While celebrating our birthdays last month, Emily, Dan, and his daughter Rosie were in a swimming pool on Cape Cod when an osprey floated directly over our heads and parked there for a good half-hour. The wind was nearly at a gale. The sky was low and spitting rain. The bird hovered effortlessly, so still it might have been perched on an invisible wall, as it stared intently down at us. We agreed the bird was there for the party. The past year for each of us held a rich journey into the mysteries of descent, initiation, and ascension and the osprey’s presence reflected this back to us in different and unique ways.

These birthdays marked a time where we are committing to our shared movement and evolution of our practice, showing up to write what Seeing with Your Heart has revealed, and creating space in our lives and schedule to drop deeper into our teachings and the voltage of our purpose. We blocked daily time in our calendars and planned trips to sacred places to write; yet, within a couple months of doing so, all plans were cancelled. Beloved friends and family were diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses, Dan fractured his leg, Emily injured her back. The plans aligned with our soul’s call to serve at a larger scale shriveled with death present and the need to tend to basic needs on the home front.

Feeling flooded with information, mired in confusion, and systemically concerned, we sought to understand the flow of emotions and sequence of events. Can we make sense of the turn of our lives? What is our place in this constellation and the message of the suffering? How do we tend our desires amidst this abyss? Are we enough to fulfill our life’s intentions and purpose?

Why do we easily accept this visit from the osprey as a greeting card from our magical life? Well… maybe it is because the Great Mother has sent so many of her emissaries – Isis, Inanna, Mary Magdalene, Lilith, Luna, Cybele, Venus, Soraya, Tara, Earth and Ocean, the Queen of Hearts – into our lives so many times that we have come to welcome her presence in all her forms.

She often arrives when we hold questions that lead us into the Mystery with answers far beyond our comprehension. She tells us that the eye of the heart is how we know ourselves, understand our lives, connect to our ancestors, and to the realms beyond human senses. Our heart can see the webs of trauma that entangle us and the abundant resources that free us. The strength to ease the suffering around us comes as we expand our capacity to trust our inner vision, include it in our everyday, and offer it as a gift to the external world.

That osprey suspended between heaven and earth reminded Dan of the Cosmic Egg and Emily of the soul that hovers between the infinite universe and human condition. In birth, the Egg falls and shatters; yet, the soul is said to linger a while and join the body in womb a few months before birth. Before descent into form, each soul agrees to receive a systemic inheritance of family blessings and burdens, genetics and fate, and a life trajectory shaped by the cells, skin, gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status of this body’s place in the family, community, and world. Our soul takes on a life of suffering, purpose, and possibilities and together with the body it inhabits, it navigates the lessons, experiences, and unfolding contracts.

We see time and time again that traumas endured by the body send fragments of the soul to the infinite universe, separating it from its human form. Clinical practitioners may call this disassociation; however, we believe there’s a communion happening between soul and its council, a protection, a remembering of “why” one might have incarnated. For some, the soul returns as safety is secured; however, for others, a soul retrieval is required as there may be some form of rejecting the human experience, relationships, or guidance to stand tall among the resistance it faces in a world so far from its truth.