Jeff and I are watching the birds again. Our 100+ year old Craftsman home sits on its lot high above the sidewalks on our street, and so we have no window coverings. Our home is a birdhouse of its own! Outside the front window is a small grey birdhouse, currently uninhabited. Outside the windows of the kitchen stands a lovely crepe myrtle, joined by a beautiful birdhouse made by our friend Jim, and added to the yard this past winter. A circle of wooden lawn chairs in the yard gives the best view of who is moving into the wooden house in the side yard.
Jeff and I sit as quietly as we can in the wooden chairs, watching the titmice make a new home for their nest. The birds are busy; they don’t seem at all interested in us, the bigger creatures who also inhabit this part of the world. And so even as we move around, the couple does not stop their hard work, making room for eggs and soon, little titmice who will be coming into the big world that surrounds them.
I always like the little birds. Most find me unimportant as I observe them. But when the hummingbirds come into the yard, they are aggressive little creatures, sometimes buzzing close to my head as they observe this other strange, big – huge – creature. Quickly enough, the hummingbirds continue buzzing on to other places, out of sight.
I don’t think I have the patience to go about being a true bird watcher. I’ve tried. And I’ve seen some wonderful feathered creatures over the years, some who have seemed as interested in me as I am in them. But I do like to notice the birds who are our neighbors in our place in the city. They’re crafty – finding exactly what they need to make a cozy home in this busy urban area.
The new home of our titmouse neighbors! Photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2/2026
“Curiosity killed the cat…” hmmm… that may be true. And although it may be true, it is also true that curiosity is a curious and important quality. Some people are curious, others are not. Maybe that’s one way the world is divided into “us” and “them.” For some, each day holds some curiosity… a new view of an old street, or seeing something one has not seen before. When we are curious, the world opens itself to us, shining full of curious things – and happenings.
As I reflect on my life in my elder years, I often return in memory to my Junior High years. I walked from our rented flat in a working class neighborhood of Milwaukee – I actually passed the Master Lock Company – on Fond du Lac Avenue, into the middle class neighborhood that surrounded Peckham Junior High School. At Robert M. LaFollette School and later at Clarke Street School on Milwaukee’s North Side, my classmates were also the children of factory workers and stay at home moms. But Peckham Junior High was in a lovely north side neighborhood with single family homes and carefully kept lawns. My world grew as I walked under the viaduct at 35th Street. I was a young person with open eyes and a keen interest in the world, a quality shared by my family. Right away, I noticed the differences in the neighborhood where Peckham J.H. stood, comparing what I saw in some deep, unspoken part of myself.
I was curious and I was smart, both qualities that have served me well in life. I had role models. At home, my parents listened to the news each morning from the radio that sat on top of the refrigerator in the kitchen. And they stayed up at night to watch the news at 10 o’clock, before they went to bed to get enough sleep before the alarm in their bedroom went off at 6 am. They read the daily newspaper – The Milwaukee Journal. Many years later, on the cold February day in 2001 that my mother was buried alongside my dad at their gravesite on the south side of Milwaukee, I walked away from the grave as my good friend Vickie walked alongside me in the cold. “You had neat parents,” she said.
I think curiosity is one quality that my parents had that made them “neat parents.” They were interested, not only in the world, but in my friends. And when Vicki lost her mother at a young age, they were particularly welcoming to her whenever she came to spend time with me.
The world can be a difficult place – often. We are assured of that by staying in touch with the news every day, as my parents did. As adults, they knew the pitfalls of life along with the kindness and goodness. The world can be a difficult place. But the world is endlessly interesting.
I was thinking about curiosity today when I was preaching about Nicodemus. Nicodemus, best known for visiting Jesus at night to discuss spiritual rebirth and later assisting with Jesus’ burial, had a journey from hidden curiosity to becoming a follower of Jesus. Nicodemus came at night to talk to Jesus, apparently curious himself about this man who was causing a stir as crowds followed him from place to place, eager to hear a good word, or eager to be healed.
I told the story of a time my big brother Ronn, who married in his early 20’s, came to me after his marriage and made a comment I have not forgotten. In a way, Ronn had always treated me as an equal, although he was 9 years older than me. And I’ve never forgotten what he said: “did you know that not everyone is interested in things, like our family is?” I understood then that he was reflecting on a difference he had noticed in his new wife’s family. He didn’t say more. I always loved Sue – love her still now that she’s been gone many years – but it is true, she did not have the interest in life that Ronn carried, as if he was carrying a gene that gave him a keen interest in learning, in new things. Later, he’d turn that interest to computers, and when I called him from across the country with a problem using my first computer at home, he’d patiently walk me through the steps I needed to get back on track.
And I suppose, like Nicodemus, curiosity might lead us into unknown, uncharted places. Maybe curiosity is responsible for whatever risks we take, a companion to the risk.
The world is endlessly interesting… even the small places are beautiful… photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2/2026
Winters were tough – cold, with lots of snow – when I was a child growing up in Milwaukee. Many of my memories include cold, gray skies, and snow. Although climate change has affected snowfall in later years, I recall vividly when I lived on Martin Drive in Milwaukee, in an apartment that came without a garage. Winter mornings, as I prepared to drive to Waukesha – west of Milwaukee – I’d often have to start the car, run the engine, and get out to scrape ice off the windshield before I drove away from the street – hoping I’d be able to get back into a car already warm, hoping that I’d make it to Waukesha without running into a pileup.
