This week our television flashed image after image of chaos, pain, and loss. I don’t have a personal connection to any of the Boston Marathon bomb victims, nor any of the Texas fertilizer plant explosion victims, and yet my shock and grief feel personal. More and more personal as time passes, as scenes of blood and smoke and flames give way to achingly poignant details about the dead and wounded.

Desperate to escape my growing sense of helplessness, I turn off the television and retreat into the yard, where I find a foraging cardinal, a pollen-dusted bee, and a pair of brave grackles. A hungry tufted titmouse, a half-grown rabbit, and a sleepy squirrel. They remind me that my journey is simultaneously important and insignificant, that I am both connected to and separate from the world. And their company feels like a glimpse of solace, a brief visitation of peace during a week defined by turmoil.