A pair of house finches began building a nest outside my window. Throughout the third week of June, anytime I wanted, I could lean over and see the soon-to-be mother in the corner of the window box with dried grasses clamped in her beak weaving a bed behind a petunia flower. Her partner stood on the lip of the gutter watching and burbling cheerfully. After a few days I looked into the nest—there were four perfect eggs.

A couple of weeks later, two babies, each with a body that was seventy-five percent mouth, reached up swaying and jerking a little crazily on a delicate stem, blind, wild and desperate. Father bird came and fed mother bird, then she fed the mouths and sheltered them with her body waiting for the other two to hatch. A friend 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. 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? Could I have protected the birds? 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 about what I expect or assume. Its ugliness hurts and offends me. Its shimmering beauty scares me. I’m afraid it will be lost. I want to look away.

But my life is here, 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. With disappointment, trepidation, and on my knees trembling, in gratitude, I’m holding tenderness and violence and everything in between, and saying, “yes!”