There comes a point in life when you realize you've become the person who gets excited about birds.

Not stock prices. Not college football scores. Not the latest headline engineered to spike your blood pressure.

Birds.

In this solo episode of The Story of Us, Jeff Ellison reflects on an unexpected morning ritual: sitting on the back porch with coffee, binoculars, a backyard bird feeder, and his late father's worn copy of the Audubon bird book.

What begins as a humorous admission about becoming a "backyard bird person" becomes a meditation on attention, aging, impermanence, inheritance, presence, and wonder.

Jeff explores the Buddhist image of a bird trusting its wings rather than the branch beneath it—and what that might teach us when the branches we depend upon inevitably begin to s ...