A Visit with the One-legged Gull: a meditation on productivity, mortality & spirit animals

November, 2025: I'm having a moment. To be fair, the whole of the last 2 years have been a moment. In November of 2023 I produced and hosted Healing Waters, a successful stories-from-the-stage benefit for the hospice I work with. I planned to ride the momentum of that into the next year, but no. Two months later I was scheduling a major spine surgery and 2024 was all about re-embodying and finding my way back into a remarkably changed physicality. My plans for growing my (very) small business were put on hold and the death-wellness practice was paused. Even writing was a tremendous effort for many months. With patience, humor, and chutzpah I've been able to reinvent a personal physics for holding myself up and moving through space. I began to feel like I could make future plans again. And then, as the year ended and I was gearing up to start 2025 with renewed enthusiasm for all my projects, on christmas day I survived a major heart attack.

Thrust into another season of recovery and delayed gratification, and with a more vigorous relationship with my mortality, I spent the spring and summer taking stock. Between April and August the only work activity I took on was 'grief & mending', a peer support group I facilitate twice a month. Its been good for my heart. Sweating through the July doldrums I realized I'd have to actually make plans for picking up speed again, and began to imagine a roster of autumn events. A keynote address for a medical school cadaver donation memorial program got my juices flowing again. As September rolled around I'd taken on a client, scheduled two fall workshops online and another in person out of state. I joined a new doula collective and hosted a pop-up Phone of the Wind at a local festival.

This may seem like a non sequitur but bear with me. It can be said that my relationship with productivity has always been a kind of boom n' bust - bust n' boom arrangement complicated by the fact that disability, rather than best intentions, is the keeper-of-spoons and activity director. There is a trickster element to sustaining momentum and things sometimes take a lot longer than I wish them to. I finally got the writing engine better tuned and published fresh blog posts. I submitted poems to a publication and applied for a writing residency that would require travel (unlikely, but fun to throw my hat in the ring). I finished a five-year project, installing a Phone of the Wind booth that will stand longer than I will live. I initiated a next long-term collaboration that will involve installing a labyrinth in a hospice garden, because when work is death-all-day it gives me joy to focus on projects that serve the living. I'm stirring pots for community death care education and care circles prepared to serve the wave of uninsured dying people heading our way. Busy busy Dina bee!

Fast forward to the first of November and enter the seagulls! More specifically, one-legged gulls. You see, they appear now and then, throughout my life, like a spirit animal if that sort of notion makes sense to you. Not a sexy spirit animal though, like Wolf, Bear, or Eagle, not a lithe spirit animal like Deer or Dragonfly. No, since childhood I've had the gnarly one-legged seagull that stands a little apart like a refugee and holds it's ground.

Looks at you one eye at a time. Trickster bird if ever there was one.

They show up when I seem to be turning a page or entering unexplored territory. Taking a leap. Spreading my wings. And yesterday, after the workshop out of state, I found myself a beach and watched the moon rise and just as the sun was setting I encountered first one, then another, and finally a third one-legged gull. The first stared for a bit and then flew off bored. The second stared a little longer and then waded into the water and floated away looking back at me over it's shoulder. The third stared and stared and stared. Until finally I asked if there was something I should know, and when it held it's silence I walked away. It was getting dark fast and there was a bite in the November wind. When I got to the car I knocked the sand out of my shoes and laughed and cried and wondered out loud what could be coming on the tail of such a portent.

Back in July when I was reconnecting with work and purpose, I clipped a handwritten note to a friend's drawing tacked on the wall over my desk. It reads: Align myself with networks of care, mutual aid, and joyful defiance. Sitting at my desk as I write, reading this note aloud to myself, my core intention feels intrinsically connected to my encounter with the birds on the beach. The moon rose, the sun set, the water danced on the shore. And three one-legged gulls made themselves known to me, were seen as surely as I was seen. I have no idea what it all means but I am certain it will be good trouble. I left the beach and headed home. Along the way I felt myself to be three parts gull sleeping on the moonlit bay, and one part me traveling home under the same night sky.

Many traditions teach that the veil between worlds and even life and death is thin at the cusp of November. Seems that way to me. Its a good idea to listen when your spirit animal arrives on the scene in the shimmering light between night and day. Like the one-legged gull that stands a bit apart, being gimpy is an otherness. Sorting through my quantum entanglement with the gulls overwhelmed me. Salt crossed my face again, and to be honest my mind was so blown it took twice as long to get home as it should. The heart knows, and mine (along with my very existence) has been so challenged these last few years. Driving home I realized the thing about the gulls isn't so much about me seeing them as it is knowing they've seen me. I don't know why this matters, or why it makes me feel safer amidst all the chaos coming our way. But I feel recognized like a relation, and steadied.

So yeah, I'm having a moment. I wish this for you too, in your travels. To feel seen and steadied and encouraged. To belong, even if you're gimpy and find your place at the edge of the flock. May we all have the gifts we bring and the seeds we plant received and put to good use.

So, um, yeah.