In the spring of 2023, when I heard about the Eco-Spiritual Direction program offered through the Center for Wild Spirituality, I resonated with an immediate YES! It felt like this was what my life had been leading up to, all these years.
Quite some time ago, I had a dream in which people came to my house to die. I accepted this in the dream, without any sense of how this could be at all true, in my waking life. My house isn’t set up for the dying, after all, but the dream has not left me.
In the past couple of years or so, I have companioned and supported three women friends on their final journey. I have sat with others and their families through my work. But recently, the Wild showed me something deeper. In between errands and appointments, I stopped for lunch in Fredericton’s Odell Park. As I walked toward a picnic table, I noticed a tiny red squirrel on the ground, not moving. Was it dead? I poked it with a twig. No, it wasn’t dead, but something was wrong. It just lay there, barely breathing.
I held my hand above its tiny body, my fingers tingling as I sent it energy and flower essences. To my total surprise, it hopped up and scampered away! It wasn’t long, though, as I sat eating, before the little squirrel raced around my table, coming to a stop on the concrete pad behind me. There it collapsed, head on the ground, with its hind legs still on the run. Perhaps it was a seizure. Soon its little body lay still.
As I watched its labored breathing, I offered more energy and flower essences, but this time it did not recover. In minutes, it was gone, and the flies began to gather. I carried it to a crook in a tree root, and covered it with leaves, needles and bark – a wee funeral for a wee creature.
I was left wondering – why did this little red squirrel come back to the cement pad to die? Once it was on its feet, it could have found a place of quiet shade for its death. Why did it circle my table and stop, right there, behind me? Could it be asking for my care and companionship?
A few days ago, we started classes again, and I took my intentions out to the Wild as we had been invited to do. I sat on a rock where I often sit, in the companionship of the More-than-Human Others in that place. I heard a crow, a plane, a tractor, a blue jay, a sparrow, and…. a mosquito. She sat on my finger, on my nose, my cheek. Neither of us hurt the other. And she said:
“I am small, but everyone notices me. I am small, but I bravely approach those who hold me in contempt. I am small, but I change lives. I am small, but I can change the world.”
I am not brave like Mosquito. I would rather be quiet and unobtrusive, to keep my ideas and gifts protected and safe. But Mosquito assured me that what I have, what I can offer, is precious. We are building something new together, and the pieces I bring are part of the construction.
I may not know what parts are gold, and which are iron or steel or plantlike, but it is all important, none of it too small, she told me.
And so, with the encouragement of Mosquito, after one classmate told of companioning her dog in his last days, and another woman spoke of how often spiritual directors work with the dying, I told the story of the little red squirrel.
Perhaps I am being called to companion dying humans, as they approach the Numinous. Perhaps the call to work with the dying was the message from the little red squirrel, just to be sure I got the point. But maybe it is more than that.
We are living in a time of mass extinction, they tell us. As species die, and eco-systems change, are we being called to companion More-than-Human Others? We humans need the companionship of the Wild, but maybe, just maybe, the Wild needs our companionship too.
Dream Bringer’s Studio 