P.S. If you have not read her blog, this one in particular - her "bird search," as it were - is a personal favorite. Her winter walk in 2020, past all manner of mundane birds, as she seeks affirmation and signs. https://amal.substack.com/p/a-new-years-bird

.... I’d found my birds. And the happiness I felt — bubbling over into tears, the gift of it, the miracle of it — wasn’t a reprieve from pigeons, but just the company of birds: the sight and sound of them, darting, singing, the shape and flash of them moving in the world. Sounding, and sought. Hidden, and found. The sudden awareness of how long it had been since I’d just stood and stared at birds, for the love of them.

I probably stood there for another ten minutes, thrilling in them, before walking home — thinking how much I wanted to tell my friend of what I’d seen, and then write about it....

.... But I want more than anything to tell you how I didn’t feel the need to do any of that. I want to tell you that shedding the weight of a borrowed pattern was its own vibrant grace, and an encounter with common winter birds in a green tree beneath a white sky breathing snow was a gift that asked nothing of me, that slaked thirsts I’d forgotten I had.