Rapt

My encounters with eagles have historically been…well, complicated. Seeing one has always felt magical. But my earlier encounters often came with baggage that made them equally distressing.

I grew up at a time when bald eagles were on the endangered species list. To see one was a rare experience. And it was precisely this fact that made tracking and photographing them a fascination for one of my early boyfriends. He imagined himself to be an aspiring Ansel Adams and he took this eagle seeking mission quite seriously. Many of our weekends had us scouting locations where sightings were recently recorded or likely.

Now that I think of it, these striving treks into the woodlands of Minnesota probably laid the foundation for the spiritual connection I still easily feel under the canopy of arching tree limbs. But they were not easy for me, because while he was free and fully present to discover his coveted shot, I was burdened with thirty pounds of awkward camera equipment. With eyes to the sky and a brisk pace, he could traverse uncharted snowy paths with ease where the extra weight of the camera equipment often found me thigh deep in snow.

When my lagging pace became a consistent reason he missed a shot, I would add his fury and frustration to my physical burden by calling it a personal failing. The extra responsibility I (literally) carried went unquestioned by both of us and was quite unpleasant. His solution to our “arrangement” was to buy me the most incredible set of high-performance snowshoes. They were truly a wonder in engineering!

But my solution took a slightly different direction. It involved taking my focus away from the sky and looking at what was right in front of me. I decided to leave the relationship and those cherished snowshoes. I still miss the snowshoes.

But a strange and remarkable thing happened when I stopped looking for eagles. Their population rebounded and they were finding their way into the most ordinary moments of my life.

There have been several to date, but this by far, is my most memorable eagle encounter.

A few years back after I had started working with an energy healer, I was driving home from my appointment in an unfamiliar state of pure contentedness. I felt an odd mix of being both highly attentive AND absent, as if some physical boundary had been erased.

While traveling close to sixty miles an hour, I noticed an eagle soaring several feet ahead of me. I smiled both inwardly and outwardly as my focus lingered longer than it ought to have while operating a moving vehicle. As I continued to travel down the highway, I noticed the eagle descending rapidly. With a foggy mind, I concluded it must have spotted easy prey and may be preparing for its incredible hunting choreography. I knew the eagle’s proximity was moving more earthbound, but at some point, my traveling speed placed it behind me.

Seconds later I felt a presence in my peripheral vision and no joke, right outside of my driver’s side window was the eagle flying at eye level. In a state of awe I have never experienced before, my mind seemed to go offline as my senses became even more heightened. The eagle’s focus was several feet in front of us. And in a slow, silent state of synchrony, I sensed the eagle’s subtle shift in direction. As its path slowly drifted over the hood of my car, I shifted my car’s speed and trajectory to make room for it to take the lead. There was no thought, no sound, and no time. In a mysterious sense of entrainment, I found myself easing my car towards the shoulder somehow knowing I needed to clear space for its impending descent.

It was then that I witnessed a splash of red, and a small ball of fur and flesh roll out from under the tire of the car in front of me. Within feet and seconds far too close for comfort, the eagle dropped its talons, effortlessly plucked up the destruction, and safely carried it off into the sky. Still traveling at highway speed, but safely avoiding the eagle, my mouth fell open, and words suddenly flooded my mind. How did it know that was going to happen? How did I know to get out of its way? What on earth had I just experienced?

It was both a troubling scene and utterly REMARKABLE. I cannot remember another time in my life when I felt so supremely connected to both my own body and to something outside of it. I have also never felt that level of intersubjectivity before and will continue to hold this experience as perhaps the most profound sense of connection I may ever experience in this lifetime. And while I do not remember the exact content of my healing session, I do remember feeling like this eagle came to communicate something destructive was going to be miraculously removed from my path.

The rest of my ride home was as ordinary as the earlier part was extraordinary. My mind was content to leave the experience alone. There was no need to generate lingering emotional effects, nor a reason to create elaborate meaning making. It was exceptional and enough. To this day, my key take away is this, meaningful connections, which I now call spiritual encounters, happen far less when I seek them, and far more when I am fully receptive to them.

Please share your own most memorable story of connection with us.