this petal, the earth

love letter to the hummingbird pilgrims

flowering farewell ~ the last new moon before the coming frost

so fragile
this petal, the earth.
as fragile as love.

~ mirabai

Isn’t this what endings do to us? Aren’t they designed to break our hearts open with luminous remembering? As I witness the beginnings of the great autumnal descent, my heart has curiously resurrected hidden memories of spring. Of the mystery from which it all so innocently emerged. The heart that was bravely germinating in that cold, dormant soil is now returning to bury itself in that same dark and fertile origin. And everything that happened in between is but a luminous flowering dream.

the spring’s very first tiny garden bouquet, and the memory of how its sweetness and generosity broke my heart.

After months of darkness and snow, when the nights are still freezing and the garden soil has barely begun to stir, on a day that appears to be like any other, suddenly something magical happens: the hummingbirds return. It is an electric, dreamlike moment, that first early spring morning when I hear those iridescent zips and trills ring out from high above the trees.

I try not to panic as I quickly brew the season’s first batch of nectar, and whisper ardent spells to the trays of germinating flower seeds. “They’re back!!!!” I scream-sing in joyful disbelief, to no one in particular, and my heart spills over, and I remember once again exactly why I plant so many flowers every year.

tiny winged spirit fiercely guarding her flowers, this season’s late summer garden

What does it mean to be truly devoted to something, to wholly offer our hearts? Whatever I feel for the hummingbirds seems very close to that definition. Loving them is so easy, and my longing to be of service to them flows out effortlessly. And in return, the hummingbirds have mischievously filled my life with flowers. Their ferocity is the kind that brings nothing but beauty.

I call them nectar dragons, in homage to their rainbowed, dragon-hearted spirits. They make their presence known. They are by far the fastest, feistiest, most prismatic beings in the garden, who live their lives in fierce devotion to the flowers, and there is simply no missing it: they are operating on a different frequency than the rest of us. In fact, they have the highest metabolic rate of any living being on earth, and consume their body weight in nectar each day to survive. They are literally made of flowers, and the flowers are made by them.

intimate lovers, hummingbird and wild dagga

According to my teacher Rocío, hummingbirds have the ability to transport and transmute high levels of energy. These little ones move at such a high speed (80 wing beats per second!), they can appear invisible to the human eye, moving back and forth between the realms of form and spirit. “Tiny living lightning” is what Pablo Neruda calls them in his poem, “ode to the hummingbird”, in which he also acknowledges that these little beings seem to be from a different dimension:

oh,
tiny
living
lightning,
when you hover
in the air,
you are a body
of pollen,
a feather,
a hot coal,
I ask you:

what is your substance?
and from where do you originate?

Rocío was taught by her lineage of Ecuadorian grandmothers that hummingbirds and flowers have been co-evolving together for thousands of years, working together to continually generate new synergies of healing energy— frequencies that are direly needed by our changing planet. This co-creation is the actual essence of the term “high vibration.”

let the frequency of the earth remind you who you are

Through their humming sound, high speed, and iridescent plumage, they deposit healing frequencies into the flowers each time they take a sip of nectar. The plants then continue to pass along that blueprint of energy through their lineage of seeds. Hummingbirds amplify the electromagnetic field of plants, which allows the plants to then generate higher levels of aromatics and medicine. This iridescence transforms our cells not only when we eat or drink plants as food and medicine, but we also receive it simply from being around the plants.

Over and over, I have listened to Rocío speak about the healing frequencies of nature, and how these forces have the ability to re-attune us to our own luminosity. We don’t even have to do anything — we simply go into nature, and allow the spirit-saturated forces of trees, flowers, birds, stones to do their healing work on us. Hummingbirds, as tiny as they seem, have a particularly powerful healing frequency for our planet, according to Rocío the teachings from her grandmothers.

