Boundaries for birds and boundaries for me

Boundaries help keep safety intact.

Love too.

Being inches from the miracle of baby birds was only possible thanks to the physical boundary of deck boards (in case you missed it: here).

Prentice Hemphill has an illuminating description of boundaries and how they help both parties feel safe. Thanks to the thick deck boards, the baby birds could feel safe from threatening me, and I could feel safe from them lurching at me (also from a protective mama bird on attack). Even with the protection though, I didn't steady my eyeball on the babies for too long, just in case they could see me and became creeped out or freaked out.

Anyway, I was wrong about what Hemphill says about boundaries. Maybe you've already seen Hemphill's quote and are better at remembering these things than me, but here it is on Instagram: "Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously."

This clearly didn't apply to boundaries with baby birds, they didn't love me, but the reminder of boundaries and love together feels good anyway. And it’s possible that I loved those baby birds.

The boundaries I've had to work on sometimes include physical space, body space, but they also include emotional or relational space. I hadn't realized it immediately, but there were other boundaries at play that day with the baby birds: boundaries for myself set by myself. Some kind of self-boundary. Is that a thing?

While I had looked away from feelings of desperation and dejection (in case you missed that too: here), that was partly avoidance but it was also a boundary. Small-dosing difficult emotions protected me from being swallowed whole by them. It was usually just fine to deal with them later if at the moment wasn't appropriate, for me or for others. The emotional boundary limits how much I feel at one time.

And you never know what kind of containing and holding you're going to need, what practiced boundary for yourself will come in handy, until you need it for the very moment you're in.