I grew up in rural northern Ohio along the Chagrin River, which is a Native American word for ‘clear’. Our home sat on top of a 35-foot embankment overlooking the river that was contained by a 200-foot shale cliff majestically wooded and silent. The top of the cliff was my spiritual home. I spent hours walking and reflecting there, my “imagination alighting everywhere” as Mary Oliver so delightfully describes it.

One summer day after 7th grade, I waded knee-deep through the rapids across the river. I climbed the ravine and wound my way up the trail to the top. As I walked along the cliff’s edge, something caught my eye. Flashes of light—like mirrors reflecting sunlight—came from the river below. When I focused into the water, I realized that the flashes were the sun reflecting off the sides of fish swimming in a school. These 40 to 50 small fish, called “shiners”, were swimming in formation. First they made a rectangle, swimming in one direction for several yards. Then, in a flash, they turned and swam back in the opposite direction. In another flash, they formed a circle rotating around an invisible center. Then—flash—they broke that formation to form themselves anew.

Dusk forced me to descend the trail and cross the river to home, but I knew I had stumbled onto a dance, a sacred ritual, a divine secret: there are invisible patterns throughout all of nature and these patterns are imprinted within each species.

Little did know that this would be the first of many encounters with sacred pattern that allows the veil between worlds to drop away. Years later I learned that the Native Americans call what I witnessed the “dance of the fishes”.