Dawn's Notes
On Eagles' Wings - June 2018
by Dawn Phelps, RN/LMSW
Eagles—graceful, proud, magnificent! Eagles—symbolic of pride and strength. Eagles—flying at thirty miles an hour, soaring high in the air, or diving at thirty miles per hour to snatch a fish from a stream, quickly rising again!
Have you ever wondered where eagles nest or how they learn how to fly? If you are interested, let’s begin on a very high cliff with a stream meandering through the valley floor. The air is crisp and cool. The sky is blue, and the day is clear with an occasional whimsical cloud floating high overhead.
On the edge of the cliff there is a large nest which was built by a male and female eagle. It is about four feet wide and three feet deep, made from limbs and lined with pine needles, soft mosses, feathers, grass, or leaves. The nest is a just-right place to rear a couple of baby eaglets.
The parent eagles usually mate for life and return to the nest year after year. They repair the nest by adding limbs and additional lining until the nest is extremely heavy—sometimes heavy enough to topple a tree if that is where the nest is built! Then the female lays one to three speckled, off-white colored eggs. In about thirty-five days, soft fuzzy eaglets will peck their way out of the eggshells.
The babies emerge vulnerable, totally dependent on their parents for food. They grow rapidly, and their once-comfortable nest becomes crowded. In need of space, the young eaglets are forced to move to the edge of the nest where they discover a new world below. “Wow! What a view!” There is green grass, trees, water, and flowers—entirely different sights and colors from their drab, brown nest.
The mother knows her eaglets must soon leave the security of the nest. There are new lessons to learn if they are to grow into strong, independent eagles, and she knows they must learn to fly. “How scary,” a little one might think or “No way am I going to do that!” as he clings to the edge of the nest!
Then the mother gradually removes mosses and leaves that line the nest, exposing the rough limbs that poke into the young birds—“Ouch!” The mother quits bringing food regularly, and the eaglets become hungry and lose weight. Then she flies by the hungry eaglets with a tasty morsel of meat. She dangles it just out of reach as the babies perch on the edge of the nest.
Motivated by hunger, the eaglets try to grab the meat from their mother’s beak. As they reach, they may temporarily become airborne for a few seconds. Next the mother may fly near the nest and gently push an eaglet out of the nest. Startled, the baby will instinctively spread his wings and flap. To his surprise, his wings may hold him up and he flies!
If a young eagle begins to fall, the mother swoops beneath and catches him on her back. She may give him a ride, dump him, and catch him again. Flying lessons, exciting and exhilarating to the onlooker, are probably anxiety-producing and scary for the eaglets.
In life, we humans face many kinds of crises, scary times such as divorce, sicknesses, relationship struggles, financial problems, or deaths of someone we love. During these times, we are forced to make changes in our lives. Like the eaglets, our nests become uncomfortable as our soft lining, our old familiar life, is removed.
When someone we love dies, we grieve. Grieving is hard work, and we are vulnerable. We, like the eaglets, are challenged to cope, to personally grow, to develop new flying wings in our unfamiliar world.
From time to time, we need to rely on our faith, friends, and family to catch us when we fall, to let them swoop under us and pick us up. Eventually, we, like the eaglets, will find that life can be good again. We will find a new normal. We, like the eagles, will learn to spread our wings, catch an air current, and fly.
She was afraid of heights,
but she was much more afraid of never flying.
- Atticus
Call about the next "Living Life after Loss" Group at:
Meadowlark Hospice
709 Liberty, Clay Center, Kansas
(785) 632-2225
Dawn Phelps, RN/LMSW, Group Facilitator