Spirals of Hopes and Dreams and Impossible Things

I’ve been living in my apartment in the city for over a year now.  I have a big window that overlooks Lake Michigan, where civilization ends and solitude begins, a vast stretch of never-ending cerulean. Before I lived here, I was fortunate to live in other places of great beauty, and once as close to nature as you could get without having to pitch a tent.  On a nearly daily basis I crossed paths with woodland creatures such as foxes, coyotes, deer, turtles, snakes, hummingbirds, goldfinch, and my personal favorite, the great blue heron. I always interpreted these meetings as a message to be heeded from another world, the otherwise unseen world that’s visible from my window, a world that begins where civilization ends.

The price of living in an apartment up in the sky of such a large metropolis is paid for in inflated rent and the absence of contact with these beautiful creatures. It’s a fast-paced life.  A life where, if you thirst for symbolism, you have to dig a little deeper to unearth that which quenches your thirst. It doesn’t smack you in the face as obviously as a starling smacking into your window, though that has been known to happen here in the high rises of the city as well. Had I lost my touch, my direct line with that other world, that more beautiful world?  I began to wonder.  

There aren’t many creatures to be seen outside my current picture window, save for flocks of drunken sunbathers during mating season or gaggles of geese during migrating season. I do love when I can catch a glimpse of the occasional cormorant.  But then, recently, on a day when summer was drawing its last breaths, I had the fortune of looking out the window when it was passing by — hard to miss, its giant indigo wings flapping at once both gracefully and laboriously in the air.  

This was my first and only sighting of the great blue heron outside my window, and only the second sighting of the bird amid the city’s congestion since I’ve lived here.  Flying in the air between two buildings, my own and the one that peers directly into mine, I noticed that it was ascending in small upward spirals, higher and higher, searching for that air current where it would begin to soar effortlessly over the city to a world just outside the foreground.

I watched this performance in the sky above my building for five minutes or more, analyzing what was taking place before my eyes.  The heron would make a circle, fly a bit forward, then continue to fly upward in a circle, fly a bit forward, repeat. I don’t know much about the science of bird migration, but it was clear to me that the bird was searching for that perfect, almost predestined stream of air, that lift it required so its wings wouldn’t labor as much — just glide over the sky — as it was about to embark on a lengthy journey.     

Later, a quick Google search would reveal that the bird was using something called “thermal soaring” in an effort to find the air current which would carry it great distances on its journey with ease and grace.  At the time, I didn’t realize heat was part of the equation. At the time, I didn’t think a whole lot about the science or the mechanics of what was taking place before me, but rather, the symbolism of watching what this bird was doing and how it related to my own life.  What was the lesson being offered by this winged blue messenger? I turned again to Google, which revealed that the great blue heron brings messages of self-determination and self-reliance, and symbolizes the innate wisdom of being able to maneuver through life, progress, and evolve.

Emily Dickinson once said that hope is the thing with feathers.  As my eyes followed the great bird’s eventual ascent into the troposphere, my heart welled up with the muse featured in her verse — hope.  While I strained my eyes to keep up with its flight pattern as it grew smaller, until it was only a dot moving across the sky, I was inspired “to wish impossible things,” which happens to be the title of a song I listened to when I was a teenager, a time when in fact I did wish impossible things, and they seemed just within reach, like that other world I can see just outside my picture window.

Since I first witnessed the bird, I have been replaying the scene in my mind, perhaps as a reminder to stay true to my own course.  Not long after, during one such iteration, a synchronicity occurred. I received a text from a friend of mine, who found a painting of a great blue heron in the building he works, asking me if I wanted it for my apartment. It was an almost life-sized canvas of the majestic bird.

The universe works in mysterious ways, but it brings you just what you need when you need it, in the form of synchronicities or air currents or feathered visitors just passing through.  It reminds us that the seemingly impossible is anything but, and that which seems hopelessly intangible is just within your reach. The universe has a way of carrying you on its shoulders, if, like the heron, you would just give yourself the initial lift.  Like the heron, if you set out and take flight on that lengthy and potentially unfamiliar journey, the rewards at the end may be the things you wished for long ago, those seemingly impossible things which are waiting to come true, somewhere out there in that world just beyond your picture window.