Eagle Eyes And A Bright Heart

I have been spending a lot of time with the poplar grove behind the house. At first I thought they were birch, but they are poplars, tall, old and wise. Holding a kind of quiet authority. They have become a small anchor point for me. Every time I walk into the center of them, something feels magical and powerful, as if I am walking directly into a portal.

Ever since we arrived here in Montana on this property I feel they have been calling to me and teaching me, or maybe reminding me, that I do know who I am.

They have also been asking me to rise from the curled place I have been living in and come back to myself.

A part of this story reaches back to Wales. During the ritual in Cymru, I asked a seer a simple question, although it felt enormous at the time. I asked which direction I was supposed to go next. In the darkness of the roundhouse after a powerful Seid ritual, she quietly chuckled and said "You will have to go backward to move forward. There is a third way, one you cannot see yet" I carried those words with me, but they did not make sense.

Nothing in my life seemed aligned with a backward step, and I could not imagine another path I had not already considered. It was not until I returned to Utah, (I went backward) and my husband received the invitation to move to Montana, that something in me recognized her truth. I had been thinking about two possible moves, circling them again and again, and Montana was not even on the horizon. It appeared almost out of nowhere, yet the moment I felt it, I knew. This was the third way. The way I could not see from the place I was standing.

There was another message too. A psychic told me that for years I had been living like an eagle in a tree. He said I had been perched above my life, observing everything without landing, watching from a distance because the community had not felt safe. When he said it, I felt the truth of it without fully understanding what it meant. In Utah I lived in a four story house and spent most of my days looking out from the top floor. I was high above everything, both physically and emotionally. I could see the landscape, and I felt rooted into it, but I never felt like I could root into a community there. I was always the outsider observing. He told me the time was coming when I would have to leave that vantage point and connect to the earth again. He said I would have to let myself come down and step back into community, get my boots on the ground and land. All of that was in my awareness long before I understood its meaning. And here I am, living in a one level house surrounded but nature and getting reacquainted with the Earth in a new way, open to connecting to new community.

Utah dimmed me in ways I did not fully see until I left. I arrived there in 2020 open and hopeful, ready to practice my work without the shadow of a New Age cultic hierarchy hovering over me. And at first I did. It was a time that was swiftly changing how communities connected as everyone began to isolate. So I searched out and taught myself ways to work remotely where my Sound and Trance sessions would translate in a good way. I recorded sessions and had many face to face video calls. It was good. I stayed connected to clients from all over the world. I felt deeply aligned with how I was showing up in the world. Then, slowly, a couple years passed and I ventured out locally. It initially felt so hopeful and exciting. I tried to find community. I worked at 3 different spiritual centers, each one teaching me a lot, and yet no matter how hard I tried to connect with others or build something, nothing would stick.

The turning point for me was when I almost fell for a repetitive pattern of abuse. I met a human being who loved bombed me, and I almost fell for it. But then they began to twist everything. They gaslit me, manipulated me and tried so desperately to control a situation. An experience I was all too familiar with, and it activated some deep wounding. From that moment on, everything changed.

Something about that experience revved up an old pattern. I began trusting too quickly. I gave too much of myself away. I overshared my methods and experiences because I wanted connection, not because I meant to teach. People took what I offered. They claimed training that never happened. They built offerings from things I had shared privately. They recreated pieces of my work and left me out of the spaces they built from it. It was not one moment that broke me, but the steady drip of small betrayals. Eventually I shut down.

In my opinion Utah itself has a complicated relationship with honesty. There is a surface smile that hides deeper avoidance. A residue from a religion that has shaped the entire state in ways no one fully acknowledges. I kept meeting people who wanted to be spiritual without facing their own shadows. Who would turn around and blame me when something I said activated old wounding (even though they had come to me to help see and heal that wound)

Without realizing it, I began abandoning myself again. The longer I stayed living there, the smaller and more shut down I became. I crossed my own boundaries long before anyone else did. I kept giving away things that were never meant to be shared casually. Underneath all of it was the old pain, the ache of wanting belonging so desperately that I handed pieces of myself to people who had not earned them.

I had to trace the pattern back. I had to look into the parts of myself shaped by childhood indoctrination, the parts that believed being generous meant being unguarded, the parts that still thought everyone has the same moral compass that I do. When I finally pulled the roots up, the clarity came. People will always take what is offered freely. Some with gratitude. Some with acknowledgment and deep appreciation. And some with entitlement. I cannot control that. I can only control how I hold my work and myself. How I value what I carry. How I create from a place of alignment rather than desperation. I didn't realize it when I was in it, but the pain and wounding of cultic abuse, which I had been born into and later went through three more experiences, and this narrative that I had been living was taking over. It was as if the energy of my past had taken hold of the wheel and decided it was in driving from now on. But not anymore. I get to decide the narrative of my life and how I move and live in the present moment. By also dreaming a new beautiful future.

All of this has been shifting since we arrived in Montana on this gorgeous land. I have been slowly seeing through some dense fog as it has been lifting and creating a new sense of enlivening. And then this morning, the Bald Eagle appeared. Previously we had a Golden Eagle land, but this morning it was the majestic white headed majesty.

It was dawn, the sky still that winter pink gray, and I saw it perched in one of the large trees outside my bedroom window, the one I call the Gebo Tree. There they were, just sitting perched in some kind of quiet power.

I walked to the Gebo tree. She has a long scar running up her trunk, the mark of a deep freeze that once split her open. She healed from the inside out and the wound became part of her strength. When I reached her, I asked for permission before placing my hand on that scar. The moment my palm touched the healed wood, felt this calm fire being lit. A small light in the darkness that I have been navigating. It was like a fire rediscovering itself.

I looked up at the eagle watching from above, and everything aligned. The runes on my fingers, Gebo, Kenaz, Fehu, were present in the branches around me. Their shapes. Their teachings. Their meanings. The crossing. The illumination. The returning flow of life force. It felt as if the land was speaking the same language my body had been trying to remember. It felt as if the world was finally meeting me where I was.

Something settled inside me then. A remembering that came from somewhere beyond thought. I felt who I am, without apology. I am a Seer. I am a Grief and Death walker. I am an Artist. I am a Shamanic Sound Healer. I am a Writer. I am a Musician. I am the Lady of The Wolves. These are not labels I need to perform. They are simply who I am.

The spark that moved through me felt like the Earth asking for my roots. Asking me to trust my life again, to trust the spirit world, to trust my experiences and to trust myself.

The eagle held the long clear sight.

The tree held the story of being split open and healing anyway.

The runes held the path forward.

I felt that I was being asked to unfurl myself and light up after so many years of dimming. I felt myself rise out of the place where I had been curled in on myself.

Gebo is guiding me to honor exchange without sacrificing myself. Kenaz is reminding me of the fire I carry, the wisdom I have earned. Fehu is calling in the abundance that comes when I stop shrinking to make others comfortable. And the eagle is showing me how to see again, how to land, how to trust my own vision.

This grove is becoming a mirror, not a symbolic one but a living one. On that morning, with my hand on the healed scar of a tree that survived being cracked open and the eagle perched above me, something in me opened too. The runes in my skin and the runes in the branches carried the same message.

I am not becoming. I am returning.

And I am ready to rise.