The Eagle and the Eclipse
Gathering strength and moving beyond
I stepped on to the foot bridge to cross Issaqauh Creek on my morning walk and a bald eagle glided across my path, twenty feet away and ten feet above. It was powerful, silent, and enormous. The creek is known for salmon, but I had never seen an eagle here before. They live in pairs in the trees overlooking the lake, where the creek empties its cold water two miles to the north. When the salmon run up the creek every September, following their spawning instinct and swimming against the current to lay their eggs and die, the eagles stay by the lake. Maybe this eagle had seen something the others had missed and was moving into the neighborhood to make a home.
The giant bird settled on a branch and turned to look at me. For a moment, we locked our gazes. Two creatures in light, rushing water, tasting a breeze. Surely this meant something. The eclipse was coming in three days. A cosmic happening.
What did I want to say? Should I welcome the bird to this town I’ve made home, in a valley nestled between the mountains and streams, where I've learned to see more clearly. No longer suffocated by the darkness of chronic illness and surgery. Were the eagle and the moon here to tell me to keep moving? To open up to what was happening and let go of the past. Or was I telling myself? Was there a difference? I had always thought I was separate, fighting everything and everyone to create a place for myself in the world. I fought my disease and my recovery and fell to my knees where I saw I had been connected the whole time.
I saw the eagle again that afternoon as I walked with my daughter down the path that leads into the forest at the foot of Tiger Mountain. We crossed a different bridge over Issaquah Creek and the eagle settled on a branch of a different tree. It looked at me again, as if to confirm I was listening. “Cool,” my daughter said.
We turned a corner. I looked back and the eagle was gone.
The next day, an eclipse passed high above the Pacific Northwest like most astrological events in fall, winter, or spring: behind clouds. At the time of faraway totality, I squinted at the sky, trying to discern a shift in quality of grey. Nothing happened. No howling coyotes or frightened bobcats.
I sat at my desk and live streamed different cities in Texas on the path of totality. The ooohs and ahhhs of begoggled spectators filled my computer screen. Total darkness. Cities I knew from my daughter’s years of equestrian training and competition. Horse country. I asked my daughter whether her barn south of Houston took eclipse precautions. “The horses aren’t dumb enough to look up at the sun,” she said.
I didn’t look directly into the eclipse, but I didn’t miss it. The celestial bodies crossed over in my body. A blinding shift. My blood flowed and my heart pounded. A transition from illness to health and the death of an identity. Just as the eagle told me.
I’ve been processing the news of my unlikely health since last fall, when my cardiologist showed me proof that my heart had healed. The nuclear imaging machine that two years earlier produced an image of a permanently damaged, scarred heart now saw a different picture. The bottom of my heart looked strong. There was no evidence of damage. The genius of its natural function was restored. “Is this normal?” I asked, bewildered. I thought I was broken forever.
When I emailed my cardiologist to ask what she thought of the results she wrote me, “You’ve healed!” That test followed my latest blood test results showing low levels of cholesterol, thanks to a regimen of injections and pills. Heart healed. Cholesterol under control. My fantasy ideas of a healthy body were coming true, though my vision of the future had always been blurry.
For decades I didn’t accept that I was sick. I am a man who perseveres. I am able. It’s been an important identity for me: the unstoppable survivor. A superhero who overcomes, despite his guarded heart, buried under an iron cage. I’ve offered this identity proudly since I was a child to show that nothing can hurt me. I thought avoiding difficult truths and succeeding alone without asking for help were qualities to cultivate and polish. Perhaps I was conforming to our culture, bowing to the superheroes we celebrate: Daredevil, Batman, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. Forged by tragedy and neglect. Obsessive, right, successful, damaged, alone. Tortured.
I pushed through illness, to the edge of death, and into the void of surgery and recovery. Three years of partial recovery. No energy. A mirage of a man. Fighting my pale husk of a body. Depression leaking into my arteries and heart, hardening them. Scarring. Tightening the mask.
To win the battle with my body, I surrendered. I was fighting myself out of habit, trying to get back to a time before surgery when the precious personality I had constructed as a kid held strong. The photo of the boy, looking over his shoulder. Fearless, looking at his father behind the camera who showed up every two or three years, and telling him, “I don’t need you.”
I believed I was invincible as long as the wall around my heart held strong - a belief that burned forty years later in a firestorm of tears. The creek flooded when the rains came down too hard, too much water for the delicate banks to contain, when we were building our home in Issaquah. The water broke the barriers, the blood flowed, felled eagle nests in trees, eroded the valleys…
My inner flood happened a year ago. In horse country, there for a horse show. Alone in a rental car in the parking lot of a Residence Inn in College Station. Convulsing in waves of sobbing release. Decades of repressed grief and sadness pulsing through and out of my body where I had locked memories away. Too much to feel. Better to survive. Feelings locked in my body for decades broke out, like an exorcism or Candomblé, lifting a spell, a curse. I was left on the ground, in the car, consumed and exhausted.
Then the healing began. Maybe it was instantaneous. It was seven months before the nuclear imaging machine peeked inside and confirmed the scarred muscle had melted away with the tears. My heart had healed. I was left without the identity of a tough guy. I was soft like the wind, like a feather. I wasn’t recovering from life saving surgery. I was soaring. I wasn’t damaged and waiting to die. I was immortal, a soaring spirit, like the eagle. I had healed from the inside. Not just the disease and surgery but ideas and beliefs about who I was.
Do I know how to let go? Heart surgery connected me with people I never would have known. I’ve made friends. I’ve held these friends in my heart as they’ve wept for the loss of their own healthy identities. I’ve changed as I’ve embraced their stories and the impermanence of my life. I fought and then accepted disease, death, and health. The truths are deeper than the experiences I’ve collected. Surgery came and went.
I’m alive today in a healed body. More present, listening to the funny pops and clicks my chest makes as I shift my weight. Reminders of the saw and staples. I fill my body with breath, injections, pills, vegan foods, tai chi, long walks looking for eagles, and calm. Here I am in a moment of choice: do I trust the re-orientation of my body that led me to healing or do I cling to old ideas of who I am? Will I build a new identity as a marvel of healing? Sounds like a fun story but it’s a lot of scaffolding to erect to avoid standing on the ground. Is my story useful for others? Is it the story of difficulty or healing? Maybe it’s both? Do I need to tell the story, or is it enough to breathe and stay quiet? I will be sick again. I’ll die. But not yet. Like the eagle.
The energies are shifting. I hear them when I close my eyes. Maybe I feel them with my ears. Gravitational pulls from the eagle and moon, asking me to listen. I haven’t seen the eagle since the eclipse. I walk by the creek every day and look in the trees, wondering whether he decided to stay and make a home like we have. Maybe he moved on.
Additional resources on listening within:
This is gorgeous writing, Aaron. Thank you for sharing it with us.