Where do you find comfort these days? I am borrowing mine from the birds. From my bathroom window, I can see the doves and robins perched together in a naked sumac tree in the middle of winter. How do they find shade or shelter together when there is nothing to protect them?

And why are the radishes growing so sweetly under that same tree? How did I grow something this sweet with so little care? I believed in a seed and tried. The ground wishes for it. This ground of being. Can my faith be applied to things that are not radishes?

Four days after the inauguration, a driver fell asleep on his way home—so close to home after a long day at work, he was so apologetic for it, we were shaking hands by the end of it—both of us shook by the crash and relieved to be walking away in the end. But does he replay the same moment I do now, the one with his sleeping, flopping face in my rear view mirror?

Why do we say something is totaled when it is in pieces?

I want to be mad at the other driver but aren’t we all too tired to be out here on these roads?

I try to take a moment every time I pass the bathroom window again to count the birds.

How long will insurance sleep on this?

Does insurance dream, too, when it sleeps? Or just deny it is sleeping?

What other option is there to being woke except to sleep or die? How are we trying to defend that we need to both sleep more and to wake up in equal parts?

When did words I learn in church—sanctuary, stranger, mercy—become synonyms for sin and crime?

Does any word exist to wake one up who do not want to wake up? If there were one, don’t you think it would be mercy?

In the rear mirror now, is that a country of sleeping men? White-knuckled but asleep at the wheel? We will not be shaking hands after this is over.

What mercy do we need—what mercy is already too late—as we brace for impact?

For this moment, I am standing in my dirty bathroom, watching for clues the birds leave on how congregate in winter when the protection is only in holding together, an invisible refuge in the cold. How do they know to do this, to live mercy and care without fight, without words?