After the heat this week, today feels almost chilly. The baby hawks in the graveyard have not quite yet fledged, but they have come out of their nest and are sitting up on the limbs of the oak like big birds, pretending to be cool. I want to tell them, "I know you're still babies. I saw you when you were little fuzzyheaded dinosaurs. I have your eggshell in my desk at home." 

I'm here, doing the things that I always do: going for my run, walking barefoot out into the garden to pull weeds and check the progress of small, hot peppers. Something has been nibbling on my tomatoes and sunflowers - two plants that I don't usually have trouble with, but that are giving me difficulties this year. The ugly little cat weaves between my bare legs as I work out there, occasionally throwing herself down into my weeding and trying to bite and lick my hands. The cardinals are courting each other. They do this thing where the female comes up to the male at the feeder and begs like a baby bird, flapping her wings, and the male very tenderly puts a seed in her beak. Is that love? Or is it more about sex?

Do you think energy is real, or is it just what we make up in our own brains for why certain weeks feel hard, or happy, or nostalgic, or easy? Sometimes I think there's so much significance to this life and the world around me, the cycles, the signs. At times in my life, I've felt so connected to that thread that I can almost guess what's going to happen next, or what another person is thinking, or feel them across time, space, mountains. Once, years ago, I had the strongest sense that my dead grandpa was standing just in the next room, listening to the sound of his beloved piano being played during a night when my house was full of happy, singing people. It was the realest, truest feeling - even if I knew I would walk into the dining room and not see him there. In life, he'd never even been to this house. 

And sometimes, it all feels so arbitrary, like maybe I'm actually just really mentally ill or stupid or I just come up with these things because it's better than that aspect not existing. If I were to work the components I bought last summer at the witchstore, would I stop dreaming of bees? If I did, would it be because something had really changed, or because I had convinced myself that it had? Would I lose something important? Would I lose the bees?