Feral Friends, 

In June we gathered a small group of  therapists, poets, counselors, yogis, educators, grad students and a psychiatrist for an ecopsychology cohort. We met in verdant spaces in the company of wild creatures and flowing waters to revive the best and wildest parts of ourselves and to explore creative ways to help our patients, clients, and students do the same. 

One sweet riparian morning it was Billie Shelton’s turn to offer a prompt. She began with a poem by Mary Oliver: Some Questions You Might Ask:

Is the soul solid, like iron?

Or is it tender and breakable, like

the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?

…Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?

Like the eye of a hummingbird?

Following Oliver’s long series of questions, Billie added her own:

How did the bluebirds know I needed their blueness on this day?

Did the fox feel the same oneness when our eyes met?

Why did I grow up along the River, eating mulberries and talking to the frogs, and not in a refugee camp?

And more. Billie released us to walk along the wooded creek and to listen, breathe, smell, gaze, taste and touch (watch for poison ivy!) and to let questions unfold and to look for answers within the questions. To find the shape and weight of our souls, to enter more deeply the silent textures of birdsong and a thousand eyes upon us. At least that’s how I understood Billie’s instructions, and I spent the rest of the morning thinking about a hummingbird’s eye — that deep and ebony pool of endless questions that shape the better parts of my soul. 

May you be likewise blessed and obsessed. May you find a friend like Billie.

—Jack Phillips

Photos: It is our good fortune to have in our kith and coterie some fine photographers and it is also our good fortune that Finn Soderberg shot some hummingbirds this past breeding season. Top: Male ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) in Washington County, NE. Bottom: Male broad-tailed hummingbird (Selasphorus platycercus) in Medicine Bow National Forest, WY.