The last week of August, I spent a few days in Westport, Washington, with my writer friend Jennifer D. Munro. I had intended to work on my book about the Mount St. Helen’s eruption, but there wasn’t enough time to do any significant work on a novel, and I had been thinking about a recent call for poems about birds. Jennifer, who has been birding for years, brought her bird guides and binoculars, and it was the perfect time to revise the two poems I’d drafted and start a new one.

One of my poems is about the Brown-headed Cow Bird, which lays its eggs in other species’s nests as a “brood parasite.” On our first evening walk, Jennifer pointed out a Cow Bird sitting on a wire. My first sighting!

During our stay, I made a playlist of bird songs, including the famous one that goes, “To everything, Tern, Tern, Tern.” I listened to the playlist on the drive home.

Several weeks before, I read E. Lily Yu’s Break, Blow, Burn, and Make while I accompanied my mother in the hospital. In that liminal space between sickness and health, between life-threatening diagnoses and life-healing care, Yu’s book was clarifying and inspiring. The writer’s work is a sacred act of love, she argues: “The artist dies to self, burns, and becomes transparent not out of self-hatred but out of love, so that something greater than the self might come into being.”

Sometimes when I’m writing, I feel as if I’m fiddling while Rome burns; I should be marching in the streets or, at the very least, writing to my elected officials. But Yu argues forcefully for the value of time spent apprenticing ourselves to art: “What greater threat to the rulers and authorities and powers of darkness than a moth that, for the love of light, is willing to join itself to flame?…Darkness would be driven back before that extravagant love.”

I keep her words in mind as I sit down to work.