Yearning to Fly
Photo by KS Nature Photography
As part of this year’s Inner Forest Medicine Journey, during the week of summer solstice, six individuals sat alone with Boulder Mountain for 4 nights and days, while Heather, Tessa and I stayed in basecamp to support them with presence and prayers. Some fasted from food and all fasted from the comforts, routines and habits of their daily lives.
There is a deep longing within the human soul to discover our true nature, our purpose, and how to bring our gifts to our community and the world. While a rite of passage ceremony might be hard to describe to our families and friends, and has been all but lost in our culture, the soul remembers and is the mysterious force that guided each of these individuals to the threshold that week in June.
Once the group had vanished into the forest my attention turned towards being present with the place. Whereas the week before was very cold at night with blessed rains passing through, this particular week was the epitome of blissful summer days. My personal camp was right on the creek, still roiling with snow runoff and silty with gray sand. The banks were lined with yellow pea vetch and newly leafed aspen trees shimmered in the breeze.
The first day I was there I had a sense that something important was happening in my surroundings. The next day when Tessa, Heather and I discussed a schedule for our personal time to wander outside of the basecamp area, I declared that I was going to stay in my camp all day as something was compelling me to do so.
There I sat with my journal, tea and binoculars, not sure what I would see but sure I would see something. Soon into my sit every so often I would hear a sound as if someone was shaking a rattle full of dry rice…ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch….Expecting that a flock of little birds with a buzzy call were landing in the tree canopy above me, I would pull out my binoculars scanning the branches but I couldn’t spot any little birds.
Throughout the course of my sitting there the shaker sound continued with intermittent regularity, yet I still couldn’t determine the source of the sound. At one point I even wondered if one of our people were up on the hill with a shaker playing a joke on me to see how many times I would jump up to look around.
It was about the time that I realized the sound was coming from inside a dead tree, that I also saw a flicker fly from across the creek to the tree behind me as the shaker sound intensified. This time when I jumped up with binoculars I witnessed a poppa flicker shoving food down the throats of his four baby birds.
Pure delight was the reward for my persistence and I sat back on a log to watch these little ones–four soft pink beaks extending beyond a perfect circle in a dead aspen tree, their eyes still sealed shut.
Photo by Larry Master….a good image of poppa and baby flickers!
I repeated my sit time in my camp the next day and was astounded that in one day the eyes of the birds had opened and where once the birds were pink, they now were feathered to the extent of being able to determine their gender– two males who I identified by the orange patches beneath their chins, and two females.
Watching these babies each day deeply stirred something in me…something about instinct and a yearning to fly. And something even deeper. There is something in witnessing the shine in their eyes, a brand new gaze upon the world, the purity of this gaze and the innocence, that honestly broke my heart.
I won’t lie and say I only experienced delight upon witnessing these birds every day. Paired with the intensity of my delight was a deep grief, the kind of grief I am quite familiar with…the twinned grief and love that is a constant ache in my soul
This love/grief ache goes something like this: I witness, love and deeply feel the true Beingness of every creature in Nature whether baby flickers in a tree, chipmunks scampering across logs, squirrels who get up close and curious, coyotes howling in the night, young deer galivanting in the aspens as momma keeps a close eye, and so on forever and ever. The grief comes from knowing the ways “civilization” has conditioned humans to view the natural world as objects and resources and in this trance of separation wild Beings aren't the only ones who suffer, the human heart and soul suffer as well.
One of the invitations I gave our group as they headed out to their solo spots was, “What if going out isn’t about you?” What if we weren't born to be consumers and employees but actually we have a unique gift to bring to the world in our lifetime? What if our own yearning to fly is driven by our soul instinct to be of service to more than just ourselves?
Each day I watched my flicker babies I felt their yearning to fly as a deep primal instinct—the shine in their eyes looking out to the sky, their necks stretching out beyond the tree cavity. I felt this in my own body, my heart, the depths of my Being and admired how instinct drove them to be true to their nature.
When I returned a week after the Inner Forest Journey ended, two birds remained in the tree cavity, now calling out with a flicker cry. I sensed their flight day was nearing and returned two days later. While sitting in the shade of a Ponderosa, a shadow passed over my journal and I looked up to see the female fledgling hooked into a pine tree across the creek. True to her nature she pecked and pecked and pecked on the bark circling the perimeter of the trunk. She was quiet, her feathers downy soft. She knew just what to do.
Soon after, I heard the tell-tale cry of a male flicker and jumped up to see the brother bird hanging onto a dead aspen tree, calling out at the top of his lungs, announcing his place in the family of All Beings.
May we be so blessed to know our True Nature and follow our own yearning to fly.
Aho.
We are now taking applications for the
Inner Forest Medicine Journey 2023-2024
With a deep bow of respect, love and gratitude, I welcome Tessa Barkan as co-guide for the Inner Forest Medicine Journey (IFJ). Tessa participated in Medicine At Our Feet, Herbal Apprenticeship in 2018 and continued on into my first group for IFJ in 2019. Since then she has been in the role of a support person for the last two IFJ groups.
Tessa is a young, wise soul with a gift for deeply listening to individuals and reflecting back the medicine of their stories. Tessa will be bringing in perspectives from her personal experience exploring ancestry and relationship with place as well as ritual and ceremony to ground us in what it truly means to be human.
Matt Cochran will also be sharing his medicine with the IFJ group by way of teaching us how to be in relationship with our dreams as guidance for our personal soul journey.
You can learn more about this year’s Inner Forest Medicine Journey, including guide bios here.