Ugh.
And as I scraped the windows, I remember clearly thinking, again and again: “who would live in this climate?” Maybe I was planning ahead – unknown to even me – for another future.
Today, a headline in the New York Times reads: Record Snowfall Slams New England as New York Digs Out. Ugh. I can relate. And I’m grateful to have had a busy morning here in Oakland, running a list of errands as I enjoy a sunny day. Again. We’ve had a week of rain, and the forecast is for more rain this week. We’re always grateful for rain, even in years when the rain is unrelenting. The Bay Area is not “sunny California,” which I quickly learned during my first winter, 1981-1982, an El Nino year. Instead of sunny days, I walked all over Berkeley in the rain. I had my mother send a box of my clothes that I’d failed to pack when I left Milwaukee. I needed clothes suitable for rain.
But this winter we’ve had plenty of rain, and another storm is on the way. It’s about time for spring to arrive full force, as the neighborhood trees, already budding, call out.
But I miss the snow, sometimes. I miss those wind-less snow falls, when the snow falls straight from the sky and leaves a blanket on the streets. In one memory, I watched late into the evening the snow fall, gentle, onto the lawn in front of my apartment building. Some memories of snow are gentle, like the snow.
And I don’t miss the times I skidded to a stop at a stop light – or even on the freeway, driving someone else’s car. Ugh. Ugh.
Spring in Oakland – photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2/11/2026
At my retirement gathering, to honor my retirement from active ministry, a woman I went to seminary with and who had retired several years before I retired, told me that after she retired, she felt as if she had lost God for a while. I was surprised at her comment. I didn’t think I would experience the same thing. At the time, I “prayed at all times” by having an on-going conversation with Jesus.
But I was wrong. For a couple of years after I retired in 2014, I felt as if I was adrift in my spiritual life/journey. As time has unfolded, I have returned to my relationship to the Holy, in a new/different way than before.
Now, I have the sense of my being “in” God, as part of God, not separate. I am immersed in God’s presence, as I am immersed in the air, say. The relationship I have now – as I compare my “before” and “after” – is to be part of the Whole. And ‘the Whole” is abundantly huge, “the Whole” is all that is. “The Whole” is loving all of creation and all that is beyond within itself. What that means, I can’t say/explain to myself. I don’t try. My time of prayer now is simply being with awareness, when I have that awareness. Often, my time spent walking is a time for me to be in that presence –
“You will wonder and in the depths of wonder you will discover a simpler way: you will walk, feet planted firmly on the earth, head up. You will walk into that sighing Presence.” – from the Collection, “Moments,” Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2026.
“You will walk into that sighing Presence…” – photo, Mary Elyn Bahlert, 1/2026
Saks is in the news this week. Apparently the company’s business – like so many other businesses, has suffered losses because of the use of online companies taking over the way we shop. I can’t remember when I learned about Saks Fifth Avenue for the first time in my life, but I expect that by the time I was in high school, I knew that my family were not people who would shop at Saks. We were Sears and Roebuck people. Saks did not have a store in Milwaukee, but when I took trips to the Loop in Chicago in my twenties, I was aware of Saks. Like my family, I didn’t shop at Saks.
But my mother shopped at Saks. On one of her trips to California to visit Jeff and me, I took Mom into San Francisco for an afternoon together. We walked around Union Square, happy to be together and to take in the City – the diversity of people, the busy streets. We had lunch at a cafe before we headed back to the BART station to catch our train back to the East Bay. But before we walked to the BART station, we separated for a time – at Mom’s request. She was on a mission.
Mom had a special gift in mind when we separated, although I didn’t know that. We parted ways for a time so that she could do her shopping while I nosed around the Square, looking at the people, looking at the store windows. I always love a new city, and San Francisco was on my long list of new cities I have visited over the course of my life.
When I met Mom at the appointed place and time, she was standing outside of Saks, looking at the people who passed her on the street. Like me, Mom loved the diversity of people she saw wherever she went. In San Francisco, she encountered people who brought a different kind of diversity than she was accustomed to in Milwaukee. And when I met Mom at the appointed place and time, she was standing, looking with interest at the passersby. She had a small bag – “Saks Fifth Avenue” stamped in elegant letters on the front, in her hand. She held the small bag close to her body.
Later that day, Mom handed me the little bag that held something special from Saks. When I opened the bag, I found a small bottle of Chanel No. 5. A gift for me.
That bottle of Chanel No. 5 was more than a gift. That bottle of Chanel No. 5 was a dream, a dream my mother held in her heart for me. She wanted me to have a life she could not have imagined, the life she did not have. She dreamed a life for me, and maybe it was in that bag, too. Maybe my life is even bigger than the dream Mom held. I will not ever know for sure.
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Still holding on to my mother’s dreams for me, with help from St. Brigid on St. Brigid’s Eve. photo by Mary Elyn Bahlert, 2/1/2026
