Tending to your Egg-cellence
“The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.”
—Zora Neale Hurston
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I came home from a trip to the Grand Canyon this past weekend to discover that the hummingbird’s chick had hatched.
I’d been watching her build her nest in the oak tree out of spider web, lichen and catkins. I had seen her whirring wings stilled as she patiently sat incubating her jelly-bean-sized egg. And now here was a tiny bill poking out of her tiny nest!
photograph by Karen Crowe
After being dazzled by the vastness of the Grand Canyon, the hummingbird’s chick had me marveling at the miracle of the small.
Spring is a celebration of the small. A season alive with the tiniest expressions of life and beauty.
Birds and their eggs are a symbol associated with spring for obvious reasons. This is the season that birds mate, nest, and tend their young. Spring is alive with their song, scurry and flight. I can hear them at dawn each morning singing up the sun. I can see them hopping about the garden foraging for food. And on our little property, I’ve spied three different nests–hummingbird, house finch, and sparrow.
These winged creatures remind us of the hope spring holds.
For my agricultural ancestors, spring brought the return of eggs as a food source. In the darkness of winter, domestic chickens don’t lay eggs. Like the rest of the natural world, they take a break from productivity. Spring brings the return of this much celebrated source of protein whose golden yolks echo the sun that ushers in their arrival.
Eggs remind us of the tenderness of this season.
New life needs our protection and patience. The eggshell is both sturdy and fragile. Strong enough to protect the life growing inside, while also being breakable enough for that little life to crack the shell open when the time is right.
There is a time for incubating our new ideas, projects and visions, and then there is a time to break out of the shell and allow them into the light.
art by Sarah Treanor
We are asked to hold new life with just the right type of protection–not too much that emergence becomes impossible, and not too little that the new life inside is needlessly exposed.
Like a seed, the egg is merely a container of what might be. Without it breaking open, the new life the egg holds will not come to be.
And though we do not have the power to turn a seed into a tree or an egg into a bird, we can create conditions in which new life may thrive. Like the hummingbird who has been busy doing just that, we can offer our care, energy and tending to the new life emerging in us.
The egg reminds us that new life requires our diligent tending and also our surrender to a process that is largely outside of our control. We are both empowered to take right action and also at the mercy of forces greater than ourselves. The hummingbird does what she can, and also there are the wild winds of Storm and the hungry beak of Crow. The risk is real.
Even with all the preparation and tending of its mother, the little chick doesn’t emerge grown and ready to fly.
New life is not like that.
It is a continuously risky business that requires constant tending and lots of trust. Spring’s growth is tenacious and tender.
We are reminded that our vulnerability is required for anything new to grow in the nests of our own lives. To birth the new asks our hearts, like the egg, to break open—both in inevitable pain and also in wonder, beauty and joy.
Whatever new life is emerging in and through us, it will have a shape, a tenor, and a vitality uniquely its own. One that is guaranteed to surprise us, despite our conjectures and careful planning, and whose otherness we must respect.
To force new life to take a particular preconceived shape is to, at best, shrink it down to a form much smaller than the one it innately holds, and at worst, to kill the new life entirely. We must bow to the mystery of what is yet to be. Again, both our action and surrender are required.
The egg is a reminder that the small is the container for the vast.
stone from Easter Island depicting a bird-human holding an egg, British Museum
The Cosmic Egg is an ancient cross cultural symbol that represents the origin of life, a creation story found all over the globe. Out of the Cosmic Egg the entire universe was birthed. The Cosmic Egg invites us to consider how everything has a sacred beginning, a divine origin.
The Cosmic Egg pulses with possibility and asks us to trust in the mysterious unfolding of creation from chaos, of the formless giving birth to form. The Cosmic Egg reminds us that though we may be given new life to tend, we are also invited to allow ourselves to be tended.
There is a larger story that holds us. There is divine support available to us in our own journey of becoming.
What new life is emerging in you? In what ways does it require incubation, warmth, and protection?
How will you know when it’s time to break the shell and take the risk of coming out into the world—tender, hungry, and not fully formed?
How might you embody both tenacity and trust, effort and surrender?
What support might you allow yourself to receive?
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Connecting to the body’s wisdom and the longings of our soul are important aspect of the work I do as a 1:1 Soul Companion.
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Hi, I’m Stephanie!
As a Soul Companion, educator, and sacred space holder, I am passionate about deepening our connection to the earth, our bodies, and the Divine Mystery that dances in all that is.
Let’s journey together into the sacred wild!
