Forget meditation apps. If you want to experience true presence, you need only be confronted by a male Anna’s Hummingbird.

Take, for example, this particular specimen, which declared martial law over my Boise backyard in the fall of 2023 and has been my self-appointed landlord ever since.

Though only the size of a particularly aggressive ping-pong ball, he possesses the territorial attitude of a tyrannosaur. Just look at that face. This isn’t a warm welcome; it’s a clear risk assessment of my presence in “his” space.

I titled the piece Harmony, which is a very polite term for the hard-won truce we established. There’s something profoundly transcendent about being beholden to a creature that small. As long as you keep replenishing the sugar water, you remain a tolerated intruder.