On a June morning a couple of summers ago, I was hiking a gorgeous trail near my home in Los Angeles with a dear friend when we came across a massive tarantula sitting squarely in the middle of the path. Petrified and not wanting to go near it, we ultimately decided to name the tarantula “Bob” and imagine him with a little top hat and an old-timey cane, dancing around like Mr. Peanut, so he'd seem less scary as we passed him.

I had no idea that afternoon that Bob was the opening line of a story that would lead me, one month later almost to the day, to meet my husband. I'll come back to that. 

Over the last few years, some of the most powerful guidance I have received has come through interactions with animals—including that tarantula. My hope is that by sharing three of these stories, you might become a little more open to the signs and synchronicities showing up in your own life, a little more willing to slow down enough to see and hear them, and a little more committed to trusting what can't fully be explained. If this feels too "out there," remember that science itself begins with observation. The offering here is simply a deeper level of witnessing and reflection in our daily lives, in service of living the most meaningful and connected lives possible.

The scientific process can tell us so many useful things about how the world operates, but there is a limit to its power to help us live happy, healthy, meaningful lives. There is nothing irrational about admitting that some things remain unknown—or being open to the possibility that information and guidance may come to us in ways we don't fully understand. The Greeks distinguished between logos—logic, reason, and what can be proven—and mythos: the stories, mystery, and meaning that help humans understand how to live. We need both. I believe that when we embrace mystery, and become open to receiving guidance, it can show up everywhere.

Back in early 2024, my husband had had a cough for about six weeks. It started over the Christmas holiday and just lingered. It was so frustrating, and we tried different remedies to see what might help. It was one of those coughs that kept him up at night, and the sleep deprivation created even more tiredness and made it harder to heal.

On the night of January 25th, 2024, it was the full moon. My husband and I stepped into our backyard in Los Angeles and did a brief full moon ceremony. (During the full moon, it’s typical to let go of things that aren’t serving you as you enter the next moon cycle, and on the new moon to call in things you want to bring into your life.) 

We expressed our desire to let his cough go and transform it into healing, and asked Spirit to guide us with signals about how best to heal it. We said our prayer to God and the moon and went to sleep.

The next morning, I woke up, turned to my husband (he was then my boyfriend), and said, as I often do, “Oh my gosh, I had the craziest dream last night.”

I told him about a dream involving a bear in a parking lot. There may have been a shopping cart—I wasn’t really sure. But the bear was friendly, and overall it was a positive dream.

My husband’s eyes widened. He looked at me and said, “Casey, I had a bear dream too.”

We were stunned. My husband doesn’t normally remember his dreams, and it felt like such a special moment of affirmation about how profoundly the subconscious can work and play at night. We were tickled by the tandem dream, started our day, and I didn’t think much more about it.

Later that morning, I had a podcast recording for What’s the Juice with Olivia Amitrano as part of my book tour for Good Energy. Olivia and I hadn’t met before, so we were chatting for a few minutes before the recording when she asked me how the full moon had been for me.

I told her my husband and I had done a brief moon ceremony in our backyard, but that it hadn’t been too eventful. Then I blurted out, “Actually, something interesting DID happen: my husband and I both had dreams about bears!”

Olivia thought for a second and said, “You know, that’s so interesting. There’s a very powerful herb called bear root, also known as osha root.”

I had never heard of it. Olivia, who is an expert in herbal medicine, explained that bear root has traditionally been used for respiratory ailments, including coughs.

I was speechless. “You can’t be serious,” I said.

I told her about my husband’s lingering cough and the intention we had set during the full moon ceremony. Olivia, who is very in tune with the power of nature, said she would text me more information about bear medicine after the podcast.

She followed up, and I learned that bear root is a plant traditionally used as medicine by indigenous peoples and grows at high elevations, often among aspen groves. Interestingly, bears have also been observed interacting with osha root, which is part of how the plant became associated with “bear medicine.”

I immediately went online and found some. There were options for dried root, or tinctures that are intended to specifically help with coughs. When the root arrived, it looked like a dried twig. I simmered it in water for hours until a sort of gray-brown liquid formed. Once it cooled, my husband drank it regularly for a few days. His cough cleared up immediately.

