How Ducks Helped Me Remember the Beauty of Life

I just ate some duck meat with my friend Miriam on her front porch, with plum sauce. A pre-writing ceremony we wanted to carry out.

One week ago, I watched her kneel on dirt ground with the duck in her arms as it awaited its death. We both were crying. My duck’s head had already been severed from its body by my groupmate, and we had watched its life slowly drain from its eyes. The realest thing I had ever seen.

When I decided to go to Spirit Weavers, a skillshare gathering of 700 women in southern Oregon, I didn’t know that killing and eating ducks would be part of my experience. But as my eyes scanned the dozens of workshops being offered, I glazed over stargazing and fabric dyeing and fixated on animal transformation. Scenes of my childhood fantasies of hunting and cooking rabbits over a fire flashed in my mind (largely informed by YA survival novels like Hatchet), and I knew this was the one I wanted to go to.

I had never seen the moment of death up close like this before. Like many things that I haven’t experienced, this felt scary. I knew I didn’t want to be the one to wield the knife and deliver the killing blows. And with eight ducks and 34 women, I didn’t need to be. Instead, I caught the blood in a bowl. I sang the death lullaby the facilitators taught us with a clear voice. I put my hand on my groupmate’s back as she shook after doing the deed. At a certain point, my voice wavered and broke down into tears, more for all the animals outside this sacred circle who hadn’t been mourned over or loved like this. Whose lives and deaths were full of suffering and indignity.

I held the headless duck and marveled at how warm and sweet its body felt. Then I lowered it briefly into the big pot of boiling water. Tied it by its feet on a clothing line with the other seven, and started plucking its feathers out. As we all worked, we sang a different song, a simple one about surrender and trust. A flash of deep remembering - this is a scene from the village we all came from. And then, almost laughing in incredulity as I remembered that this death portal experience was happening alongside dozens of other experiences at the gathering, most of which were much lighter content than this - but I guess that’s also what happens in village life.

And as we slowly transformed the ducks, skinning them and pulling out their organs, even as the sky grew darker and started raining on us, our mood felt lighter too. We watched our facilitator cook the lungs, the liver, the testicles, the eggs, on a skillet with butter and salt, and we ate them with reverence, yes, but also made jokes and asked about each others’ past experiences with hunting.

And then it was over, and we were left to wonder what now - how would this session inform the rest of our life?

Miriam and I debriefed it together. Marveled at how this was just day one of the gathering. And then felt our way through the days to come. Full of life force energy from the ducks, full of gratitude for their sacrifice. We learned new breathwork techniques and how to sigh in relief rather than heaviness. We took off our clothes and jumped into the icy river and screamed and ran naked through camp to shower together in deliciously hot water. Sang 90’s bangers around the campfire with my other soul sister Ariel. Peed on the earth right out in the open. I felt safer and more relaxed than ever before, with these beautiful, strong, tender, fierce women helping each other heal and grow and rewild.

When I returned home, I felt different. Calmer, more grounded, more confident.

I started a painting inspired by the river we swam at in Oregon. I set my easel up in the attic of my co-op and painted with sure, easy strokes, and my housemate came to serenade me with her guitar and voice. The next day, I set up in our yard, and basked in the life all around me - housemates eating lunch and laughing, co-working, picking plums off the tree, trying to coax our cat into coming over for pets. I breathed deeply and let myself flow through the summer day, leaving my emails unread, absorbing the abundance, believing that life is in fact this good and this beautiful and this easeful.

Later in the week, I had a moment of distress after getting dinner with my relative and hearing her talk about her economic anxiety. I shut myself in my room and opened all my unread emails from artist business coaches giving me advice about client relationships and content calendars and product launches, and felt despair and shame - I need to work harder. I need to do more. I should be doing what these people are telling me to do. I’m 34 and I’m making less than I did at 24. I felt my breathing shallow and quicken, the life force draining out of me.

I told my housemates about my anxiety, and they grounded me in reassurance, reminding me that the painting I had just created was an incredible symbol of my power and success. They encouraged me to take a moment to appreciate it. (Take it on a walk! Go to dinner with it! Sleep next to it in your bed! were some of their enthusiastic ideas.)

So I sat down with the painting and really looked, in deep presence, free from critique and judgment, and I cried. In it was vibrant, colorful, deep life force energy, the sum of all the teachers and friends and magical experiences I’ve ever had, all the animals and plants who gave their life to sustain my own, expressed through my hand as only I could express.

Though I don’t know what comes next, I continue to breathe deep, and create, and walk through my days with reverence and joy and curiosity.

Thank you, ducks. Thank you, friends and teachers. Thank you, life.