Buzzard Symbolism: It Circled Over Something You Haven't Buried Yet

Artie Wu — Fifteen years guiding inner work, 100,000+ people

The Short Answer

You looked up, and it was there — riding the air in wide, lazy loops, in no hurry, over something you couldn't see from where you were standing. Nothing sent it. Nothing is being forecast. But you stopped, and the stopping is the real event: something in you recognised itself in a bird that circles patiently over what everyone else has already moved on from, and that recognition is where this page begins.

What It Means When You See One

Here is what a buzzard actually does, because every feeling anyone has ever had about one came from watching the same thing you watched. It finds what is already dead. It does not kill — it arrives after. It rides thermals for hours, tipping those broad wings slightly to stay aloft without effort, and it waits. It has a face that is not built for charm. And when it lands, it is unhurried and completely at ease with something that most living things would flee.

When you see a buzzard, you are watching a creature that has made its entire life out of what nobody else wanted to deal with. It does not apologise for being there. It does not pretend the dead thing isn't dead. It simply descends, does what it came to do, and rises again.

The part of you that stopped and stared — that is the part that knows exactly what the buzzard is circling. There is something in your life, or something in you, that has been lying there unaddressed. Not unnoticed. You have noticed it. But there is a difference between noticing and going down to deal with it, and the buzzard does not make that distinction. It only knows how to do the second thing.

That is not comfortable to sit with. It is not supposed to be.

What You Actually Felt in That Second

Probably not awe. Buzzards are not eagles. They do not arrive in a way that asks you to feel inspired — they arrive in a way that makes you slightly uneasy, and then, if the moment is quiet enough, slightly seen.

There may have been a low-grade wish to look away. That is worth paying attention to, because the urge to look away from a buzzard is the same urge that has been keeping you at a certain distance from the thing it is circling in you. The animal and the feeling are running on the same track.

Underneath that, if you were honest in that second, there was probably something close to relief. Someone — something — was finally hovering over the right place. After a long time of everyone, including you, steering around it.

When the Same One Keeps Turning Up

If you have started noticing buzzards everywhere — on fence posts, on the highway median, tilting overhead on the way to work — you did not suddenly develop a buzzard problem. They were always there. What changed is that something in you got loud enough to start catching on them.

The thing a buzzard is about became active in you first. The circling, the patience, the willingness to go toward what everyone else is walking past — that got close enough to the surface that your attention now snaggs on anything shaped like it. You are not being followed. You are being flagged by your own interior, using whatever happened to be overhead.

That is a more useful piece of information than a sign would be. A sign tells you something is coming. This tells you something is already here, already waiting, and has been waiting long enough to start showing up in the periphery of your days.

What It Is Not

Maybe part of you came here hoping this page would tell you that something ending is on its way — a relationship, a chapter, a version of your life that has outlasted its use. That it would name a transition and give it a shape. It will not do that, and the reason is not timidity. No page can see around the corner of your life, and one that claims to is the one to distrust.

The other thing people bring to a buzzard, quietly, is grief. If you lost someone, and you looked up and saw one, something in you may have moved. This page will not tell you that the dead send birds, and it will not tell you they don't. That is not a question for a page to answer, and you already know that. What it can say is this: the grief that makes you look up at circling things is real, and it belongs entirely to you.

What a buzzard is, when you strip the forecast away, is a picture of patience with what is hard to face. You looked at one thing out of everything in that sky. That choosing happened in you, and the whole of it is yours to work with.

How to Read It on Yourself

The first thing that goes wrong when you try this is that you start editing the image before it has a chance to say anything. You picture a buzzard and immediately think, that's morbid, and you redirect. Don't. The image that arrives slightly before you can improve it is the one with something real in it.

Put the buzzard across from you — in a chair, on a fence rail, wherever it wants to land. Let it be whatever size it comes as. Some people get something large and still and old. Some get something smaller than expected, with a kind of tired authority. Give it a moment to settle.

Then ask it:

What are you circling?

How long have you been up there?

What happens when you finally come down?

What do you need from me to be able to do that?

Wait without composing an answer. The buzzard is not there to frighten you — it is there because it can handle what you have been keeping at a distance, and it has been waiting for you to let it. You are not trying to chase it off or make peace with it on its behalf. You are meeting the part of you that knows how to face the thing lying in the field, and asking it what it sees.

The question to sit with: what have you been flying over for months, telling yourself you'll deal with it later, that you already know is not going to bury itself?

About the Author

Artie Wu is the founder of Preside Meditation and Ariadne. With degrees from Harvard and Stanford, he has spent fifteen years guiding over 100,000 people through inner work — dream interpretation, shadow work, parts work, and somatic healing.

He has been featured in the Gaia.com feature film Transcendence 2, and on Fox, CBS, and CNN.

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