On Hyacinths and Bald Eagles
As I waited for my coffee to brew, a small spot of pink caught my eye through the kitchen window. The gray bark of pines trees, the brown straw on the ground, the winter yellow of the zoysia grass - the winter palette doesn’t contain pink. Was it litter? What was it? I dashed outside barefoot in my robe to get a closer look. It was a tiny hyacinth, barely pushing its way through the debris of sticks, leaves and straw that amass in the bed around the trees over the winter. Nearby I saw a second one, this one deep purple.
Where did they come from?
Then a picture flashed in my mind - the window sill of my room on the 3rd floor of Baptist Hospital in the winter of 2022, a pot of blooming bulbs someone sent me. Or was it from the friends who cleaned my house and stocked the refrigerator the day before I came home? They also left fresh plants sitting in my living room and bedroom.
Were those hyacinths?
When did I plant these bulbs?
Or did I?
My sister probably did it while she was here caring for me in the long slow days of healing that winter and spring, one of the hundreds of small acts of caretaking, situated between taking out the trash, changing the sheets, or folding my laundry while I lay sleeping and breathing. Somewhere in all that ordinary stuff, I probably said, “Let’s save those bulbs and plant them.” She did and I forgot, and she probably has too. But the Maker of the bulbs and the dirt and the sunshine and the water does not forget.
He sees.
El Roi.
The name the lonely, mistreated, forgotten woman named Hagar gave God. (Gen. 16)
The One Who Sees Me.
He kept track of the pink and purple hyacinths, buried in the soil, under all those layers of death, and from it I am caught in wonder for a few moments with what I behold. Beauty does that- catches us and holds us. We have to stop and gaze and breathe. We want to take it into ourselves.
I wanted to go straight to my journal and write about it. The praise of my heart seeks expression in language. But before I could get to my journal, movement out of another window caught my eye. A bald eagle had landed in a pine tree not twenty yards off my back deck!
What grace!
My husband and I barely moved. We stood transfixed. We’ve seen eagles a few times, soaring above the lake or high up in a distant tree, but this one had come so close. She landed on the lowest branch of the closest tree to us. She was enormous. Full white head and full white tail feathers signal her maturity. She was a grown mother bird. This was her territory, her hunting ground, the place where she will mate and hatch her young. Maybe she already has. She sat there with such power, confidence, and authority.
We dared not touch a doorknob. We held our breath that the dogs inside the house with us would not bark. We joked that our miniature schnauzer could be picked up and carried off for breakfast were he outside. I took an insane amount of pictures. We must have watched the eagle for fifteen minutes or more before I braved going out a door on the opposite side of the house, tiptoeing around the porch barefoot, and reaching the back deck where I could stand face to face with the eagle and get the closest possible picture. It was magical!
After not one but two astonishing moments of beauty, I found myself wondering if there was anything connection between the two. The bulbs called me to ponder what is held in the dark ground, even buried long ago, that might be about to sprout and bloom? I thought of prayers I’ve prayed and prayers prayed for me. One prayer I literally “buried” in a pot of dirt (symbolized by an acorn) in 2017. I did not see that prayer “live” until 2021. I remembered words spoken to me by someone pouring into my life 15 years ago, which have manifested in vocational calling in the last two years. This is what the hyacinth embodies. What is unseen, but exist somewhere, full of life already, that I might wait in faith and hope for?
Minutes before the eagle landed, she was somewhere out there on the wind. Like the eagle, what might be heading toward me that is full of majesty and power and I don’t even know to ask for it? Both my seminary experience and my path or ordination were like that. They came to me, seemingly out of nowhere, not bulbs I had planted, more like the eagle swooping into my yard, up close, stopping me in my tracks and refusing to leave until my morning routine was thoroughly interrupted.
Grace comes from old prayers prayed or acts of kindness long ago buried and forgotten and it comes as sheer gift, swooping in related to nothing we’ve done or left undone, remembered or forgotten. It’s just grace - all of it.
We only have one part - to notice.
To see the One Who Sees Us.
Shhhhh!
Be still.
Wait.
Watch.
At any moment, Grace will surprise you.
