The Bunny

Orignal article was posted on Substack on 4/24/2026

On the ones who find a way to sit with you still

Monday was a good day.

I posted something on LinkedIn, my perception about what to do when everything is urgent. The post moved. Comments, conversations, momentum. The kind of day that reminds you why you’re doing this.

Then the week did what weeks do.

A colleague, also building something of her own, sat me down and pushed on my message. Not unkindly. She’s trying to help. But when someone asks you to dig deeper into what you’re selling, you find out quickly how much digging is left. Doubt crept in. Then resentment, which I’ve learned to take seriously, resentment usually means something real got touched. The flat days followed. Wednesday. Thursday. The kind of days where you don’t post, don’t reach out, don’t have the words.

I am standing at a threshold. Something is either arriving or I’m about to decide what I’m walking toward. Both feel true at the same time. Both feel enormous.

And today, Friday morning, I sat down at the table by the window to have my breakfast.

I’ve been sitting here a lot during my sabbatical. Eight months in, I’ve learned things about this spot. How the light comes through in the morning, which birds show up first, what the trees look like right now in late April when everything is that specific shade of green that only lasts a few weeks. I notice things here I wouldn’t have noticed a year ago. Somewhere in these eight months I became someone who pays attention differently.

My white dog settled next to me.

And then, on the other side of the glass, maybe two feet away from me and one foot from her — a bunny.

We have dogs. Two of them. There are no bunnies in this backyard. And yet there he was, still and unhurried, not looking at me exactly, not looking away, just present in the way that small creatures sometimes are when they have decided, for reasons of their own, that this is where they will be for a while.

Neither dog moved. Neither dog made a sound.

I just watched him.

Something about the bunny reached into childhood. A soft, half-formed thing, my grandfather, bunnies in cages, the feeling of small warm weight in my hands. I have very few memories from those early years. Since the sabbatical they’ve been returning slowly, on their own schedule, only when I’m open like this. I don’t fully know why it was him I felt in that moment. I just know I did. I started tearing up before I even understood why.

He just sat there. Then he hopped, unhurried, a little further down the path. Stayed there another five minutes. Not going anywhere.

Then the bunny went up the hill, one flash, and gone.

And the moment he disappeared, my other dog appeared. As if on cue. She came to me, touched my hand, looked into my eyes, checked my energy the way dogs do when they already know. She didn’t chase what had just left. She just turned toward me. You still here? Good.

She was part of it. I’m sure of that. The whole thing was one piece. The stillness, the bunny, and then her, walking me gently back into the room.

A year ago I wouldn’t have given another thought. Georgia has bunnies. It wandered in, it left.

But the sabbatical did something I didn’t entirely plan for. It made me permeable. I move slower now. I receive things; signs, stillness, the particular quality of a morning when nothing is scheduled and something small sits outside your window and doesn’t ask anything of you.

Birds are messages now. The slow morning is a message. The bunny was a message.

I don’t know exactly what it said. Maybe it didn’t need to say anything specific. Maybe my grandfather just wanted to sit with me for a few minutes, in the only form available to him now, on a Friday when I needed it.

The sign on my wall says Stay awhile.

He did.