Eagles!
Over my head! Piebald white heads with big yellow hooked beaks... playing in mid-air! Their distinctive cries made me drop my weeding and look up from the Irises. I gasped when I saw these six and eight-feet of wings embrace and roll in one another's wing-arms mid-flight.
Then she flapped ahead. Laughing...
He caught up to her. They synchronized wing beats.
What a lucky grace to be in the right place at that precise moment to see ordinary blue sky become a radiant canvas for one of Nature's most MOVING pieces of ART!
I've only ever seen birds this size in captivity. Here they were directly overhead flying from beyond neighbor Jean and Joewoen's house, across Cameron Avenue, directly over me and these lowly Irises, which until that moment of Eagle Presence, I thought to be a minor miracle of their own. I love to garden. The task seemed to lose its appeal once these icons of freedom began stitching the air.
I read that male Eagles are better flyers, weighing 10 to 15 pounds less than his partner. Bald Eagles mate for life. Her voice is lower in register than his. She's better at sitting still longer to keep their eggs toasty warm until ready to hatch. He's better at hunting on account of his smaller build and therefore swifter flight and dive. I wish I could've followed them - if only with my eyes, but over the roof, they disappeared from view. I would have loved to see where they were headed. I long to see things from on high...
To see from a Mountain Top's perspective - the entirety of our topography - the landscape of this world; the landscape of the soul. The highs. The lows.
The magnificent soaring ones were not always graceful, I learned.
Chris and Adam were yoga students of mine in Los Angeles. While they lived in L. A., they also had a second home on one of the San Juan Islands off the coast of Canada where they observed Eagles up close and personal. He was a devoted fisherman and watched and learned from Bald Eagles.
One night, in class we were practicing Garudasana, Eagle pose. It cultivates balance and one-pointed focus. Chris gave us a real treat - a bird's eye view of how the elegant parent birds teach their fledgelings to dive for salmon in those crystalline waters of the Pacific Northwest. Mama and Papa Eagle soar high with grace and purpose. From on high they SEE the presence of fish and zero-in on one, tracking even as they are in mid-dive, calculating exactly the point they will plunge their massive talons into dinner. Christine acted out the parental role, complete with economy of movement and glide. She then delighted us by miming the baby Eagle's version of that same ballet. It went something like flutter, flutter, SPLAT. No fish. Over and over again. Eventually, they too, learn to soar and dive; hunt and thrive.
We are all eagles... ungainly and awkward as we learn. These United States are, historically speaking, in their adolescence. As a country, we are eager to please, with a teenager's ego-centric desire to be loved by the entire world. We say, ‘Sure, we’ll fight this war for you all. Sure, we’ll export all our frivolous goods, pop-rock-jazz music to you, and our murder as entertainment television and movies. Sure, we’ll crank out humongous carbon footprints but ask you to curb yours.'
We try to cover over our acne - those pimples of inconvenient truths - that are ripe for picking, squeezing, and draining. And overdue for healing... like our history of genocide at the inception of this America, kidnapping and enslavement of way too many humans as we grew and thrived, and our current IGNORE-ance of the facts that our selfish, myopic actions make a difference (not for the good) in the Natural world. We're beginning to wake up to the fact that floods and droughts, heat domes and ozone layer holes are things we can mitigate by coming out of denial and by taking actions to change our evil ways.
During the pandemic, I knew I wasn't terminally unique when I practiced "Mouse Behavior," detailing minutiae, cleaning and organizing drawers, closets, putting everything in order as if it needed it... which it did, and making masks. Mouse behavior: moving beans and seeds into safe storage as if busyness could curb my panic feelings for what was going on in the White House, the country and in the world. I kept my eye on the smallest things. Frustrated and frightened by the BIG NEWS STORIES.
Coming out of this pandemic, I want to practice Eagle eye viewing again, of everything. I want to climb a mountain to get the higher perspective again. I want to see from an adult perspective the connections among earth, sky, water, sun and all creation. I want to remember that as long as we're all on Lifeboat Earth, my punching a hole in your side of the boat will take me down too. I want to be the voice for the Eagle and for the Mouse and for all creatures in between their perspectives. I want to speak for the disenfranchised. I want us all to reach out and touch someone and embrace the humanity within every single person. I want us to address the systemic acne of our country's very dark history and find the solutions, and to practice reparations. Unhealed, our history will take us down. It already is creating a huge divide among us. Fractious factions. Healed, we are stronger. When we repair... well, as Hemingway said, "The world breaks everyone and afterward, many are strong at the broken places."
I believe in us.
I believe we can fly.
