The Canadian geese stop here on their way south. One year on a cold clear evening, during a brilliant sunset I stood at the water's edge as raft after raft of geese flew over my head and landed on the shallow edge of the tide.

Another year while I was still teaching, and immersed in summer vacation, I heard their call just before August. It was a sad call because I knew that I needed to begin preparing my classroom for September. That same day I got a call from the principal telling me that I needed to move to a different school. The call of the geese haunted me all year, as the resentment of having to spend August packing and unpacking for a class of special needs kindergartners festered it's way into too much of my conscious and unconscious interactions.

One year a dear friend of my mother's, a woman who was a professor and a mentor to me gave me a small watercolor of a lonely goose flying through the clouds. My mother told me that this friend told her that I reminded her of a wild goose.

My first year teaching in a small community in eastern Washington, was in a school that looked out upon the McNeary Bird Preserve. It was also on the flyway for the Canadian geese, and watching them arrive and depart in their formation, calling and spreading out through the wide open sky was mesmerizing, and provided a respite from the frustrations of trying to survive my first year of teaching in a strange place.

My relationship to Canadian geese could be helpful in making sense of something I've been reading about Native American spirituality and the natural world of signs. I started reading Spirits of the Earth A Guide to Native American Nature, Symbols, Stories, and Ceremonies by Bobby Lake-Thom, Penguin Group, 1997. The author describes how an animal can be a spirit guide by appearing and leading you through physical or mental challenges. I want to incorporate this understanding into my story for my characters, but it is a tremendous reach for my imagination.

Maybe if I can let myself accept that the Canadian geese that interrupt my consciousness, and have intervened at significant times, may be relatives with whom I share a reciprocal relationship. We both share the bay where they rest on their way south. The memory of their call on my last year of teaching when I decided it was time to retire has always seemed significant. Maybe it isn't such a stretch to allow my spirit to connect with their spirit of cooperation, purpose, and fortitude.

I am learning that the Native connection to nature was organic, connecting their breath and livelihood with their spirit and internal world. I am attempting to allow myself to become aware of the ways that I can listen to the signs and accept that they may have messages for me outside of my own American Catholic paradigm. If feels like digging through layers of topsoil, digging past the leaf-meal, down past the sludge of American history textbooks and Saturday morning catechism class, to discover a different connection to the spirit, the word that means breath, that makes me live in the physical present and connects me with the world of all ancestors.

This is feeling a bit unhinged, but I need to let myself go there because my characters are of that world and they want to breathe and show us what we lost by rejecting their world and by trying to murder their culture. So I will keep reading this inspiring book and keep trying to listen.

Listening for signs

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