All your past, except its beauty, is gone and nothing remains but a blessing.
~A Course in Miracles
Healing is a wonderful Australian film based on a real life program in which prisoners in a minimum-security facility assist in the rehabilitation of injured raptors. The film is set at the time of the inception of the program, which coincides with the arrival of the main character, Viktor Khadem, at the prison farm. He is recruited for the construction of the facilities to house the birds and is thus involved in the program from the ground up, metaphorically creating a template for the fresh start he is preparing for in his own life. The theme of the injured birds being rehabilitated for release back into their natural environment is reflected in the lives of the inmates preparing for integration back into regular society. The contrast and similarities between those involved in the program and the injured birds is explored with sensitivity and empathy.
Wedge-tailed Eagle
The avian star of the movie is a magnificent Wedge-tailed Eagle named Yasmine and the close up opening scenes of her soaring through the air are breathtaking. Most of us only get to see these giants of the skies up close in captivity, or on road trips. The sight of Wedgies feeding on road kill is familiar to anyone who has spent time traversing the endless stretches of roadways that criss-cross this vast continent. The elegance they exhibit when fully airborne is in stark contrast to their clumsiness as they beat a hasty retreat from their meal and lift their massive bulk into the air when a vehicle approaches at high speed.
Part of the appeal of the film for me was that it resurrected the memory of a powerful healing dream I’d had 6 years after my husband’s death and after seeing the movie I felt inspired to share it.
This is the dream:
I’m walking alongside a road when I see some feathers on the ground. I look at them, wondering if they are from an eagle. I spot one that I know is an eagle’s feather. I show it to a man who appears nearby and as I do, it transforms into a giant feather that reaches right across the road and touches a pine tree on the opposite side.
At that moment a car comes along and I lift the feather like a boom gate to allow it to go by. Inside the car are three young men, all laughing as if enjoying a joke together. They look familiar but the car whizzes by too quickly for me to identify them. Just as they pass, the end of the feather breaks where I am holding it and I see that inside the shaft is a spiral structure, which I assume gives strength to the shaft.
I am awestruck trying to imagine the size of the bird that this feather must have come from. In my mind’s eye I see it flying over, slowly and silently observing all below.
I was quite perplexed by this dream as I couldn’t identify any of the characters and yet I felt I knew them. The man who materialized at the roadside with me I recognized as the same one who had been on the bus with me in my original vision and who showed up in just this same way in many dreams. Over time I came to regard him as a kind of companion/guide. He didn’t speak but it was as though the act of showing him the feather caused it to grow. I felt that it was a significant dream but didn’t know where to start, so posted it to the dream forum I was on at the time with the comment that I thought feathers might indicate a message from the spirit realm but didn’t know what the message was.
Later, I resumed the book I had been reading the night before I had the dream, Hello From Heaven, which was about after death communications – ADCs. There were some stories of unusual encounters with birds that bereaved persons felt were messengers from their deceased loved ones and as I was reading, my mind drifted onto the dream. Soon I was absorbed in a treasured memory of an encounter with a trio of Wedge-tailed Eagles, presumably a pair of adults and a juvenile, that my late husband and I had been privileged to share. The 16 acre property we lived on had panoramic views of the surrounding countryside and I had just come from the house when I spotted them spiralling slowly upwards out of a valley, one above the other, on a thermal. I called Roger over and we stood together watching them.
Initially we could see them clearly with our naked eyes but as they rose higher and higher they became harder to see, so I went to get the binoculars. We stood together silently, passing the binoculars back and forth and as we watched, the first one left the thermal and glided off in a straight line. It then began circling widely until the second one joined it and finally, when the third one reached them, they headed due east at a constant altitude. By this time they were barely visible even with the binoculars and we soon lost sight of them. With the spell broken, we went back to what we had been doing.
As that memory faded, another incident came to mind that occurred on this same property. We had a large shed we wanted to use to collect rainwater from but the three huge pine trees adjacent to it were constantly dropping pine needles into the gutters. They also posed a fire hazard to the shed and so on that basis and taking into account that they weren’t native to the area, we reluctantly decided to cut them down.
There is a bit of skill involved in tree felling but we had removed a few smaller pines by this time, so didn’t anticipate any problems. The first two fell without incident but the third one refused to topple. Eventually Roger decided to get the tractor out and pull it over using a very long rope and while he was organizing it, I went and got my camera. This was a pre-digital SLR with a mechanical lever to advance the film and as the tractor started to inch forward, I put my eye to the viewfinder to take a shot of the scene while the tree was still standing. It started to lean ever so slowly but took so long to fall that I was able to wind the film on and get another shot with it mid way before it finally crashed to the ground.
I took more shots of the whole scene. There was now light and space where previously there had been a great wall of dark green and the three majestic trees lay in a row amidst shattered branches and hundreds of scattered pinecones. By this time the noise from the chain saw and tractor and the sound of crashing trees had faded into silence and as I lowered the camera and surveyed the scene, tears began to roll down my face. Roger came over and said, “Did that make you feel sad?” I nodded my head and he said, “It did me too.”