Rocío always taught us that here in the Americas, where the hummingbirds live, we should all try to have at least one pot of flowers outside our door (especially tubular, mint-family flowers). The purpose of this is to create a giant flowering bridge that the hummingbirds can follow, a path to provide them with nectar on their migration journeys. I have heard Rocío describe this as mandatory, for the healing of humans and our planet, particularly in a time of increasing habitat loss (flower loss).

Hummingbirds encompass two magical extremes: they are both the smallest bird in the world, while also having the longest migration distance relative to their size. A rainbow bridge of flowers could truly make a difference in their travels. And wouldn’t it be a magical thing for humans to create together?

offerings along the flowering bridge

Each garden is one little flower stop along the hummingbird migration route. Exactly six months after that fateful first trill of the hummingbird arrival, my garden is on fire with such flowering fullness that it breaks my heart to see. She has done it again. But there is a clear letting go that arises each year when the garden reaches its peak of flowering. In that same breath of fullness, of wild embodied flourishing, the heartbreak of farewell is whispered.

This year, watching the garden unfold into a crescendo of its most unbearable beauty, my heart breaks as usual. The nights grow cold again. And that’s when I start listening, in increasing awareness, to longer and longer stretches of silence in the once-humming garden. Oh, the hummingbirds.

Their jeweled zips and hums and trills, endless bickering and dive-bombing each other at the speed of light— those magical little voices are the healing sound bath for the entire garden. The growing silence is filled with their impending absence. I grieve for the flowers, who I know will miss them as much as I do. And I cry for the generosity of the flowers, for their knowing of how to bloom mostly wildly in perfect timing. Right at the moment when the hummingbirds need to almost double their body weight in order to make their pilgrimage, the flowers give them everything they have. The garden in September looks like one giant flowering altar, the plants’ last offering of their finest nectar, as their winged beloveds prepare to depart.

true love

I woke up to a particularly cold morning last week, much colder than predicted. I ran to the garden at dawn and listened for them. My eyes filled with tears at the utter silence. At the stillness of the still-blooming flowers. I walked inside crying, feeling like I had utterly failed. I hadn’t said goodbye, I hadn’t told them enough times how much I loved them, or wished them well for their long difficult journeys. It is like this every year, one moment they’re there, and then they vanish. But this time, I wasn’t ready. I really wept.

A few hours later, from inside the house I thought I heard a faint familiar trill. In disbelief, I ran outside and there they were: not one or two, but perhaps twenty hummingbirds zipping around the garden with their usual ardor. Not only had they not left yet, but a whole new group of them had arrived on their travels from further north. I cried all over again. I felt like I was being given another chance to love them as freely and as fiercely as I had always meant to.

I sat with them for hours that day, studying them, listening, and talking to them. I asked them what it felt like, to prepare for such a very long journey but to not take a single thing along with them. No backpack, no snacks, no map. Just their tiny rainbow bodies and a whole-hearted devotion to nectar. Usually they need to drink nectar every fifteen minutes or so in order to survive, but much of their few thousand mile journey requires them to cross flowerless oceans or hundreds of miles of desolate desert.

I imagined what it might feel like to set out on such a journey, with nothing but my body and a longing in my heart. To let go of everything I had known, trusting the invisible path of nectar. Hummingbirds teach us to go mapless, toward the flowering mystery that calls us.

“small, superlative being, you are a miracle, shimmering.” -pablo neruda

Their great pilgrimage is what breaks my heart most. Their bravery, and their knowing. I want to honor it, to send them off well, with prayers and love for those long flowerless stretches. My love for the hummingbirds requires me to let go of them for half of the year. To say farewell, to wish them well on their journeys, and trust that they will be taken care of along the way. To pray to the flowers to bloom brightly, nectar-rich, so that the hummingbirds might find them, to ask the clouds and the winds to be gentle during their travels. I like to imagine their destination more full of flowers than they ever could have dreamed. And I like to imagine myself letting go into loving them, more than I ever could have dreamed.

