Wildest of Hearts,
I sit in a clearing of soft grass on the headland. The heavens are calico blue; that unprocessed quality of Sky when it runs off the loom before being printed by cloud.
A female Nankeen Kestrel appears in the dimensionless space above me, flickering its wings before suspending itself in midair. Flicker and float, flicker and float…its small head darts left and then right in-between treading air, seeking to fulfill the destiny of some unaware creature who knows not that this sunset shall be their eternal.
I adjust myself quietly to lie beneath her hovering body.
She’s now 20 feet directly above me. I can see her pale buff underbelly, her finely barred undertail with broad, charcoal grey band. I can see her yellow-rimmed, blackseed eyes, stained with tear streaks.
I suddenly feel like prey, the vulnerability of my tamed body against her wild.
She seems uninterested though. I’m a little disappointed.
Kestrel continues to defy gravity as I telepathically instruct my excitable dog, who’s suddenly disappeared, to stay wherever he is…I assume he’s of the intelligence to receive this otherworldly message but quickly lift my head up to see how much time I have. I locate my ‘cognizant hound’ in the thicket, launching himself into the air, half twisting his body to catch a butterfly. I rest knowing his love for the wing-ed will buy me some time, and so, I return to her.
I take a breath, slow and intentional, and sense my heart making space for this small suspended being above me. I become inhabited by her, feathers and all. I can feel her lungs in mine. Warm blood is met by warm blood, aliveness met by what is alive in me; flight and soul gather inside this ephemeral body. I can feel her small shape, the down of her white belly, the flitter and float, the invisible marching band of all eight chambers beating inside this one chest.
I remember reading a Peruvian shamanic wisdom that said people couldn’t heal using an animal or a plant - until they had become it first. Through ceremony, trance, and perhaps most powerful, conscious imagination, sufferers would study their plant or animal intimately by invoking its energy, imitating its movement, and connecting to its instinctive spirit – allowing embodiment itself to become the healer.
Under the belly of this bird, I wonder how it would feel to carry a heart across the sky. Whether it skipped a beat too when it lost altitude like mine does when I drive over a hidden bump in the road.
I wonder whether the heart feels more at home in a body so free.
I feel an invisible mirror between us, a kind of love-mirror that only reflects our sameness, that only speaks of our shared Mother. It feels as if the world flattened out and then turned vertically so we were pinned up against our respective elements, earth-dweller and sky-seeker, acknowledging each other in the subtlest of ways.
In truth, there is no distance between us. My body knows this. It’s why it feels the form of something so other than its own. Some primordial thread lies frayed but still very much connected to the ways of seeing the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner. And not so all becomes a mono-crop of alikeness but so that all diversity is understood to share its inherent nature.
If there is no distance, then there cannot be separation. Kestrel is made of my seeing, my hearing, and my touching. All I know of her - is my experiencing of her. Even without touch, I sense her as something closer than my skin.
The mind splits and says there is a me and a Kestrel. But from the clear-seeing eyes of the heart, I cannot find something separate, only a continuous experience that runs away from the loom like the sky from its print. I cannot find a feathered body outside my own because my experience of her is all I know inside of me.
Perhaps in this moment, I am too being reclaimed by a greater, cosmological body; my heart within its, my small form on this patch of earth something that is suspended within its knowingness. Perhaps, I am too, treading ground to a body that dwells in endless mystery.
Before I can contemplate further, Dog’s wide smile bounds before my face, taking place of Kestrel. His body is not something I have to subtly sense as part of mine as he trips and falls clumsily onto my chest. He is so immediate - and that is why I love him so. Kestrel still sees the wild in tamed-Dog and darts away quickly.
I wonder if I can feel this psychospiritual osmosis towards another, when I’m not blissing in an open field, towards my own children when they are arguing over the lyrics to a song, or my husband when he fumbles with the unsayable, or when a stranger makes an unconscious judgment about who I am, or when I look in the mirror and see the deep roots of age cracking through the soil of my face… What is it that makes the heart close to these experiences? Why does my body not make space for this?
Of course, I know nothing closes. The heart is always open, receiving, willing to pull things inwards and allow it all to belong – only the tamed mind cages what does not validate and entitle the separate self. If only it knew how dangerous staying closed was, and how lonely it has become by believing there is such a thing as distance, preference, and otherness.
That is my longing. To hold the world and all in it as if it were a hovering kestrel inside my own being. To stay present enough within my body so that it becomes the healer. No emotion, no state, no circumstance, no person made of anything other than my own experience of them; my heart’s experience of them.
May you be wild in your knowing. May you come home to yourself and remember that the medicine you seek came into the world with you. May all become dissolved within the ancient wisdom of your body. And may you run off the loom, free from the print that wishes to color your raw and remarkable beauty.
Blessings,
QUICK NOTE: This week, I released a new meditation called Wild Mind. It comes with a workbook you can download on Substack. If you feel like you’ve hit a bit of a plato with your healing journey, this might be a good time to become a patron and discover this intimate community we’re weaving together here. Patronage offers you immediate access to all the archives of audios, meditations and written content, as well as the community of like-hearted people from all corners of the globe. I am so honored to call them wild hearts, as I’m yet to meet braver, more genuine souls. If you’re interested, join us and say hi!