Blue Jay

Blue jays are diurnal (active during the day) and rely on sunlight for foraging and navigation. The daytime offers clearer routes for them, along with better sightlines, and more activity among plants and insects.

However, what the blue jay and other diurnal birds learn is that clear, daylight conditions do not remove the need for ongoing attention. They often follow lighted pathways through the trees not just because the light is available but because it’s part of how they stay oriented, especially when searching for food or evading predators for them like hawks and owls.

The need to find sustenance is still present, and danger can still be sensed in the daylight, which means that careful navigation is still necessary even as the sun moves steadily across the sky. For blue jays and other birds, alertness is not only needed in the dark of night, but also in the shifting light of day.

However, perhaps, what we can learn from the attentive ways diurnal birds must travel through familiar spaces is that even when we do feel that we can fully observe, surroundings still demand response, and there is still a need to give ongoing attention to what shifts with time, light, and sound. Perhaps, we’re not doing everything wrong when those “daylight” certainties still seem uncertain or incomplete. When the things we thought were for sure or forever start to reveal their limits. Perhaps, this kind of realization, too belongs to the rhythm of paying attention

Continue to notice the way sunlight dances on the trees, and chase those paths of golden sunlight, even before you make sense of things. Daylight might not always lead to clear answers right away and there might be more decisions to be made than you originally anticipated, but the larger work you are doing of staying present, learning to fly right here, matters more than you know.
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Notice how the sun shines
through the leaves
and how you are learning
to follow that path of golden sunlight
through the wild of changing things.