What is most interesting about this story, though, is that we have a loved one dealing with lung cancer and a challenging long-term chronic cough associated with it.

So the question that occurred to both my husband and me was: perhaps his cough, the intention setting with the full moon, the emergence of the bear root, and the rapid healing for my husband was just the start of the story. 

Maybe, the entire experience of his cough was all in service of receiving the message for our loved one with a much more serious cough. Perhaps his cough wasn’t just an annoyance, but a signpost that allowed for the emergence of a tool for relief for our loved one.

On January 2, 2025, my husband and I had just gotten back from our roadtrip honeymoon and I was in the backyard laying our camping blankets and gear on the grass to dry in the sunshine. I noticed a bee land on one of the blankets I was spreading out, and I sat down next to it to watch it for a minute.

The bee was doing an interesting gyrating dance with its abdomen—the rear section of its body—and I started taking a video. Over the next three or four minutes, the bee began acting more haphazardly. Its movements became jerky and erratic, and then, suddenly, it keeled over onto its side and appeared to die.

It was astonishing. In the course of just a few minutes, I had watched a bee go from what looked like thriving and happy to dying, all while I was filming it. It felt shocking and deeply sad.

My husband and I went hiking later that evening, and I told him what had happened. He looked at me and said, “I also saw a dead bee sitting in the middle of our front walkway today, while I was watering the plants.”

We were both struck that we had each separately noticed a dead or dying bee on the same day and had been impacted enough to mention it to each other.

Five days later, on January 7, an alert came to our phones telling us that a fire was approaching our neighborhood and we needed to evacuate immediately. I walked outside and saw huge flames in the hills just above our house and gigantic plumes of smoke directly overhead.

We got in our car minutes later, drove away, and never slept in our home again. Our house did not burn down, but much of our street did, and the vast majority of our beautiful neighborhood was leveled to the ground.

A dying bee can be seen, in some traditions, as a warning of environmental imbalance. It can portend a difficult period ahead or the end of a productive cycle. All of these things were true for me: we were about to witness the repercussions of environmental imbalance on an unimaginable scale. Our lives were about to be uprooted and our priorities were about to shift. I was personally coming to the end of a multi-year cycle of writing and launching my book, being thrust into the public sphere and political orbit, and had just made the decision to step back and focus on starting a family.

Bees are the humble actors responsible for pollinating flowers, supporting so much of our plant life, and sustaining our food system. And many bee populations are being profoundly affected by human activity, including pesticide exposure, habitat loss, disease, and other environmental pressures.

Wildfires, too, are a natural and expected part of California’s ecology. But the scale of destruction they can cause is profoundly shaped by human choices: where and how we build, how landscapes and vegetation are managed, how local governments prepare for fire, and the changing environmental conditions in which fires now occur.

That experience of dying bees appearing to both my husband and me, along with many other experiences around that time, has pushed me to think differently about my work and what I am focusing on in this next chapter. I’m increasingly focused on the concept of stewardship and the intersection between human health, ecological health, and spirituality. These things aren’t separate at all, and I believe understanding their interplay will be necessary to guide us into a positive next chapter for humanity as our technological capacity and extraction potential continue to increase exponentially. Our health is embedded within the health of the living systems around us, and living in accordance with that reality will serve all of us well.

The third story is about a tarantula, and it threads through my husband’s and my journey.

Back on June 14th, 2023, I was taking a gorgeous hike near my house in Los Angeles with my dear friend. I had just moved to LA a month earlier, with the clear intention of finding my soulmate (you can read more about that story, here), and was so grateful to be living right down the street from this beautiful trail.

As we were hiking, chatting about all sorts of things, we came across a huge tarantula in the middle of the trail. Both of us simultaneously levitated into the air and basically tried to jump onto each other’s backs. We were petrified, laughing, screaming, all at once– it was a hysterical moment.

We ultimately decided to “name” the tarantula “Bob” to make him seem less intimidating as we walked past him, and decided that instead of being creeped out by this every time we walked the trail in the future, we would imagine that Bob had a little top hat and an old-timey cane and was dancing around. Somehow, personifying Bob like this made him much less scary.

