hollow bones—how to soar

I sit on the floor in front of my altar where the sun cascades onto the hardwood floors. I light a candle and dried cedar needles. Candle light flickers against the gold-leafed vases. My own chanting enters my heart as medicine, echoing in the dark cave of my chest, calling me out into the possibility of newness. For years, I’ve used the struggle of life as firm ground to push off into the air. At the altar holding a mala and chanting that morning, I’m no longer interested in fighting all my days and nights.

A clear and constant message many of us receive as children, after we’ve flown into this world, wings spread, is that we can’t stay up in the sky. When we are taught this, we fall from above, our bodies as regal and heavy as bald eagles.

Fortunately, the bodies of bald eagles are strong. They use their thick muscles to gather strength and take off into the air. They move from heaviness, stretching into their wingspan. When they reach a certain height in the sky, there’s no weight. Their hollow bones are so light it’s as if they have no bones. Emptiness enables them to soar.

Many Native Americans make ceremonial whistles from these bones. When air is blown through them, the eagle can sing again. The great spirit of our existence can play its song. The ancestor eagle sings from such hollowness and we remember the “soft animal of our bodies that loves what it loves,” as Mary Oliver says in her poem “Wild Geese.” Not loves what it craves or feels pleasured by, but loves what it remembers of itself, the place that is untouched by suffering, where there is no struggle, a place where flight in the sky of life is possible. In the hollow bone, we identify only with the air, that which does not weigh us down. To identify with the vast nothingness is to see ourselves as the forest, the ocean, the air blown through hollow bones.

This message is not the one that Native American teachings, prayers, ceremonies, and rituals offer regarding the eagle spirit. I’m using the symbol of the eagle and its hollow bones as a metaphor of struggle and flight in our lives.

Was I willing to exchange the legacy of struggle for the songs I came with? Was I willing to let go of the thoughts and habits and replace them with the ancestral hollow bones, in which I could experience emptiness until I heard my original voice? Where was the soft animal of myself, the one untouched by suffering, and what did it love?

Struggle exists. The eagle spends time looking for food to feed the body. In this sense we are like the eagle, we find ways to survive. In a spiritual sense we hunt for what will feed our souls. It’s necessary. It’s when struggle shadows our innate peace that we lose touch with our ability to soar. Although suffering exists, it’s not our nature. Physical survival is not our main task on Earth. We are meant to fly.

As aspirants of the hollow bones we are light enough to aspire toward our blissful nature in the midst of struggle.

My soft animal walks about the floor of the earth and dreams of resting on the foliage sprouting on mountaintops. My soft animal loves when the wind sounds like rain and the rain sounds like the ocean. It loves to bow as an act of compassion. It loves when hardness sparks a fire, but also when deep breath settles the flames so that they can be used to see through. It loves when everything unravels, the tangled knots come loose, and there’s nothing to do but wait in the silence. My animal loves to love ordinary things for their ordinariness. It loves falling into the spiral of life and conspiring with ancestors. My soft animal loves to fly.

Sometimes I hear all the eagle whistles blowing. The high shrill lifting feet, being sent into the fullness of emptiness. The hollow life, filled with wind, can’t die. Nothing dies in nothingness.

I burn the dried leaves of cedar trees. The smoke is heavy but I don’t cough, I pray. I fan my feather to see all there is to see.