To watch them leave is to agree to fall in love with the invisible. To tearfully say goodbye to what we love the most is to enter into relationship with mystery. To trust that what we love will not only find us again, but that it will remain with us even when we cannot see it.

This is the question I have been walking with recently: If I were to let go of every single thing that makes me “me” - all the labels, the patterns, the stories, the sorts of things we might include when writing a short bio about ourselves - if I let it all go, what remains?

What I know remains is the love I feel for the hummingbirds. And the mysterious memory of a river stone’s smooth touch on my skin. The ecstatic first glimpse of the tiny new moon’s return, and how it spoke to a part of me that was both cellular and beyond-cellular. I think that perhaps our greatest act of ecological participation is when we allow ourselves to fall in love with the other-than-human beings. By loving the hummingbird, I gain access to an understanding of belonging to the entire world. Not just the present physical world, but also a softer one — one of starlight, of mist, of shared ancestral lineages that are braided throughout us all. Woven with iridescent threads.

The utmost creative gift humans are here to offer really has very little to do with the things we make, or what we call ourselves — our real creative gift is our ability to see with new eyes. To see through the eyes of the heart. Can you close your eyes for one moment, and let yourself see the world through the prismatic lens of your heart? And to feel Gaia seeing, through you.

so just keep going, keep going.
until the heart really bursts open.

—Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo

I am just one small being who gets the great blessing of being visited by another species I love dearly. My moments with them are fleeting, and also infinite. We are all receiving these sorts of visitations all the time, from our other-than-human friends. As one of my teachers once put it, we are all just friends on the path. Or as Ram Dass said, we are all just walking each other home.

And in the end, we will ask ourselves if we loved each other well enough to say, with a sincere heart, farewell my friend, and blessings on your journey. And what a gift it has been to walk alongside you for just a moment. And may we find each other again somewhere, someday.

There is a tenderness in these farewell wishes that requires the heart to break a little. And in its breaking, the heart becomes the open door that no one can shut.

the sincerity
of this moment
is eternal time.

—Jade Brunel

Somehow this writing mysteriously became my tender goodbye letter, my broken-hearted love letter to the hummingbirds, who so graciously gave me the opportunity to bid them a proper and radiant farewell this year. This was the most present and loving, ceremonial goodbye I have ever wished upon anyone… leave it to the hummingbirds to evoke that kind of healing.

The autumnal equinox offers us an invitation to grieve well, which means finally letting ourselves love as freely and fearlessly as we’ve longed to. We get a chance to add our unique essence to this ceremony. The earth is fading before our eyes, birds are migrating, many wild ones are scurrying around getting ready to descend into the dark earth. The world above ground is growing dark as well. And as we bear witness to it all, there is more than enough time to wish all the others well, to say sweet dreams, and thank you, and see you again soon. If you, too, are just entering into autumn here in the northern hemisphere, here is your reminder: it is not too late to sing your praise and heartache to the land. It is never too late to tell this world exactly how much it has meant to you.

And to my dear hummingbirds: I will be dreaming of you until next spring.

Thank you so much for being part of my life.

May your journeys be swift, and filled with nectar.

May the flowers always find you.

May the whole earth be your petal.

May you always bathe this world with light.

to transform our despair into active care for the world

here is our first
and only assignment:

to fall in love
with the magnificent wild beings
of this great earth community

so that we might remember
our responsibility
to invoke
our own magnificence.

P.S. At the time of sending this, there are still four hummingbirds in my garden. I read this whole letter out loud to them just before pressing send - one of them zipped right up into my face.

P.P.S. If you live in a part of the world without hummingbirds, know that planting flowers still infinitely serves all of the winged ones who live near you. Even if it’s just one potted plant, wherever you are, flowers will feed the pollinators, and then provide seeds for the birds passing through. May we build the rainbow bridge across all of earth, and never underestimate the power of planting flowers. Perhaps especially sunflowers.