Greetings Beloved Fellow Soul Travelers,
Every month four our newsletter, we intuitively pull an oracle card . . . and the card for April comes from my Native Spirit Deck. The card that emerged was the Eagle Card. This is a card about seeing life from a higher perspective. It reminded me of an event from my life.
Many years ago I used to lead vision quests. I wrote about this (and about how to create your own vision quest) in my book called Quest that was co-written with my daughter Meadow. I was with a group just before they embarked on their quest in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. It was a chilly morning as we stood in a mountain meadow. The tips of the high grasses were sparkling with frosty dew. The sky was so vividly blue it felt that you could reach up and grab it.
One woman in the group, excitedly pointed up and said, “It’s an eagle!!” Everyone looked up, thrilled to see this majestic bird. “Wow! It’s an eagle!” They felt that it was a personal sign as they were about to embark on their quest. The excitement was palpable.
However, one dour man looked up and declared, “Nope! It’s a buzzard. A turkey vulture.” Everyone stopped and just stared at him. He looked angry and disgruntled.
I spend a lot of time looking at birds and I can tell, fairly easily, the difference between a vulture and an eagle. However the bird was so far away that it was impossible for anyone to truly to discern what it actually was. It was up for interpretation.
(I personally I love vultures as much as eagles, but for different reasons. Did you know that the mighty condor is a vulture?)
However, it was interesting that even though no one actually knew exactly what the bird was, some chose to see a sign of courage, strength and freedom, and another chose to see a sign – for him anyway – of something dark and negative. It was the exact same image high in the sky, but the perspective and the assigned meaning was different for the individuals there in the meadow.
As I remembered this event, I mused that we might not be able to choose the circumstances of our lives, but we can always choose a higher perspective and we can choose the meaning that we assign to those events. When I encounter a stumbling block in life, I remember the eagle and the vulture and say to myself, “Denise, you have a choice in how you see this… choose the eagle.”
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