Lotsa weird stuff going on.

A striped lizard keeps appearing, parading in front of me in the house. Red leaves from Nowhere litter my path. A single azalea bloom in November-and a new brood of Carolina wrens in the garage. Three wild strawberries in the grass.

I found the 5 red leaves this morning under the oak where I practice. I looked and looked and found no source for red leaves, no source for leaves at all of their distinctive size and shape. Where did they come from?

A few years back I saw a PBS program on bowerbirds. The male bowerbird constructs elaborate architecture—fundamentally to attract mates, but it seems to go beyond that.

There are several bowerbird species—some build plain thatched nests. Some bowers are quite big if I remember correctly. Then there are the species who create colorful welcome mats, bowerbird mosaics. Intricate installations that have nothing to do with nesting. They interest me the most. The birds collect, sort and arrange small objects—sometimes bringing them in from quite a distance. Blossoms of pink or yellow. Shining insect wings. Berries and seeds.

On the program, if the narrator rearranged something, the bird would return, do a double take, and fix things back. Beetle wings HERE, thank you very much. Clearly, the bird had an idea of what he was trying to build, what he was trying to express. All of the bowers were intriguing; some were very beautiful.

Toward the end of the program, the focus was on a bowerbird species whose habitat overlapped human space. Near a school yard, one bowerbird’s construction had a section composed of broken green plastic soldiers, another of-was it bottle caps? crayons?

As with human artists, does the work at some point evolve from trying to impress potential lovers to having meaning in and of itself? Is the bower-building more about attracting, or expressing?

At the time of the program, I wondered if a blog or website wasn’t a sort of bower. A bit of color here, some insect stories there. Let’s switch to dance or poetry or astrophysics or arrowheads.

Perhaps God or the universe behaves like a bowerbird, offering this shining tidbit and that, drawing each of us forward.

If we are willing to follow.