Wings in the Silence: Hummingbirds, A Storm, and Wilderness Magic

The universe doesn’t always speak in words. Sometimes it brushes your cheek with a wingbeat, paints a rainbow across a stormy sky, or hums in the pitch of a feather-light heart. And sometimes it sends two hummingbirds to hover around your head as if you’ve stumbled into a fairy tale. It hums. It buzzes. It flutters two iridescent wings right in front of your nose and asks: are you paying attention?

It was my second day at Friend Camp in Wyoming’s Medicine Bow National Forest, a place remote enough that the last bars of cell service had fallen away nearly fifty miles earlier. The road had been nothing but dirt and gravel, a long rumble through sagebrush flats and weathered hills. By the time I arrived at the camp, the forest seemed to breathe in its own rhythm. A dry-sweet scent of sage lingered on the air and mingled with the metallic undertone of pine sap, while the faint rasp of grasshoppers sang in the meadow. Massive granite boulders rested like abandoned toys along a trail that climbed toward Laramie Peak.

I shared this wilderness with exactly three neighbors: a father, his son, and their dog, all from Houston. They were scouting elk territory for the coming hunting season and spoke with the ease of people at home in wild places. The father mentioned, almost casually, that two bears had been spotted by the creek. I nodded as though I also found bears to be an ordinary part of the scenery, and pictured my bear spray packed snuggly in the trunk of my Ford Focus. 

The following morning I hiked the trail toward Laramie Peak, a four-mile climb rising nearly 3,000 feet. The air thinned as I ascended, turning sharper, cooler, until each breath felt lined with iron. I crossed boulder fields and slipped on wet stone, pausing only when icy raindrops began to fall, then hail the size of marbles. At the summit, a storm gathered in the distance, its clouds swollen and violet, pulsing with light. The wind smelled of electricity. I didn’t linger. My body ran before my mind had finished deciding, boots striking slick granite, heart quickening as thunder rolled behind me.

I reached camp just as the storm broke. Within minutes, hail rattled across the roof of my tent, thunder shook the ground beneath me, and lightning carved the sky into shards of white. I tucked myself into a cocoon of tarps and blankets, lantern light warming the small space, the air inside tinged with the mineral scent of rain. Safe from the deluge, I opened a book: Signs by Laura Lynne Jackson, a meditation on how the universe communicates with us through symbols. One passage lingered with me: hummingbirds, she wrote, are messengers from the unseen world. They are healers, helpers, and carriers of love.

The next morning, the forest seemed rinsed clean, each pine needle tipped with light. I settled onto a sun-warmed boulder, closed my eyes, and began to breathe. My practice is simple. I  breathe first, then settle into stillness before inviting a positive emotion to enter my presence. That morning I chose gratitude, for the mountains, for the shelter that held me through the storm, for the neighbors who had worried for me. Gratitude rose in me like a tide, filling my chest until it spilled outward, as though the air itself had taken on its shape.

That is when the hummingbirds appeared. When I felt a presence behind me, I turned my head and saw one perched on a nearby branch, throat catching the sunlight in a flash of ruby. “Are you a messenger?” I asked softly, half to myself. As if in answer, a second arrived, landing beside the first. Two pairs of unblinking eyes watched me as I returned to stillness.

Soon, they approached me. One hovered before my face, close enough that I felt its wings stir the air across my skin. Another circled behind me, its hum high and steady, like the faintest echo of a heartbeat. I closed my eyes and felt its wings moving the air around my face in a tender, almost imperceptible breeze. Another circled behind my head, close enough that I could sense the vibration in my bones. They lingered for three, four, five seconds, and then vanished, leaving behind the faintest tremor of wonder.

I cannot say what message they carried. Perhaps it was reassurance, or perhaps it was nothing more than the coincidence of two birds drawn to the same patch of sun. Yet their presence left me altered. For a moment, gratitude had a body: wings, feathers, and a hum in the air. Not all messages arrive with grandeur. Sometimes they are small, iridescent, fleeting, and easy to miss if you aren’t paying attention. But when they come, they remind us that even in the vastness of wilderness, we are never entirely alone.