I know. I know. More ducks.

I promise there’s a reason I keep coming back to them, and it isn’t just that I’m besotted (though I am). It’s that this is how meaning works. We don’t understand our lives in the abstract. We understand them through the ordinary things that are right in front of us, like our pets, or the garden, or doing the shopping, or the thing that happened on a Thursday. Think of it as the small stuff is how the big stuff becomes visible.

So yes. The ducks. Again. Stay with me, because this one goes somewhere just for you.

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My ducks turned two over the weekend.

They began hatching on the 22nd of August, 2024. I remember I sat and watched the eggs crack, ten of them in the end. Ten little Indian Runners tumbling wet into the world. And this week, right on cue, a long chapter in the sky closes. It’s a two-year arc, completing.

I didn’t plan that, but I felt the strange symmetry of it and had to start writing, because these two years have been an entire education in something I think this week is asking all of us to look at.

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Ten ducklings is a lot. 

It meant I rearranged my whole life. I’m talking about my work, my sleep, all the daylight hours, and especially my sense of what a day was even for. I suddenly had ten small beings who needed feeding and constant pools of clean water and watching and protecting, around the clock, and I was largely on my own for it for the first four months of the relentless, unglamorous work of keeping them all alive and thriving.

It was devotion in its most exhausting form, rather than the pretty kind. The 4am kind. 

And I did it. 

But when the ducks hit four months, they’re considered all grown, so I did the math about what I could actually sustain. And ten was not it.

So I found a woman, through a local poultry group, who wanted to take seven of them. She said she’d keep them together, give them a good life, room to roam, basically everything I’d want for them. And just before Christmas, I went from ten ducks to three.

Letting those seven go was not me giving up, or falling short, or loving them any less. It was discernment. The teary-eyed, heartbreaking, deeply loving act of knowing what I could hold and what I couldn’t, and making sure the ones I couldn’t keep went somewhere they’d flourish.

The three who stayed were Tilly, Wensley, and Blue, the ones you’ve met. They’ve survived multiple bears and coyotes and even an eagle. They’re the ones I now walk around with in the garden like a very patient security detail.

And what’s held, in the two years since, is the sheer daily-ness of it.

Every single morning before dawn, I pull down the little bridge of Duckingham Palace, and the three of them come tumbling out, ridiculously happy to see me. We walk the gardens and the puddles. We sit under the trees. We turn over the compost so they can hunt for worms and slugs. Rain, snow, summer sunshine, every day, without exception, we begin the morning together and carry on all day long.

And it’s a particular kind of intimacy, that daily-ness. It’s not the company of an animal waiting to be entertained, but more like three small beings going about their very important duck business, pleased that I’m going about mine right beside them.

That’s the part I didn’t see coming when those eggs sat by my desk. The showing up, every dawn, for two years. (And counting.)

And they’re only here, thriving, because I let the other seven go.

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This is a week of closure. A long chapter is completing. For two years, it’s been reshaping things under the surface. And the energy this week isn’t asking you to push, plan, or figure anything out.

It’s asking you to feel your way to an honest ending.

And just so you know, you can’t think your way through this one. This isn’t a spreadsheet week of pros and cons. It’s a heart week. Your mind will want to analyze the ending, maybe justify it, or optimize it, or somehow make it tidy. But some things can’t be solved. They can only be felt all the way through, and then released.

And remember, releasing is not the same as losing.

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The belief that won’t survive this week

“If I really loved it/him/her/them, I’d have found a way.”

No. So, often the most loving thing you can do is let go of what you cannot sustain.

We’re taught that devotion means holding on. In my case, keeping all ten. We’re taught that devotion means never releasing anything, because releasing looks like not caring enough, like failure. But that’s not love. That’s just accumulation, and it will bury you.

Real love knows its own limits. It tends what it can tend well, and it has the clarity and the grief and the grace to release the rest to a more aligned home than you could give it. The seven I released weren’t a loss. They were an act of care that happened to look like goodbye.

So I’ll ask you, what in your life are you holding onto (maybe out of guilt), when releasing it would actually be the kinder, more honest thing? For you and for it.

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Two years ago, something in your life began. And this week, some chapter of it may be asking to close.

Where are you in your own two-year arc? What did you hatch back then? A project, a relationship, a version of yourself, a whole new life? Has it grown up now, and is it asking something different of you? And what have you been holding onto that might, finally, be time to set down?

You don’t have to answer, but I encourage you to sit with these questions. And if something comes up, I’d love to hear it. Hit reply and tell me in a sentence or two where you are in your arc. I read every reply. And there’s something about naming it out loud, even to one person, that helps it move.

For me, the ducks are turning out to be far more than ducks. Ten became three. And the three are exactly enough.

Jonni

P.S. If a two-year chapter is closing for you, and you’d like company while you feel your way through the ending, let me know.

P.P.S. Whatever you hatched two years ago, I hope you can see how far it’s come. And whatever you’re ready to release, I hope you can trust that letting go and loving are not opposites, because sometimes they’re the same act.