Beyond Myself II

Before this letter, I want to pause and say thank you. So many of you reached out with concern and care during this fire season here in British Columbia. I feel so held by this community. We are safe, and so are those we love, and I don’t take that for granted. Thank you for all your gentle support. Also, I hope this short series — Letters to the Living World — inspires a different way of connecting with the earth we love so much. Talk to a tree and see what comes back. Ask a river a question. The clouds are not mute. Treat the natural world as something alive and listening, something with its own things to say if we're willing to experiment with how we perceive. I hope these letters might encourage you to begin a meaningful conversation. “I shall go out again and find a tree, trees, pines, mountains of pine. If my silence succeeds in song, you will hear of it from the winds.” —Chid Corman Soon after I begin writing these daily letters to the living world, I notice nature drawing closer, as though responding to something I am not aware I can offer—or enter. Is it a channel? A doorway opened by my earnest and urgent longing to commune with something beyond myself? Whatever it is, creatures carrying an unmistakable alliance begin finding me. Like sentinels, almost. They arrive on four legs, on broad wingspans, and low along the earth on scaled bellies, stopping me mid-path to look back at me through round, piercing eyes. It is the quality of their attention that speaks most to me. Each one is utterly alert, yet nothing in them seems strained. Vigilance, discernment, and ease move smoothly together in their bodies. They speak of motion paired with stillness, gathering and releasing their energy in precise accord with the moment. They share their poise and calm and dignity, their elegance. I wonder if in the process of asking for help, I become more able to receive, seeing everything coming toward me as a kind of grace being communicated. Though perhaps “help” isn’t quite the right word—it feels more like community arriving to meet me. Beings sensitive and attuned, walking different yet parallel paths across uncertain times, each one of them mirroring to me an essence I could drink in. Far more curious to me than their presence is the mystery of their arrival and how any of it finds its way to me at all. How did the idea to write letters—or prayers—to the living world find me? Did it slip from a passing cloud into the water I was drinking? How did it push through the crowded fields of my mind, finding a small opening to grow large enough to be heard above all the racket? How did I find the eagle that day along that crooked river? How did it find me? And why was I given the rare chance to watch its passing from one world to the next? How is it that, just as fear narrows the world around me, a deer crosses my path, a dragonfly lights upon my shoulder, or the trees rise up and outsing the mind? How does a plea to the living world find me, move through me, and summon forward guests that interrupt, intervene, and hand back to me a bigness, a wider way of seeing, that this body can recognize? How does this miracle begin, and what is so subtly shifting the tide of this being, this woman who finds herself caught between two worlds, in the messy middle of transformation? Could it be the earth a giant ear, listening to our many voices? Could she be so kind as to reach toward us in mysterious ways and place one of her endless iterations of beauty into our hands? Could I dare to believe that when I begin to feel my being changing shape inside the changing shape of the world, that there is something with me, assisting in this transformation, both mine and ours? And when everything else seems to be failing, could I open wider rather than snap shut? Could I speak and name what is here, and listen for the answering echo of our communion? How deeply I want to believe this. And how difficult it can be to go on believing when I call out and hear nothing return but my own lonely voice striking the wall of the mountain. The hours of a day are many, the sightings are brief, and sometimes there are none at all. I have lost count of how many pleas feel unanswered and how long the days stretch between my isolation and the flicker of grace entering, its scent barely lingering in the room as it leaves. But somewhere in that tight and twisted place of feeling heard, or not heard, I begin to understand that I am not standing outside the living world, calling in. The voice leaving my body belongs to it too. The plea itself is wild. I come to know my own body as the listening earth, and as the wild guest moving across her. My breath meeting sky, this skin remembering fur and my ribs holding the wing. My cries are not keeping me from the sacred, they are what carry me into it. The pregnant and waiting vessel, the lonely child, the dying eagle. We are not calling to one another across some great distance. Every letter I write to the living world is simply a letter written home. Dear Eagle, How surprised I was to find you there on that broken tree above the stony riverbed. You, sudden and huge. A body brimmed with mountain crests and the unblinking light of high places. I caught my breath, and took to my knees before you. You looked at me slowly, turning your head, and held me inside your golden eye. I wondered why you let me see you that day, why you allowed me so close. After some time with you, I began to feel you were in the process of leaving this world, sitting in this place you likely deeply loved, as I have loved it too. Something in you had grown so very still. You did not startle at my nearness or open those great wings to put distance between us. You were folded in now, spending no more effort to lift yourself anywhere beyond the place you had chosen in the channel of that river, with this strange woman praising you in her tunic and bare feet. I sensed I could have reached out and touched your white head. But I withheld my reach, and sang instead at your large taloned feet. I saw you again in my dreams that week. A little girl brought me a pendant with your picture printed upon it. She tapped her small finger against your image, mutely insisting that I look deeper. Closer. A few days later I returned to the same place on that crooked river. You had crawled beneath the broken tree and tucked yourself under it, close to the stone and sand. You had found your perfect resting place. I had been witness to your living and now to your dying. How humbled I am to have shared the quiet threshold of your end. How wisely you chose this place to lay down your heavy beak. The river never stops singing there and the sky is usually so blue. A local Indigenous elder came to receive you. He thanked me for helping bring you to him, reminding me that your kind is sacred, that we are kin to you and to the trees. Through his hands, your great brown feathers will enter the air once more, carried on in prayer and song. That night I dreamed of you again, decomposing in my hands, small bugs crawling over your silken feathers. We are all connected, the elder’s voice rang out throughout the dream. I look toward you as though you hold a message, perhaps one I am not yet ready to understand. I can hear you faintly, speaking to a time when we and the wild ones step back into the same circle. Give me the ears to hear what I cannot yet hear. The words of the sky world I am always looking up toward. The language locked inside that vast, sunlit eye. Grant me the grace of wider seeing. Lift the roof from this tiny house I have mistaken for the whole world. Teach me what you learned there at the end, when your great wings folded against your body and you allowed the living to come closer to you. Dear Eagle: All your life, the sky. Then, this final, soft grounding, sinking deeper into the earth than flight ever allowed. You stayed for me to find you. You lay still so I might bear you into what comes next. You and me together, for a little while, working our way toward another life. Is there a place, creature, or element of the earth you have always felt in conversation with? Has anything in the living world been asking for your attention lately? I’d love to hear. I love you. Sarah This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahblondin.substack.com/subscribe