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by Thea
There is a bird sleeping in my bra as I type this. She flew up the stairs to my office looking for me, landed on my shoulder and pushed her way over my collar and under my sweater. After scrabbling around in there for a moment (I have got to trim her nails), she wedged her head and tail into my left and right bra cups respectively and promptly dropped off to sleep. Her name is Lupe, and she is one of three birds who live with my husband and me.
I haven't always been a "bird person." Like many people, I grew up with dogs and cats as pets -- as well as the occasional snake or toad, much to my mother's dismay -- and didn't pay much attention to birds. During my childhood we spent a great deal of time in a rural part of northern Minnesota, where were no other children for miles, so my sisters and I caught lightning bugs in jars, staged turtle races on the beach, and watched schools of fish and water bugs swim in shallow, weedy water. Despite being surrounded by animals, however, I was oblivious to the bird world. Occasionally I'd notice a bright red cardinal against the white snow or start at the noisy chatter of a jay, but I had no idea how important birds would later be to me as teachers and friends.
I began to explore Wicca in my late teens, and one thing that struck me was the tales of witches and how they worked with animals. Like many budding witches, I wondered if I would have an animal totem, and how I would figure out what it was if I did have one. I heard other pagans talking about their totems or animal guides, but their animal teachers always seemed to be the exciting, glamorous species, like hawks, bears, wolves, ravens, or horses. I thought it was curious that nobody had a moose, a rat, or a leech as a totem -- after all, don't they have things to teach us too? I didn't want to be judgmental, but after hearing about twenty different people tell me that their totem was raven, I was getting a little bit skeptical. I began to believe that the whole totem thing was a romantic notion and wishful thinking.
Over the next few years, I put the totem idea aside and focused on leading a couple of different women's pagan groups. Eventually I sought formal training with a coven. As part of the training, our teachers led us through a series of meditations, each one pushing deeper than the first. During one session, we were told to choose a partner, and using a special meditation technique to look at our partner's face and "see" that person as he or she was on the spiritual plane. When I tried it on my partner, Mary, who was an elder in the tradition that I was studying, her face changed in front of my eyes. Half of it transformed into the face of a snowy owl. I marveled at how real the vision was. I felt as though I could run my finger along the ridge around her eye and feel the spiky little feathers. Mary was as surprised by the vision as I was because owls had come to her in meditation for years -- something I was unaware of when we began the exercise. We decided that this meant that there was something Mary was supposed to teach me. I began reading a little about owls.
The experience with Mary brought birds into my consciousness, but it was my friend Bernyce who truly opened me up to the bird world. Bernyce was trained as a healer by the Hopi. When she was about five years old, she wandered onto a Hopi reservation and crawled into a kiva. Some tribe members found her asleep inside the kiva with an enormous cougar stretched over the opening. After that experience, Bernyce began her training, and the elders declared that the cougar was her totem.
Perhaps because Bernyce had one of those bona-fide glamour totems -- acquired "legitimately" through her life experiences rather than by reading a book and deciding that cougars were cool -- she didn't think much of birds as personal power animals. After working for decades with the supple, muscular, stalking energy of the great cat, birds seemed kind of wimpy to her, or so she said.
It took me a while to realize that she was actually wary of birds. Grandfather Cachora, her Yaqui teacher, used crows and ravens to keep an eye on his students and play pranks (read "learning experiences") on them. One day, when Bernyce and I were leaving his home in the hilly desert of northern Mexico, he grabbed his medicine bag and shook it over the hood of Bernyce's truck, mumbling something that I couldn't hear. I asked her what he was up to, and she sighed and said, "Well, he's either shielding my truck so we have an easier time getting past the border guards, or he's messing with me. Only time will tell."
