulted in the birth of a person that is particularly special to us. My dad, living thousands of miles away, combined with poor timing and a lifetime of questionable choices, resulted in one unforgettably sad missed call.
Whenever I paint rainbows now, I think of them as “archways” of potential, or as “magic conduits.” All acts of creation are manifestations of potential to some degree. When baking, the potential for bread is always there in the flour, water, and yeast. Within a lump of clay exists the potential for a mug, or a song in a violin. It just takes a specific combination of time, energy, and attention in order to bring these things into fruition. Just like sunlight hitting water droplets in precisely the right way, the potential is always there, and when you create something, you become the magical conduit through which these things appear.
Time for painting, writing, or anything unrelated to caretaking, is slim these days, but I’m trying my best. Sometimes it happens while holding a wriggling baby. Most of the time it happens while she’s napping or when someone else is available to hold her. And it’s always a difficult choice between getting more sleep or exercising the “self actualization” part of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Lumi is four months old now, and I’m feeling sad that my dad never got a chance to meet her. He would have been over the moon to have a grandchild. But life is a cycle, death is only one part of it, spring is here and so is an abundance of new growth. It’s time to focus on small stuff with our small person, like flowers and tummy time and the seeds we want to plant in our garden this year.
It hasn’t been easy keeping this going while I learn how to be a parent, my brain feels like it is melting most days, so thank you very much for reading, and for supporting this publication. It means a lot.
Happy spring.
Love,
Melanie
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♥
With pouring rain maybe 80% of March this year, being reminded of rainbows in your way has brought grins to me. & yes, March is also a mixed month for me. My husband died 13 years ago this month. Last year my favorite reframe was to begin celebrating the last day of his living life rather than the day he passed. It was a lovely change. Living life fully is fabulous. Thank you for contributing, monthly, to my full life, this way.
oh I am sad to have missed the archways class. it's gorgeous.
thank you for sharing, melanie. lumi is PRECIOUS.