AUDIO: I Take These Signs Seriously
Great Blue Herons, A Love Story, and the Future
Dear Friends,
Thanks so much for your replies and comments on this essay, “I Take These Signs Seriously” about a visceral encounter with a Great Blue Heron. For those of you who prefer to listen, below is the audio version.
May we all find our way in this beautiful, complicated, soul-making world.
Blessings,
Carolyn
I Take These Signs Seriously
On Great Blue Herons, a Love Story, and the Future
1.
I saw the Great Blue Heron again just the other day.
2.
Many decades ago, the heron first appeared in my life in dream, or embodied nature. I cannot discern which, and perhaps it doesn’t matter. Two images live in me as the origin of this story: adjacent to each other, perhaps co-created within a web of psyche, memory, and time—the mysterious, interlocking realms of our true existence.
The first image was in nature. I was driving south on California Route One between the town of Santa Cruz on the Monterey Bay to Topanga Canyon just north of Los Angeles. My teacher lived in the dusty low mountains of Topanga, wedged in a little house at the edge of the semi-wilds of Topanga State Park. I was on my way to see her, to re-join her world where the telling of dreams began each day before any other thing. Always these drives took on a mythic feel as I embarked into what, every time with my teacher, was an entry into spirit.
I was just beginning my journey, driving south along the marshy waters of Monterey Bay, and I saw a tall primordial bird standing among the rushes right by the road. She was regal, eerily calm, perhaps four feet tall, and seemed to own the air around her. No, that’s not it. She belonged to the air around her. Yet even these are too many words. I was driving a lone car on a narrow highway, around 40 miles per hour, and though I immediately slowed down, there could not have been more than thirty seconds to the whole encounter.
I was driving, and I suddenly saw her within a few feet of me. I slowed, she turned her head, she looked, I looked. We did not exchange a gaze, but we were both aware. It was as if the world cracked opened into its actual, non-interpreted self, and the heron crouched her long, thin curved neck, which was perhaps two feet long, then widened her great wings and ascended, flying alongside me for a moment then circling across the highway to the marsh on the other side. In my astonishment, I could see her in my rear-view mirror. Oh, the wing-span! Five or six feet wide, flying with me for the briefest of seconds. I saw her arise from the earth and emerge into the sky, the essence of natural flight, her legs tucked behind her aerodynamically. She was no longer vertical, as she had been only a second before, but wide and horizontal, her wing span filling my sight.
Then I drove on. That is, my car kept moving, at a speed I could never match without it, and I went along, for I had a schedule to keep and an important place to go. And right there—right there—is our essential tragedy.
I drove on.
Yet I was imprinted. Changed. Transmuted. Nothing would be the same again. For somehow time stretches, and somewhere the Great Blue Heron is always flying over me, encompassing me within her great wings.
3.
The Great Blue Heron in the second image of this origin story was in a dream. Not long after I saw the heron by the road, or perhaps just before (yet still, does it matter?) the Great Blue Heron visited again. There was a tragic and then a triumphant feel to the dream. In the image that endures within me now, thirty years later, the heron emerges from marshy waters, making her way with difficulty, bedraggled and troubled. She has endured something traumatic. She is primordial as she arises out of the muck of some human-imposed blockage or ruin of her world. She is emerging, forcing her way through, and now at some opening she spreads her great wings and flies into the air. Even then, in her troubled state, she was more beautiful, far more majestic than any machine we humans have built to imitate her, to give ourselves wings and to increase our speed yet exponentially more. She gracefully rose into the air, and sailed off. I felt she was released
At the time I scribbled down the dream, deeply moved and in wonder. Now, thinking of it, I had a thought, or perhaps it is a wish: that she was flying out of the wreckage, into the future.
4.
Three years later, after a journey across the sea to Ireland and an encounter with the ancestral realms of the Otherworld, I put the Great Blue Heron on a flyer for the writing groups I was just beginning to teach. My artist friend Ginger Hedrick, who had a cosmic touch to her work, painted it for me. It was beyond beautiful, and I hung it on my wall like the sacred image it was, with pride of place in my living room.
So as I began what would become the central work of my life, teaching called “Writing to Feed the Soul,” I had a ready image to represent what I felt about creativity, the soul and all that feeds the writing life. It was 1997, and I was about to turn forty. I photographed the heron painting and used it on my flyer, which I printed at Kinkos on dusty blue paper, then put up around town in bookstores, coffee shops and anywhere with a place for community announcements.
Making this flyer and beginning this work was the most public thing I’d ever done— announcing to the world who I was and what I wanted to be and do. My picture was not on the flyer. The heron was.
Great Blue Herons have been on the earth for 1.5 million years. They are truly prehistoric, their early ancestors are about 50 million years old. Humans have been on earth in our current form for around 300,000 years, and our early ancestors are about two million years old.
That is to say, when it comes to understanding how to survive on this earth, herons are our elders.
5.
“I take these signs seriously,” my new lover wrote to me a few months after I made the flyer. “A Great Blue Heron flew across the sky just above me today. She is a sign that you are with me.’