Now a whole cascade of memories began crowding my mind, triggering an upwelling of grief but just as it threatened to overwhelm me, I heard a voice inside my head say, “Don’t pine for me!” I knew instantly that this was the message of the dream and it was coming from Roger. In a flash I also knew who the figures in the car were: Roger was in the driver’s seat and with him in the front was my sister’s husband, Kim, who had died two years before him. Kim and Roger had worked together in their teens and Kim had introduced Roger and I. In the back of the dream car was my cousin, Ray, who had died the year before Kim. Three young men, all in their forties, dead within three years of each other but if the dream was anything to go by they were having a ball and right in that moment I envied them. It had been a very difficult 6 years since Roger’s passing and at the time I had the dream I was at my lowest point. I felt more like the felled trees than the soaring eagles.
I was a bit mystified by the message at first because although I knew I wasn’t fully over my grief, I wouldn’t have described it as pining. Then I remembered a quite dramatic incident from the night before I had the dream. In the book Hello From Heaven that I had been reading, there was a story of a young man who had been killed in a helicopter crash appearing to his mother, telling her he was happy and imploring her to let go of him. As I read the story, I began to wonder if there had been any resolution to the visitation I’d had from Roger 4 years earlier in which he had asked me to speak to his mother because she wasn’t letting go of him. I began mentally talking to him, asking if everything was O.K. now and if not to let me know if I could do anything to help.
As if on cue, there was a loud bang from the adjacent room. The cat that had been asleep on the bed in the room came flying out with her fur standing on end and I leaped up from my chair sending the cat on my lap flying for cover. I went into the room to investigate but couldn’t see anything amiss. It had sounded similar to a bird hitting the windowpane but besides being unlikely because it was nighttime, the shutters were down, so it didn’t make sense.
Needless to say I felt more than a little disturbed by this. Was Roger saying he is not at peace? The subject of his prior visitation had been dropped from any conversation with my mother in law soon after it happened and she had since moved interstate. I no longer had much contact with her and besides, spirit visits were a subject I was somewhat wary about myself at the time, so didn’t feel inclined to broach the subject with her again. I did the only thing I could think of and said a prayer for her to find peace and closure. That night I had the dream.
As I reviewed the whole unfolding saga from the pre-dream incident and the dream itself, to the memories it evoked and the message I received, it became clear that ‘don’t pine for me’ was more like ‘stop worrying about me.’ The visitation I’d had previously from Roger was unmistakably real and had convinced me once and for all of the survival of consciousness but because it was a plea for help with no satisfactory resolution rather than a message of reassurance, it had raised more questions than it answered. My search for understanding is what had led me to reading Hello From Heaven .
Although the dream helped me let go of the concern and sense of responsibility I had been feeling on Roger’s behalf, I was still left wondering about how unfinished business for those who have passed on is dealt with. This had never been a concern when I believed that death was the end of the story. Eventually, I would make an in-depth study of a wide range of beliefs and viewpoints concerning what is generally referred to as the afterlife but in the meantime, I decided my main priority was to sort myself out. Regardless of what I learned about what happened after death, I didn’t want to be dealing with unfinished business on my deathbed or taking it with me if I was going somewhere else, nor did I want to leave any mess behind for anyone else to deal with if I could help it. I had an intuitive sense that it was best to deal with the problems I had while I was alive and I still hold that viewpoint.
One aspect of the dream I could never come to any definite conclusion about is whether or not I was seeing the spirits of the three males who’d died or whether they were regular dream figures. Was it a case of my dreaming mind giving me an image that would put my mind at rest? A psychoanalytic approach would certainly see it that way but it didn’t feel right to me at the time and still doesn’t and in the final analysis that is what counts. Dream interpretation is an art, not an exact science. One thing I can say is that the dream didn’t lend itself to the usual kind of psychological analysis of the characters. Even after I realized who the occupants of the car were, I couldn’t make that approach fit. I’ve had countless dreams of Roger over time but this one stands out in my mind as having a very different feel to it.
The presence of my ‘guide’ was an important clue that this was no ordinary dream but there were also the feathers, the pine tree and the spiral inside the feather. Feathers and birds are universal symbols of the connection between heaven and earth, as are trees with their roots in the ground and crowns in the air. Conifers have a special significance because they are evergreen and so are symbols of eternal life. The spiral, which was in the dream itself and repeated in the associated memories of the spiraling eagles and the patterning of the pine cones, is a universal pattern and also symbolic of the link between heaven and earth, as it is ubiquitous throughout nature and the cosmos.
As for what made the loud noise, I never did find out but it certainly got my attention and having had more of this type of incident than I can possibly count by now, I know better than to put it down to ‘just a coincidence.’
