Imperfect Love

The ice is gone. This is the first full week of open water, and the pond is itself again — light moving across the surface, the edges soft with the beginnings of green, the whole thing breathing. I have been waiting for this since January.

And yet.

The male swan is patrolling. His mate is nesting in the northeast corner, out of sight from the road, tending something small and fragile and not yet born. And he is out here doing what he does every spring: driving away anything that comes near. Not just strangers. His own young were the first to go, last year's cygnets, not even a year old, the same birds we watched take their first awkward strokes on this water last spring. He drove them off before any outside intruder arrived, across a pond he has acres of, toward the spillway and whatever comes after that for them. 

There is no negotiation. There is no looking back.

I'll be honest with you: in a violent season, the swan's violence feels like almost too much to watch. I find myself standing at the water's edge thinking, there is room here. There is room for all of them. 

And the swan does not care what I think.

His exiled young gather at the spillway first, that narrow threshold between pond and harbor we have visited before in these reflections, the place where this small water becomes part of something much larger. Then they drift down to a shallow cove near Cold Spring Harbor’s 9/11 memorial. A quiet gathering of the dispossessed, waiting out a season they did not choose. They were born on this pond. They know no other home. And still they cannot stay.

What the male is showing is love. I want to be careful to say that. He is ferocious in his devotion to what is nesting in that corner, to what is coming in weeks. The cygnets, when they arrive, will be tended with a ferocity that is, in its way, its own kind of tenderness. He will not rest until they are safe. That is real, and it is not nothing.

But it is love with a fence around it. Love that holds some in and drives others out, in the same feathered body, with the same furious wings. The circle drawn just large enough for what is new, and not one inch larger.

I keep returning to the question the pond is asking this week, the one I cannot answer cleanly: Can we learn to love more perfectly by watching the pain that imperfect love inflicts? 

The ache of standing here, watching last year's miracle drift toward the harbor. Is that ache itself a kind of teacher? Does something in us recognize, when we see the circle drawn too small, that it was always meant to be larger?

I don't know. I know that next week is Palm Sunday, and that something is coming that will have its own answer. But this week the pond is still asking. And perhaps that’s enough. To stand at the water's edge. To feel the weight of the question, and not to look away.

A Prayer:

God of the open water and the hidden nest, of the fierce and the exiled alike — we watch the love this world manages and feel, somewhere beneath our ribs, that it is not quite enough. Teach us to sit with that ache rather than explain it away. Teach us to let it enlarge us. Through Christ, whose love drew no circle it could not break open. Amen.