The Bear. The Eagle. The Owl. Do You Feel It Too?
I was eight years old and I had a snake living in a jumbo pickle jar in my room.
I had punched holes in the lid for air. I had been hiding it for weeks. And then one morning I came home from school to find my mother standing on top of the piano bench, frantically dancing and trying to take her pants off at the same time.
My snake had escaped from the jar. For a week it had been somewhere in the house. And then it crawled up my mother’s leg.
My secret was out.
I have always been wired this way.
I collected horny-toads as a kid. I carried them in my pockets because they were my friends. I did my science fair project on geckos. I had a praying mantis egg case in my room — which hatched. All of them. On the wall. The morning before school. My dad had to come in with a shop-vac before my mom woke up.
Animals have never felt separate from me. They felt like family I hadn’t been introduced to yet.
The Owl
My daughter was born and an owl showed up.
A great horned owl sat in the tree outside our back door for the entire first week of her life. Every day. Just sitting there, looking in through the sliding glass door. Watching.
I am not someone who reads into things. I don’t do zodiac signs or Chinese calendars or cosmology. That is not my world.
But I know that owl was there every day for a week. I know it had never been there before. I know it never came back after. And I know that every time I looked at it, I felt like my daughter was being watched over by something bigger than me.
I don’t need to explain that. I just know what I felt.
Walter Reed
Years later I ended up at Walter Reed.
I won’t go into all of it. But they made me meditate.
I had never done it. I’m not a sit-still kind of person. I thought of meditation as something that happened in movies — you know the scene. Smoke, drums, vision quest. That was not what was happening. This was a hospital. Cold. Fluorescent. People in hallways who didn’t know your name.
They made me sit down and close my eyes.
I don’t know why it clicked. But it did.
I felt energy all around me. And then I saw a bear. And then I became the bear. I could feel the soft earth under my feet. I could feel the weight of myself moving through a forest. I could feel my breath in the cold air.
And then I changed. I was on the edge of a cliff above a canyon and I was an eagle. I went off the edge. I was airborne. I could feel the wind pushing back against my wings as I climbed. Not imagined wind. Wind. I could actually feel it.
I was given a keychain before I left. A bear on one side. An eagle on the other.
“These are your spirit animals,” they told me.
I didn’t go back after that. That was the only time I was ever made to sit in that room. But I have thought about it ever since.
What Happens in the Trees
When I run trails — really run, in the back country, away from roads and noise — something happens that doesn’t happen anywhere else.
In the city I’m just surviving. Moving from one thing to the next. Getting through.
In the woods I can feel something more than just me.
I feel the roots under the trail. I feel the strength in the trees standing on both sides. I feel like the ground is alive and I’m connected to it through the soles of my feet. This is when I pray — not a formal prayer, just gratitude. I thank God for the world around me. For the fact that this exists and I’m allowed to be in it.
I don’t know what to call it. I know what it feels like.
Why I’m Telling You This
I built Trek4Free because I wanted other people to be out here.
The bear is on the Trek4Free website. The eagle is on the Trek4Free website. The owl is on the Trek4Free website. I didn’t put them there because they looked cool. I put them there because they’re mine — they’ve been mine since that room at Walter Reed and since the first horny-toad I carried home in my pocket.
When you use Trek4Free to find a free campsite or a trail you’ve never run — I want you to go feel what I feel out there. The thing in the trees. The thing that makes you stop in the middle of a run and just stand there and breathe because the light is coming through the canopy in a way that makes you feel small and enormous at the same time.
I don’t know what a spirit animal is supposed to be. I’m not sure it matters what you call it.
I just know that when I’m out there, I’m not alone. And I don’t think you are either.
Am I the only one? Or do you feel it too?
Tell me in the comments. I actually want to know.
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