The golden sun was low over Utah Lake when Jessica and I sat down by the banks of the water to give a shape to something I had been carrying for a long time.
I began the way I always begin. I turned to each of the directions and called them in, the inspirational forces and the elements, the unseen keepers of the land, our ancestors, the guides and the tenders of the earth. An invocation is a powerful thing. It is a way of setting your intention about what you want to create. Most of what we create comes to us first in drafts, in pieces, and by the time I sat at that bank with Jessica, I was already clear. The name had come to me long before, in my dreams and in my journaling. Our community was to be called Rewilding Hearts.
We placed down plant clippings from our gardens and wove them together to form a beautiful circle, a type of earth vigil. This is an old way, held by earth-tending traditions and by cultures that see the world as animistic, that know the plants and trees are alive, the same way an animal is alive. When we move into a place of reciprocity and receptivity, we open ourselves to receive, we do so with an offering. When we ask for something, clarity, healing, guidance, inspiration, we first offer a gift. This gift can be your words, songs, a piece of your hair, items that you have created, food, or crystals.
We drank tea from beautiful handmade cups, and we poured the first sip onto the ground. I believe that an offering as small as a swallow of tea given back to the earth is enough to say, we are connected, we remember you. In that circle we were not only calling forward the animals and the plants we could see. We were calling forward the unseen realm as well, and in many traditions there are names for them, so we set out a cup of tea for them as well. We are still the living breath, the bones, the blood of our ancestors, and we had come to help complete something they began, a mission of harmony, of reciprocity, of joy and of healing together.
We each took turns singing a song with the tea held close to our hearts, letting the elements weave into us, into that expansion. When you move into a ceremony state, you are asking your senses to become sharpened and alive, and the circle you draw around yourself becomes a sacred container, a place where you can be a vessel for truth, for vision, for creation. You are setting time aside to be holy. The true meaning of holy stems from the ancient Hebrew word Kadosh, which translates to “to set apart”.
Rewilding Hearts is the community that was born on that bank, in that holy place.
Jessica speaks the same language
Jessica is a brilliant and gifted artist, and she feels the moving of the elements the way I do. That is a rare and profound alignment. It is one thing to be gifted with your hands. It is another to feel the importance of gathering, of honoring, of tending the land, and to feel it in the same way as the person sitting beside you. We speak the same language.
Before we ever sat down, she had given me a series of questions to answer, so even this ceremony was a draft we had been writing together for a while. She can hear the subtle songs of the lake. She uses her hands to weave baskets, to make nourishing food, to care for people who have lost someone, and on that evening, to draw the images she was seeing into a form the rest of us could hold.
What we were really making
As we stayed in that expanded state together, the ideas came easily, almost in time with the lake crashing against the shore. Colors, textures, images, all of it arriving to hold what we were making. Rewilding Hearts lives in two places. Online, it is a community where we come to be present for one another, to tend each other’s grief and to celebrate each other’s joys and big wins, so that none of us carries the lows or the highs alone.
In person, we gather on the land itself, drawn to the places that could use our care, ground still unsettled from old battles and old griefs. We each bring small offerings from our gardens and weave them into one circle, and our own hearts lift while our roots reach down deep. Even if this is not the soil where you were born, not the ground where your ancestors are buried, it is where you live now, and that is the beauty of it. We come together where and how we can, first to uplift our own hearts, and then to help heal the places on this earth that are asking for it.
The next morning, I walked back for a chime
The next morning I walked back down to the water. I had left a small bamboo chime hanging on a branch the night before, light enough to sway, so the prayers we had spoken could keep singing to the birds and the water for one more day. It was now time to bring the chime home, and to show one of my dear friends, Jon, this spot, one of my favorite places here at Utah Lake, that he had never seen.
Spring was fresh on the trail. Thistles were coming up green, and a cool saltiness rode the wind as it picked up off the lake. Somewhere people were laughing, and that contagious sound carried on the echoes. It was strange and lovely to retrace the steps I had walked less than a day before, to see in the clear daylight the plants I had only known in the dark. I was still in that between-worlds place you enter after the ceremony, the hands that had reached up to the sky still wanting to root down into the earth. So as we walked on the trail I wasn’t exactly sure where we were. Then I heard the chime, ringing softly on its branch, and I knew I was on the right path. I lifted the chime off its branch, and tucked it into my satchel, which was still full of herbs, candles and clippings from my garden.
The eagle swept down
We had walked for a minute or two farther down the path, into a perfect clearing, when the eagle swept down.
It came right in front of us, so low that I did not have to lift my gaze to find it, only fifty feet above the bank, its wings wider than any falcon, that regal brown body, white head and golden beak. It had come down close on purpose, to be seen.
We stopped talking. I reached out and took Jon’s arm. We froze. The eagle hovered over our heads, then rested for a few breaths in a tree at the edge of the bank, before lifting off and rising away over the water.
“Can you believe that?” I whispered. “I have never seen an eagle this close. Not here. Not at Utah Lake. Not like this.”
A yes from the ancestors
The pure shock of seeing the eagle appear out of nowhere began to shift into enormous gratitude, so deep it filled my whole chest, because I knew what this meant. It was a yes. A yes from the universe, from the ancestors, from the very land we had prayed over the night before. Retrieving that chime had closed a circle, and the eagle had come to seal it. Everything Jessica and I had set into motion, the intentions, the meditations, the prayers, the creation we had woven at the water’s edge, the eagle answered all of it in a single sweep.
I understood, standing there, how important this moment was for Rewilding Hearts. This eagle felt like the beacon, a symbol of what it means to reconnect to our ancestors and our roots while we also honor the plants, the wildlife, and the history that has lived right under our feet. There is an ancient prophecy that the eagle and the condor will one day reunite in love, the eagle of the north and the condor of the south, and that when they do, all the children of the earth will remember that we are one, not divided by color or race or culture.
The eagle carries the medicine of vision, of rising into a higher sight. In that moment it was asking something of me. It was asking me to step into the role of a leader, to use my eyes of vision to help bring us together, so that we each honor our own roots and our heritage, and so that we honor, and do our best to make right, what has happened on the land we all walk upon.
The eagle is the one who rises into vision.
You are being asked to rise
The eagle did not labor to lift itself over the lake. It opened its wings and trusted the wind that was already there. When it is your turn to rise, you will not have to force it either.
Questions people ask
What does the eagle symbolize as an animal ally? Eagle carries the medicine of vision and clarity, the ability to rise above the immediate storm and see your life from a higher, wider view. She is courage, freedom, and the reminder that there is always another way to see what is in front of you.
What does it mean when an eagle sweeps overhead? In many traditions it is a sign of vision and higher perspective, a call to rise above your fear and see the wider view. For me, an eagle swept down low over Utah Lake while I was envisioning what the community “Rewilding Hearts” needed to be. Eagle does not deny the storm. She rises high enough to show you it has an edge, and a beyond.
I am a somatic and energy practitioner, not a licensed therapist, and nothing here is a substitute for medical or mental health care. This is an invitation to your own knowing, offered with love.
If something in you lifted as you read this, there is a gentle place to begin. You are welcome in our Rewilding Hearts community, which gathers each month online to remember that we belong to each other and to the land. And if you would like to be met one to one, you can book a free discovery call, twenty unhurried minutes, no pressure and nothing to sell, just space to be heard.
The eagle came down close, on purpose, to be seen. May you let yourself be seen too, and trust the wind.
