Dear Friends,

This week I am co-working with wrens.

A pair of house wrens have claimed a new birdhouse that I recently installed out back. (My middle kid built the box a couple years ago, and the time and place for it to fulfill its purpose finally arrived.) Wrens are vocally boisterous little birds. Their chattering, chirpy song is frantic and self-contained with a distinctive structure that’s easy to recognize once imprinted in memory. Its cadence and pacing is like a gas motor revving to life after a cold spell, sputtering at first then picking up speed until it finds a rhythm. I often imagine that the wrens are yelling at me, really telling me off. Did I move too close to their territory? Do I smell funny? Maybe they just don’t like the look of me? Their song seems directed and purposeful, but I’m ignorant of their deeper motivations.

When they aren’t yelling at me, the pair of wrens are homemaking, carrying small twigs and sticks into their new box. It doesn’t seem to be an easy task, threading those sticks through the tiny opening in the birdhouse. They take time, observing and perhaps planning their actions, before they hop to the hole and quickly hoist the materials inside. Several times, I’ve seen them drop sticks after moments of consideration; perhaps unsuitable for what they need. But, I’m not sure; I know very little about the behavior of these strong, delicate house wrens.

As I am co-working with wrens, I should briefly describe the work that I do while sitting in a cheap, broken camping chair in the shade of a middle-aged spruce tree with a laptop computer resting on my knees. It’s been unusually sunny and warm this second week of May in central Vermont – a welcome drying out from the past month of cold and rain and even snow a few weeks back – so I’ve been enjoying the privilege of remote work outside. Co-working with the birds.

I might use my observation of the wrens’ labor as a foil for describing my own work in a couple of ways. On one hand, I could point to the tangible, essential nest building of the wrens (the activity and the product) in comparison to my vaporous “knowledge work” – specifically “experience design” in a large corporate healthcare organization, which often feels difficult to describe and measure. Birds build physical nests in order to survive, thrive, and create new life. I build social things (processes, services, experiences) that attempt to re-humanize a bloated, bureaucratic industrial healthcare system that dehumanizes the very humans it is intended to serve and who work within it.

On the other hand, I might use the wrens’ productive work as an aspirational metaphor: my colleagues and I work with our fellow employees and patients and families to co-design services, experiences, and artifacts that hopefully create the infrastructure for wellbeing and care within – I repeat myself – a bloated, bureaucratic industrial healthcare system that dehumanizes the very humans it is intended to serve and who work within it. I mean, building spaces and moments that maybe feel like a bird’s nest? That’s a stretch!

Now I am thinking that the comparison of my work with the wrens’ work is not all that effective or illuminating. I am also thinking that my relationship with these little house wrens is totally lopsided. I need them more than they need me. In our co-working arrangement, I am mostly watching them do the work. Each time they call out, I look up, eager to observe some new behavior that might add to my understanding of what they do and why they do it. They take their time, working out their next move. I watch and wait. I close my laptop and study them. In these experiences of the non-human world, I am eager to observe something that might add to my understanding of my (human) place in the world. The privilege of spending these intimate moments in proximity to the wrens is grounding, life affirming, rejuvenating in small ways. When our human-made world seems to spin out of control – and this week’s news has me feeling disoriented, sad, angry, scared for us – the cyclical, ecological processes to which the wrens belong provide the opportunity for a perspective shift by considering natural systems and timescales. To which we humans also belong, change, and are changed by.

Maybe the wrens see me as hulking presence in the background, a threat to be wary of, or a nuisance to yell at and mostly ignore. Humans, sigh. Although, to be fair, I did put up a pretty sweet birdhouse, which they do seem to find accommodating. Maybe they’re even grateful for it in their own way.

Working away in bird land,

Jeremy