The insistent tick of a man cutting bamboo with a cutlass outside makes it’s way through the dusty window, while an orange winged parrot surveys the scene with interest in a nearby hollowed palm.

A nest.

All that parrot is concerned with is the protection of it’s nest, and while the bamboo cutting is happening some meters away, it monitors the situation. This is what many creatures do when their offspring are not ready to leave the nest yet. They keep an eye on things and, if threatened, will either make a lot of noise or will attack creatures disproportionately larger who might be a threat – like the nearby osprey, who are held at bay by the noise of the cutlass cutting that bamboo.

Sometimes, a parent isn’t available to do these things. Sometimes a predator gets a foraging parrot. Sometimes a human shows up to capture it and put it in a cage. Sometimes life is ended otherwise, and the young parrots within have to either learn to fend for themselves or die.

I sit outside with my coffee and observe. I do not know much of these nests and families. I was a young one who learned to fend for myself at a young age, even with a parent around. The idea that a parent is constantly around for that sort of thing seems… alien to me, and so I always watch how animals and people act in families – and then by extension, tribes, and then by extension… well, it gets messier and messier.

It all revolves around The Nest.

Humanity is different, The Nest has largely become a derived function of society, and I am a product of that, and I am also the dividend of The Nest I came from, whatever good that is. In the grander scheme of things, I am of No Nest, of the caves, left tapping away at a keyboard as insistently as the man with the cutlass cuts at the bamboo patch.

I type faster than he cuts, but he gets a tangible result where I do not. He is cleaning his nest, I am sure, and I am building mine one word at a time, weaving words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into pages and chapters of a life lived with open eyes and a burning question.

AI will not be trained on his work, as important as it is. Generative AI will not be cutting bamboo anytime soon.

Yet in time, that bamboo may grow back, the words will have fallen away, and all will be forgotten.