Meditation for Soaring Above Borders

You can shake your fist at an eagle, but you can't make it fly home.

Where I live in Montana is an oasis of sorts. It's a former glacial lake, surrounded by mountains and protected from the harsher mountain winds and brutal cold. Behind my house flows a river. It rarely freezes for long.

There's a family of bald eagles who live nearby, I see them especially in the summer when I go to my swimming hole. In the winter, though, the shallow channel dries up and I can walk across the ice and rocks to the peninsula that's usually unreachable from my end. Here, the river is much deeper, and the sun hits more directly on the few days we access the sun. On a hike with my dog, I bumped into my neighbor and his dog. They were counting the bald eagles — called a toupee when it's a group like that, according to the internet anyway — and at that time he'd counted 121.

"These ones are migrants," he told me. "Here enjoying a break from the wind, some sun." I scanned the scene.

"Probably appreciate the river flowing too, can see some fish in there to eat. And the rabbits." I paused and enjoyed the moment. "121, eh? That's something."

"Sure is. Just taking refuge in our slice of paradise."

We parted ways and I found myself standing at the edge of a bluff overlooking the river. Broose, my dog, rolled in the crunchy ice lining the riverbank. I get anxious when she does this, but she keeps a good ear for pops and shifts so I have to trust her as she trusts me to stand at the tip of ice-covered land like I was.

The days before, and in that moment, ICE officials were raiding workplace and schools and neighborhoods. Some schools turned them away while others claimed to invite them in. My own sister works at a school with students from all sorts of backgrounds, many of them undocumented, all of them deserving to be there, all of them kind and eager to learn. All of them children. I thought of them and watched these eagles, coming in from the north despite our now-paused tariff wars that were starting to take shape in this moment. The week prior, I was in New Mexico watching the geese who had likely flown from Montana, who would head further south before making their way back north. All these borders, and for what? The birds that are killing us are the ones we breed here en masse, our own chickens. I can't say I let these birds fly overhead. I have no control over the birds. No border does.

Meditation: If you wish, start in eagle pose (Garudasana). You start in mountain pose because you are a mountain — both constant and constantly changing. Everything on the mountain is the mountain: the falling trees, the herds of elk, the rock, the rot. The wind shifts the mountain without knocking it down, the trees bend from the force of and while the wind bends from the stability of the mountain. Wrap your limbs around one another and feel in flight. You are unstable and yet you are still here. Perched. Aware. Ready to launch.

If you are in this position, feel the strength and fluidity it generates. If you are able to feel your feet flexing under your weight, take notice of the twitches and adjustments, how awake and alive your feet are, reactive without major motion. Like an eagle's eyes, the muscles, bones, and tendons of your feet are receptors of all information that will keep you steady. Feel too your body sway, the urge to take flight, to put a foot down, to let go. Do it.

Whether or not you are in this position, take a deep breath in, hold it, breathe out. Continue this steady breath and picture these eagles in the photos. They exist without borders, not despite them — they are so much more powerful than a law could ever be. What limits have others placed on your world that you can soar above, that you have the power to not just challenge, but to levitate above?

I invite you to hold onto this energy — powerful in your instability, your ability to adjust without moving, to be both the mountain and the eagle soaring above it.