It was a mild, late spring Sunday. We drove for about thirty minutes down dirt roads across the prairies above the long gash of rock canyon that houses the narrow, lush, and green (as the Spanish name says) Verde River. We had just slowed down to rattle across a rusty cattle guard when Thomas commented, “Did you see that pigeon? That’s weird…it didn’t fly away or even move when we drove through.” I thought nothing more of it, and we kept driving toward our destination.

Once out of the car, we ambled gently down a dirt road through national forest, basking in vistas of distant surrounding mountains, red and ocher to the east toward Sedona and purple blue to the south toward Prescott. Spring would soon to pass into summer, but on this day the sun was still mild, the air calm with a lilting, caressing breeze, the earth beneath our feet pliable. All along the way, we drank in the beauty of the early summer wildflowers. The enjoyment of nature’s bounty gave rise to a mood—an expanse of inner space that matched the sky, free of anxiety, obsessing, or dread, free of cloying attachments, dramas, and drives, free of concepts, free of the constricting costumes of my usual personality.

Yes, it was a free moment, an enlightened moment—a gift in which the essence hidden beneath all that poses and presumes to be “me” was allowed to unfold in simplicity, in the graceful just this-ness of the here and now. Everything I saw shone with a gentle soulful presence, an earthy divinity that imbued me with a rare inner peace.

As the sun moved down the western horizon and the shadows grew long, we arrived back at our car and drove the same gravel roads in the direction of home. But we had not gone very far when, approaching the cattle guard again, we rolled to a stop, rendered speechless by the scene before us. There, some twelve feet away, a pigeon stood very still, head down, about one inch away from its crumpled mate that lay in a stony, silent pool of death upon the ground.

Finally I said, “That’s the pigeon that you saw earlier, isn’t it? The one that didn’t fly away when we drove through before?” My eyes were rooted to the birds, and I stated in dismay what was obvious to us both, that the bird was waiting for its mate to get up, so they could fly away together. We sat there a while longer in dismay, taking it in. The living bird did not move at all, and its head drooped, as if in deep grief.

What do we self-absorbed humans know of what animals experience? Why would a bird mate for life, as many do? Why would the pigeon stand there for hours after its mate was shot dead? Most people would say that it is only an instinct driven by survival of the species. I am not convinced this is the only reason the bird remained at the side of its pair mate.

Putting the car into park, Thomas got out and walked slowly toward the birds. When he got about one foot away, the living bird finally, reluctantly it seemed, fluttered up and landed just a few feet away on a fence post, where it stayed while, using a stick, he rolled the dead pigeon, its feathers all akimbo, into the brush well away from the road. As soon as he walked away, the waiting pigeon flew back to stand beside the dead bird.

Getting back into the car, he said, “At least it won’t get run over…the dead bird or the live one.”

“How long has it been dead?” I asked.

“A few hours, at least,” he answered. “It was already stiff.” He paused for a moment, then added, “It was shot. There was blood all over.” If it had been a natural death by a predator, the bird would have been eaten—it is not uncommon to come across a pile of feathers while out walking in the desert prairie. As we drove away, reverberations of the birds, living and dead, hit me full force. Human beings kill birds, and other animals, and each other, for no reason at all. There are always terrible consequences to acts of violence.

Back at home, sunset turned to dusk as I sat on my porch to look out over at purple mountains and ponder how the mood of freedom and beauty had changed when death arrived on the scene in a collision between the sweet and the bitter.

As the days passed, the symbolic impression of the two birds remained with me, and I realized that I had been opened by the immanent power of God. Thus liberated, my attention was floating freely when I was seized, shocked by the birds into a deeper contemplation of how the Great Mother gives both birth and death.

This is not news. Kali is often imagined with four arms: two of these display the “have no fear” and “blessing mudras,” while the other two hold a huge head-chopping blade and a dangling, bloody, chopped head. The Great Mother as Harbinger of Time gives and takes away. We’ve all been through iterations and cycles of ebb and flow in the currents of our lives. My own life has been thickly populated with experiences of abundance and loss, endings and beginnings. And yet, each time the wheel turns and I arrive at the point in the cycle when the Great Mother casts Her gaze my way, when She speaks directly to me, when She chooses to awaken me further, I am conducted into awe.