A pair of house finches began building a nest outside my window. All through the third week of June any time I wanted I could lean over and see the soon-to-be mother with dried grasses clamped in her beak weaving a bed behind a petunia flower in the corner of the window box. Her partner stood on the lip of the gutter watching and burbling cheerfully. After a few days I looked into the nest—four perfect eggs. Two weeks later, two babies, each baby body seventy five percent mouth and the mouth reaching up and swaying and jerking a little crazily on a delicate stem of neck, hungry and blind and wild and desperate. Father bird came and fed mother bird, then she fed the mouths and sheltered them with her body and waited for the other two to hatch. A friend I told called it a blessing on my home and that is how it felt. I have made a nurturing place here. I am doing something right.

Two days later, the nest was empty. A predator took them, and it left a house-finch-sized tear in the fabric of my assumptions about the world. Can animals be evil? Was the predator feeding its own babies? Should I have protected the birds? Could I have? Should I become vegan? Of course, this is not just about birds. When I look through the tear, I see a reality that does not care what I expect or assume. Its ugliness hurts and offends me and its shimmering beauty scares me because I am afraid it will be lost. I want to look away.

But my life is here, in this world, and I want to be in my life. So I have not removed the nest, a place where possibility and loss overlapped. I am lingering at the tear. I am looking through it into a big, deep, dark, bright, ugly, beautiful, pulsing, true world. And with disappointment, or trepidation, or on my knees in trembling or in gratitude, holding tenderness and violence and everything in between, I say, “yes.”