Bob the tarantula came to me in a dream that night. I texted my friend the next morning saying, “There were three Bobs in my dream. They were in my childhood bedroom!” Bob became a fun joke and an example of transforming something frightening into something fun and connecting.

On June 20th, just a week later, I co-hosted a summer solstice ceremony in my backyard with one of my best friends, Ezzie Spencer, who wrote the incredible book Lunar Abundance. Each woman in the circle expressed what she wanted to bring into her life in the next season.

Mine was very clear: I had moved to LA to find partnership, and I was calling in my soulmate and asking the powerful women in that circle to help me do it with their collective power.

One month later, on July 17th, 2023, I walked into a Mexican restaurant in Santa Monica. In walked my future husband, wearing a shirt with a very abstract pattern. I told him, “I love your shirt. It’s an amazing pattern. It’s got tarantulas all over it!”

He hadn’t recognized that they were tarantulas, but once I pointed them out, he saw them, too.

It wasn’t until much later that I connected this back to my tarantula encounter almost exactly one month earlier.

Interestingly, in some spiritual interpretations, the tarantula symbolizes deep personal transformation, patience, shadow work, and the conscious creation of your destiny. It represents trusting divine timing rather than rushing the next chapter. The animal asks us to be patient. That was exactly what I had needed to do in my search for partnership. And the presence of the tarantula shirt felt like a wink from God that everything was in divine order—and all connected.

What’s interesting is that I later learned that my husband had his own experiences with tarantulas that also had to do with overcoming fear. He had been surfing with friends at Jalama Beach, where there is a powerful, large surf break called Tarantulas. He had had a lifelong fear of spiders because, when he was young, a neighbor suffered a severe, life-threatening spider bite, causing him to kill any spider that entered his space for decades. As his spiritual journey unfolded and his connection with animals grew, he developed a growing intention to have a more positive, close, and harmless relationship with animals. But he was tested on a trip to Costa Rica, when a huge wolf spider showed up on his pillow, showing him that there was still more to clear and heal. Just months later, he caught one of the most powerful waves of his life at the Tarantulas break and felt a deep, immediate lifting of his fear of spiders—one that remains to this day.

For both of us, tarantulas were involved in personal transformation of fear into empowerment… a journey that absolutely had an impact on our ability to find each other. 

These are simply three of many, many more stories where animals have helped share a message or inspire a learning…

🪱 Worms came to my husband in dreams before we started our vermiculture (worm) compost bin, which ultimately became transformative for us and helped usher us into a new era of wanting to produce minimal waste and focusing on living in more circularity with the land.

🐶 I had a dream about my golden retriever just days before we got him, where he spoke to me in clear English and told me that we were going to have a huge impact on each other’s lives. And now, after having him for a year and a half, it’s so clear how that has happened. He helped prepare me to become a parent, amused and protected me while I was pregnant, and was there during my early labor to help me get through the contractions, earning him the name “doggy doula.” I was so inspired by him that, after just two months of having him in our family, I wrote an essay about 16 things I had already learned about life from having a dog. He opened my heart and helped show me what unconditional love looks like.

The message of these stories is that I believe there is useful, important information and guidance we can access through many diverse experiences in life, every single day. Maybe these aren’t “intentional” messages from God (although I think they are), but at the very least, these interactions with the natural world around us can offer us the opportunity to experience awe, reflect, and move forward more intentionally and optimistically in how we live our lives. And, on the off chance that animals and/or Spirit are trying to support us with messages, what does that mean about our collective and systemic choices that are driving animal populations into decline all over the planet? Are we losing a potent source of wisdom?

A core prayer I say these days is simply to be open to receiving guidance —to help nudge me toward a life of impact, awe, purpose, and love and keep helping me get closer to God. I firmly believe that if we are seeking openness, seeking signs, and seeking guidance, it will show up anywhere.

I want to say thank you to the animals and the natural world for sustaining us with life, inspiration, and beauty. And hopefully we can all find time this week to honor the mystery of this profound, beautiful life we get to live by slowing down to observe it and reflect on it, and doing something to help protect the natural world.

Dr. Casey

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