The Hummingbird
On grief, healing, and the messages that find you when you're ready to receive them
I am heading home after an intense week at a retreat aptly called Who Am I Now?
The week was spent in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at about 6,500 feet — clear sky, expansive views that extended forever. Maybe showing me the limitless possibilities ahead. Maybe just reminding me how much space there is, when you step outside the noise of ordinary life and let yourself look.
On the final morning, I am sitting with coffee, taking in the last moments of silence before heading back to the real world. A hummingbird arrives — floating over the flowering bushes just outside, hovering with an incredible stillness that belies the work it takes to stay in the air. There and then gone. Present and then not.
Something tugged at me. I looked up the symbolism.
Hummingbirds, across many traditions, represent joy, resilience, hope, and emotional healing. In Native American and Mexican cultures, they are sacred messengers of good fortune, courage, and love. And across many traditions, a hummingbird sighting is understood as a sign that a departed loved one is near, and at peace.
It was this last interpretation that stayed with me — the belief that a hummingbird’s appearance signals the end of a difficult time, and the beginning of healing.
I sat with that for a long moment.
The retreat brought together a group of people all inside the same search — smart, supportive, honest people asking the same essential question: Who am I now, after everything that has changed? We did the work that question demands. The kind that doesn’t happen quickly or comfortably, but that opens something when it’s done.
I came in carrying what I always carry — the grief of losing Lee and the person he was before the disease, the grief of losing the person I was before the caregiver took over, the grief of the self I misplaced somewhere in those years and am still in the process of finding. And with the space and the people and the silence finally available, I did something I hadn’t fully done before: I looked at it directly. I said it out loud. I let other people witness it — and witnessed theirs in return.
That was its own hummingbird moment. Feelings and realizations hovering briefly, crystallizing in my mind and heart — clarifying the direction I need to face. It did its work and then was gone, leaving me changed by having seen it.
Somewhere in that week, I understood how much work I’ve already been doing. Reaching inside myself to nurture what the caregiving years depleted. Reaching outward to build a new life — integrating a new community with a trusted and cherished former one. Writing. Traveling. Showing up, even on the days when showing up takes everything. And now this: four days in a vast and open terrain, surrounded by strangers who became my people just when I needed them. We listened to each other and supported each other and cheered each other on. For those four days, we were each other’s people.
And I began to see it clearly — not for the first time, but perhaps for the first time without flinching.
Grief and healing are not opposites. They are not a sequence, with grief first and healing after, a clean handoff from one to the other. They coexist. They always have. You can be in the deepest part of your grief and also, in the same moment, beginning to heal. You can miss someone with your whole heart and also feel, unmistakably, that you are going to be okay.
The hummingbird doesn’t wait until the hard part is over to arrive. It arrives in the middle of things — on a final morning in Santa Fe, over the flowering bushes, while you are still sitting with everything you haven’t yet resolved.
That, I think, is the message. Not that the hard part is finished. Not that the grief is done. But that something in you has shifted enough to receive a small, floating, impossible gift — and recognize it for what it is.
Healing doesn’t announce itself. It hovers. And then, if you are paying attention, you see it.
Have you had a moment — a sign, a symbol, a small unexpected thing — that told you something was shifting? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
A solitary pair of Roseate spoonbills flew right over my head and I looked up under their pink wings and I felt my belove husband sent them to me to ease my grief.
Thank you, Vicki! Glad you got to experience Santa Fe! NM is a special place where the landscape, geography, and the tri-cultures of Hispanic, Native & Anglo blend! I am very much enjoying these posts and your healing, growing journey! 💙💙💙