A stiff wind cuts across the cold stone squares as I run through the university campus.

Normally there would be hundreds of students here, camped in tiny tents, waiting to buy basketball tournament tickets. An annual rite of March.

Today it’s a ghost town.

The steps of the student union are empty, too – no students chatting while cradling their steaming hot lattes.

Simple cups of comfort.

Not long ago, they were crowding and bumping into one another along these paths.

Doing life the way young people in college do.

Or how they did.

And finally, I look up at the church.

It rises majestically from the bottom of a long hill, a beacon visible from many miles away, the Duke Chapel.

Oversized for this little tobacco town, it looms like an ancient European cathedral.

And today I remember Paris and Notre Dame. That magnificent icon of hubris that we cherish and clutch tight to our collective memory.

As a tourist, I never stood in line to buy tickets to go inside the main structure, I always sat on the grass in the playground in the back courtyard.

The perfect spot to get a closer look at the gargoyles.

Each figure, so remarkably detailed and unique – whimsical, weird, monstrous. agonized, laughing, snarling.

Quirky little ogres.

I remember reading about their history – how they are variations on Medieval dragons, and they were crafted to serve several functions.

One was structural – to drain water away from the main roofline of the building.

Another was to serve as a meme to church members of the Devil that lurked in the city – ready to pounce and drag them down to Hell.

Another was to act as guardians of the purity inside of the church itself, they repelled the evil forces of the secular world.

Yet the mighty Notre Dame lost its cloak of invincibility in a dramatic spectacle last year. The entire world watched in disbelief as the spire went up in a blaze of bright orange flame.

Sparks, like anger, fizzing and igniting.

Boiling, roiling, incinerating.

On and on, through the night, gobbling up oxygen as tiles fell away in fiery chunks. And finally portions of the roof collapsed into the belly of its own sanctuary.

Later, ruined, ravaged, wet remnants and grief.

How quickly the facade of normality can crumble, how our devout icons can be razed.

… how quickly the facade of normality can crumble.

Beauty and grace buckling at the knees.

Where once we found comfort and refuge, now we doubt.

Some nights, I wake in bed at 3 am, heart beating too fast, not sure if the fear in my chest is in the dream or in the waking.

For me, I wonder where we went so wrong, my generation. How we ruined things for our kids. How I could ever go back and undo, take better care.

I still want to believe that, like the little gargoyle, yes, we are tragic and grotesque, but we grapple with our other masks, too – charity and goodness, bravery and compassion.

For me, I just want to run and run and keep on running, to that safe place inside that has always been my refuge: my hard-won stability, my humor, stillness, my best self.

But today, even though the streets are quiet, the volume is turned up way too high in my brain.

There’s a jarring dissonance between outside and inside the body – the harsh clanging of the inane cathedral bells amplifies the disorder.

Good and evil, faith and fear.

And I can’t go in, but I know that the Duke Gardens is a fantasia today – vacant, but mobbed with drunken bees, rare specimens of botanicals and aching new life.

Beauty, ruins, remains.

Running, running, running home, no quietude, no answers, just noise.

• Photos:
• Marseilles, France
• Strasbourg, France
• Bern, Switzerland

This morning I walk out to the backyard for my daily check on the Eastern blue bird box.

Each year I clean it out and hope and pray that this will be the year that eggs will come.

And chicks will emerge. And fledglings will quietly grow their brilliant cerulean plumage.

And each will poke a head out and take a first look at the new world, and they will be convinced that it is a safe one.

First they’re naked and blind. Then they become beady eyes from underneath mother’s downy breast.

And then they are able to peek through the tiny door.

After several weeks they will take that courageous first flap. Usually a tumble onto the ground, and a flurried frenzy.

But then, coaxed on by mom and dad, they can alight on the clothesline or a nearby shrub.

And from then on, I don’t know, but it makes me anxious.

I see a story that could go either way.

Two options: life or death.

Survival or submission.

Fact is, there were 6 perfect eggs, and only this one goober made it.

I was sure the others were just late bloomers, but no, they were dead.

Dead as dodos – dummies, diseased, unfertilized, unviable, impotent, inept, gross, losers, whatever.

This is the one success story. For now. This one homely dude.

A few more days, and the rent comes due, and it’s time to catch a flight out of here. I’ll probably miss it, it’s quick as a blink.

Proud, shrieking parents, the teenager darting for open space. Orchestrated, pell-mell drama.

Or not.

I might see my dog trot back from the bush with feathery turquoise jowls.

There have been many obstacles: fights with other birds for the nesting box. Bluebirds are shy and don’t stand up for themselves too well, they get bullied.

The specificity of the nesting materials – what the birds can find.

The availability of mealworms. And the weather.

There are cats, and hawks, and squirrels. All of them poach on the nest. Poached eggs.

It’s so easy to be romanced by the smooth, cyan eggs – the sweet potential, the perfection of design. So delicate and exquisite, but packed dense with balled-up chick.

Fact is, the gnarly little dinosaurs have stubbornly survived because of their horned beaks and their obstinate refusal to go extinct.

Evolving over millions of years, they are pre-history, Pre-human history, that is.

They are strappy, scrappy: their beaks scratch, scrape, puncture, poke, peck, peck, peck, again and again, shivs against their incubus prison.

They puff, fluff, fluster, muster, tussle, ruffle, muffle and kerfuffle.

They strain, pop, quake, shake, step, hop, hop hop again, and jump off.

And then?

Lately I’ve been thinking about the term pre-existing conditions.

One of mine is bipolar 2. It’s in my little DNA coil, genetically determined and individually crafted for me.

Beth genes waiting for expression.

At times I think I see patterns in my symptoms, but often they are completely random.

It is this fickle randomness of my own body that makes me think that life has never been a story I could control.

Our bodies, so miraculously designed and constructed, are also scattershot and absurdly random.

But we share one inevitable pre-existing condition: the fact of our mortality.

Death.

We know how our stories end, but still we fly.

We grope for the sunshine through the ragged peephole, and spy the blue, and we go for it.

We fumble, tumble and lurch.

Ideas waiting for expression. Compression, repression, impression.

A high probability scenario: soft wings torn away from tiny sanguine breast, a heartbeat skittering to a stop, a few rufous feathers left as tokens in the grass (the loss of lapis, my hope, my heartache). An ending.

Anyway, afterwards, I’ll clean out the box again, remove the old nest and dispose of the dead eggs, preserved perfection, stillness.

And eggy bits, sticky with fluff and excrement.

And emptiness.

And I imagine wings of purest indigo.

And flight.