The robin hesitated. It had already taken its time looking over the garden. It had studied every corner from atop the far wall. Then it fluttered down to the path and hopped experimentally along the gravel. A leap onto the largest cairn. A slow pirouette full circle while its head turned at inhuman angles and a bright, liquid eye searched for movement.

Only then did it flutter up to the edge of the bird bath. A drink, a long look, a drink. It sidled all the way around the rim, head turning like a weathervane. A drink, a long look around. It hopped forward into the water and backed quickly out. A look around. Another hop in and out. For another instant it hesitated. Then, at last, assured--for the moment--of safety, it cast fear away. It plunged into the water to slosh and splash and preen without restraint. Water slopped over the sides of the bath, and suddenly I understood why it needed refilling every evening.

Years ago I read a description of the American robin as the burgomaster of birds. When I see a robin standing on a wide, suburban lawn, belly and chest swelled out like a sail, head tipped back proudly as it surveys its realm with bespectacled eyes, I get the point. It's almost surprising not to see a watch fob stretched across that broad, red vest.

But when I saw the robin hesitate at the bird bath, that image of complacency fell away. No matter how much it may seem to be master of lawn and crabapple tree, it is never fully at home in them. It is still, and always, a wild thing--afraid for its life. Perhaps it is never fully at home anywhere. To be at home is to let your guard down. A wild thing can't afford that--to forget how small it is and how vast the world. The robin's courage in bathing at all, let alone with such abandon, astonished me.

I'd been watching from the comfort of the Adirondack chair, nestled into the cushions with my feet up, head back, pleased with the world, surveying my domain through bespectacled eyes. But seeing the fear behind the robin's hesitation, I felt the ground shift beneath me. For just a flash I saw the world as if through its eyes. My urban townhouse garden lost its secure place in a sleepy neighborhood and became just another piece of the wilderness, a jungle of hidden dangers and obstacles to flight. Stripped away was the illusion of safety we draw around ourselves. I remembered exactly how fine a thread our day-to-day happiness hangs by. (The diagnosis, the accident, the fire, the thug.) I remembered in my gut this primal truth: that beneath a veneer of law and order and comfortable routine, our lives are still governed by the rules of wild things. We are at the mercy of untamed events beyond our control. (The virus, the cancer, the black ice, the flood.)

Those primal truths are brutes. Looking them square in the eye, though, without the filters we normally peek through, we can also be surprised by grace, by gifts of unexpected beauty. I saw myself in the midst of wilderness where anything can happen, yes. Anything. Utter loss. Or then again, maybe glory. Or joy. (The discovery, the vista, the challenge, the love.) Wild things give themselves to the present as if it might be snatched away in violence. Or maybe--maybe as if it were eternity.

More water sloshed onto the angelitas blooming in the garden bed. I hadn't expected to encounter the sublime in a robin at a bird bath, but there it was. Terror. Wonder. Awe. And with that thought, the claustrophobia that shadows chronic illness lifted, at least for a time. I remembered, in fear and exultation: The world is vast.

Its bath done, the robin flew to one of the desert olives to finish preening. I must have moved a little, because it startled, aware of me at last. I caught the light reflected in its eye--a star in the blackness of space. And then it was gone. Flown.

Wherever its wings would take it.