Animal Dreams, Continued

Today a hawk reminded me that I’d forgotten my encounters with birds. In yesterday’s post I wrote about a dream I’d had that told me to write about my encounters with animals. So I did. But I forgot the birds.

This morning I went to the dentist. I have an unusual problem, a dental cyst between two teeth. It was removed by a periodontist but he’s unhappy with how my mouth looks; he says he’s not sure what’s wrong. So he sent me to an endodontist to evaluate it. I saw her this morning, and she also seems unsure what to do. She told me she needed to confer with the periodontist before she could tell me anything.

When I left I missed Arthur horribly. I needed someone to talk to, someone to help me through this problem.

A little later I was driving down a street in a neighborhood and I said out loud, “I miss you Arthur, I need you right now,” and just at that moment a hawk flew across the road in front of me. The road curved and the hawk curved and it flew along in front of me, just fifteen feet in front of my windshield, for thirty feet or more, before it turned off into the woods. I felt so blessed. The hawk felt like a calming voice from the universe saying, “I am with you.”

This made me remember a couple of experiences I had with birds in the last year. There’s a special tree I found on the Mountain-to-Sea trail where I feel a strong connection to Arthur. I hike up there regularly and spend an hour or more just sitting with the tree. I also do some qigong while I’m there, which is a Chinese system of movements related to Tai Chi.

The bird encounters both happened while I was doing a movement I came up with myself called ‘Exalt-Bow.’ I hold my arms out palms up and raise them above my head, lifting my face to the sky, then bring my palms together overhead and bring them down, prayer-form, into a bow.

The first time I did that was last April. As I lifted my arms and face to the sky I spotted a bird, I think it was a hawk, soaring right overhead. Just as I spotted it, the bird stalled so it paused right over me. Then it circled higher and higher right over my head, before finally flying off. It felt like a visitation from Arthur, flying high and free.

Last week I was up there again. While I was doing Exalt-Bow and lifting my arms into the air a bird came soaring from behind me and, just when I saw it the bird paused, just like that hawk in April. It held its position for a moment, then began to soar again, slowly, as I continued lifting my arms to the sky. I spoke aloud: “Thank you. Thank you. I don’t know what it means but I like it.”