The moments that will change our lives are often ordinary and unadorned. I was tired the day I dropped off a flyer outside India Joze Restaurant, and I almost didn’t do it. But I did do it, and the flyer was picked up, and the person called and said her name was Jean, and she signed up for the writing group in a few moments. Within about six months, we’d fallen in love. In a heady swirl of love poems and long lingering kisses, just as we were getting to know each other, I had to leave for three weeks to be with my family across the country. It was excruciating to be apart. While I was away, she seemed to accompany me at all times, through letters and phone calls and everything else, as we were reaching out to each other across the continent however we could.
So I, too, recognized the sign. I saw that my lover understood about the heron and me, though we had only recently met and had never spoken directly of it. She understood about the flyer, and its significance had landed directly in her heart. She saw the signs that we were in a greater, much larger story. I saw that in the great web of inter-connections and synchronicities—something the Irish might call the Otherworld—we existed in a weave of dreams and poems and herons and night stars and ancestors and marshy waters. In that moment, I nodded and thought, “Yes, yes. I see you. I, too, take these signs seriously.”
Twenty-eight years later, she and I are still happily married.
6.
Only two weeks ago, Jean turned to me over lunch in the garden and said, “Look—there’s the heron.”
“What? A heron? You saw a heron here?” It had been years since we’d seen a heron from our yard.
“Look there, look!” she pointed quietly, and yes, I saw the great primordial bird, her wings filling an opening in the trees, flying just above our yard. My hand fluttered up to my heart.
We all know the times we live in. The shrinking natural world, devastating human violence, the signs far too often of doom. All manner of screens and talking robots and sci-fi stories come true, and I take these signs seriously too. I have stopped saying that I cannot imagine the future anymore, not of our country, or the world, or our human societies—not even the near future of, say, a few years. For none of us can imagine the future anymore. Not one of us.
But, there is the heron.
A few days later, driving home from the store, I saw her again, a few blocks from my house, flying just above busy 41st Avenue. There she was, like a siren out of the blue. A reminder.
7.
Then last weekend, Jean and I brought our four-year-old grandson to the park. It is a fabulously funky, semi-wild park in a gully surrounded by trees along the local watershed. Little Caleb was telling me to wait for “Fa Fa,” which he calls his beloved grandmother Jean as she was buttoning up her jacket, and we all followed the uneven path down to the park. And Jean said, “Oh look—there’s the heron again.”
I have to comment here how Jean says these things. She is not excited, or even surprised. To her, these things are signs, important yes, but ordinary. To her, it’s just how the world works. She knows how the world works because she daily tracks every single flower and bush and tree and herb and vegetable growing from acorn and seed to great glory in our garden. It is no surprise to her that we are daily surrounded by miracles—that there are signs all around us.
But I do not have her gift, and I have to be awakened from my slumber. That day at the park the Great Blue Heron was not flying above. She was standing in the open field, crouched low, hunting in the early misty light. There would be moles and gophers and caterpillars and perhaps a mouse for her meal. We stood for a time, gazing upon her, then our little guy just kept walking towards the park. For an endless moment we were all just creatures in the field, nothing else, simply companions in the unending world of drama and living and dying and eating going on all around us and within us.
Then the tall blue-gray creature alighted and let her great, wide wings carry her gracefully above the trees.
Jean told me she saw a gopher in her huge beak.
8.
The Great Blue Heron is part our love story now, and is in some ways at the core of our origins. One could say it was the heron, as much as the title, “Writing to Feed the Soul,” that drew Jean to pick up the flyer that day. So after all these years, when we saw the heron together in our garden, and later together at the park, I felt the sign to be about the new phase that we are in: grandmothers now, with three little boys as grandsons. We are still in love, and getting older, she at 75 years old and me 68. We revel in our good luck and struggle at times with life’s transitions, as people do.
Yet, that day at the park I saw there was something else I am being called to. I stood for some time gazing toward the trees, giving the heron my greeting. Giving her my thanks. Giving her my apologies for all my kind has done to her world, and to her kind. Reminding myself that she is there. She is really here, living among us. Or, we are living among her and her kind.
I thought of my dream all those decades ago, when the Great Blue Heron dragged herself out of some human-made ruin of her world, and emerged and flew again, into what I imagined was the future. And—standing by the trees in the park, I saw that that future I imagined thirty years ago is not some sci-fi, far away forever.
That future is now. The heron and I are in it together.
We are both still here. The Great Blue Heron lives. I understood suddenly, this is the only thing that matters. That we save and repair the world in which the heron can live, and thrive, and multiply, and dream her dreams. That is a world in which my grandsons can also grow and thrive and become fully awake, fully themselves. That is a world in which we all can live and thrive.
There is nothing more important than this. Here is the urgent call of this time. We must we save and protect and love and praise and repair the world in which the Great Blue Heron can live and thrive far into the future. For she is our elder, and I want my grandsons’ grandchildren to learn from her.
I have re-committed my life to this. For if it’s true that we cannot imagine the future, it’s also true that this includes all manner of inspiration, revelations, quicksilver changes and unimaginable shifts, breakdowns leading to breakthroughs that might seem impossible now. This includes of course the interventions of Spirit and the Earth herself, our Mother. As Rebecca Solnit writes so eloquently, if the great span of human and earth history teach us anything, it is that events are truly unpredictable. Anything, truly anything, can happen.
I take these signs seriously.
Coda: This morning as I was finishing this essay, our daughter Emily told Jean that she just saw a Great Blue Heron in Eureka, California where she lives.
Written in dedication to three boys, Dean, Caleb and Cooper, and to my family and to all families, and to all beloved life.