Random Personal Posts by Gaelen Gates

I like to take pictures of flowers. It’s easy: They don’t move, they look pretty, and the macro setting on the iPhone is almost as good as the real macro lens I had for my 35mm camera 30 years ago. It’s sometimes slightly challenging to get the focal depth and framing right, but not challenging enough that I can’t stop and do it while I’m walking the dogs.

But more importantly, stopping to notice pretty flowers is a nice way I remember to find beauty that is all around us, every day. “Stop and smell the roses” is a cliché for a reason.

After more than three decades in the Bay Area, it’s also a pleasant way to mark the passage of time. Certain flowers start blooming at certain times. When I see them again, it’s a reminder that a year has passed. It never feels like it’s been a whole year.

In some ways, it serves the same purpose as a lot of my daily memento mori practices. Buddhism has a practice of death meditation, maranasati, in which we contemplate the inevitability of our own mortality. Some people think that’s morbid, which I find a little strange.

We’re all going to die, but that’s easy to forget, day-to-day. For me, trying to keep it at the forefront of thinking encourages me to find enjoyment and gratitude in something every day, because I never know if it will be my last. It also reminds me to tell the people I love how much I appreciate them, and say the things I need to say without putting them off, because none of us is guaranteed a tomorrow in which to say them.

It’s also reflected in more ordinary ways, like walking the dogs along a different route every day, so that I might see something different, or making sure to get outside and take a walk during the work day, even when I’m busy.

I have a countdown app on my phone and have it set up to show a widget that tells me the number of days until, statistically, I can expect to die. Today it’s at 12,520 days.

Every day that passes is one fewer on that countdown. So every day should count, and include something memorable, even in a small way.

Like taking a picture of a pretty flower, for example.

The flowers bloom for a little while, and then they’re gone. Just like all of us.

This is them a week or so ago:

And this is them today:

They are turning into real live adult hummingbirds! I expect them to leave the nest in the next couple days, so we are keeping the dog door closed just in case their first few test flights don’t go as planned. I’ll miss them, but I’m so excited to see them join the world of our neighborhood birds.

I learned a lot about hummingbirds a couple years ago, when we had a nest in the yard that was very easy to look into. I was so excited to see the eggs and then see them hatch, and I was working 100% from home back then, so literally watched the mom come and go all day long from my desk. That’s why we noticed right away when the mom seemed to be gone way too long. We kept watching, and she just never came back.

I did some research and read that female hummingbirds are solo parents, and will never abandon a nest … unless, of course, they are injured or dead. We called a wildlife rescue hotline, where a volunteer coached us on how to remove the entire nest and keep it warm overnight. First thing in the morning I brought the babies to a wildlife rescue down the Peninsula. Unfortunately, they were just too young (just a few days old), and they did not survive.

So I was excited, but tried not to get too invested, when another hummingbird nest appeared in January. Soon, we had two little babies!

They are now in the “fuzzy” stage, mostly just waiting for mom to come by and feed them periodically (she no longer sits on the nest, but hangs out elsewhere in the tree). I can’t wait to see them grow up!