We had reason to be concerned about crossing the border, because Bernyce had several contraband eagle feathers stashed in the car. Although she had a tribal card that allowed her to carry them legally in the United States, the card meant nothing to the Mexican border guards. Perhaps because of Grandfather's medicine, our border crossing was eerily uneventful -- a "These are not the droids you're looking for" kind of experience. When we'd driven a few miles past the border, Bernyce turned to me and said, "Watch the windshield as we round the next curve." Sure enough, as we came around, an enormous crow sped straight down the center of the highway toward us and shot up into the sky just before he would have collided with the car. He was close enough that I could see his feet as he passed over the hood and windshield. I looked at Bernyce in amazement. "That bugger Cachora does that to me every time," she said.
The antibird bias didn't stop Bernyce from working with birds in ritual and healing. Just before my formal initiation into the Wiccan group, I visited her in California. It was a crazy time in my life, with many transformations and changes, so she dragged me off to a healing waterfall in a nearby canyon and made me get under the cold flow of water. As the water splashed over me and she worked a healing, she began to make a strange, high-pitched whistle between her teeth. Within moments, four red-tailed hawks, one from each of the four directions, converged over the waterfall and began circling overhead. As the birds circled, I could feel blocks in my body breaking up as if they'd been swept away by their swirling flight.
Afterward, I asked Bernyce how she had called the hawks, and she told me that when one of her teachers, Rockeye, was a child, an elder amazed him by reaching out and gently grabbing a bird from a nearby tree so quickly that Rockeye never saw his arm move. When Rockeye asked him how he was able to do this, the teacher told him that the secret was to be something that would attract the bird, like food. Rockeye eventually mastered the technique and taught it to Bernyce.
Up until that point, I had occasionally seen a wolf in my dreams. He would appear now and then on the periphery of my vision, and whenever he did, I knew that there was something important in that dream that I should remember upon waking. A couple of days after the hawk experience, the wolf appeared again. This time he turned away from me, and as he did so he exploded into a flock of crows. After that, I saw and heard birds everywhere -- around my house, patterned in the clouds and in my meditations. I decided it was time to pay attention.
When I got home to Minnesota, I began to study ravens and crows because the wolf had "pointed out" the crows to me. I learned that ravens and wolves often hunt together, the ravens scouting out the prey and signaling the wolves, who kill and eat it, leaving the bones for the ravens to pick clean. I learned how intelligent crows are -- that they goad other birds into chasing them for fun, and that when one of them dies, the others perch in the trees over its body and make a weird, wailing, croaking sound, as if they're mourning. I also learned that in some Celtic stories, the raven or crow serves as the psychopomp, or the guide that brings the dead to the otherworld and back again.
I was harvesting the last of the vegetables in my garden one fall day when I saw three crows perched on the fence watching me. I'd noticed them hanging out in the hackberry tree in the back yard over the previous month or so, so I decided that I'd try to see what I could learn about them. We had a large, flat tombstone in our back yard. It had never been used because it had been crafted for a Russian woman with a terribly complicated name that the stonecutter had misspelled, and the stone had been circulating among our friends as a gag housewarming gift before coming to rest in my garden. I laid out some corn and other food on the tombstone (what better table for a psychopomp?) and went back to work while surreptitiously watching the three birds from the corner of my eye.
At first, they were suspicious of the whole setup, perhaps in part because they had seen my neighbor trap squirrels in the next yard, and the squirrels usually weren't too happy about it. The crows didn't fly away, however, so I kept putting food out day after day. As I composted and mulched, I talked to the crows. Over time, they seemed to grow comfortable with me, and were not startled by my presence. I kept talking to them, but I also started visualizing, as Bernyce had taught me. I tried picturing myself as something squashed in the road -- decidedly unpleasant for me, but enticing to a crow. I tried picturing cold French fries scattered on the pavement behind the local McDonalds because I knew that crows hung out there, lying in wait for such a treat. And I tried picturing a battlefield, littered with Celtic warriors, with the Morrigan and her ravens flying overhead. I thought I might butter them up a little with some grandiose imagery.
One day, one of the adults landed on the fence and cocked her head, watching me. I had just turned to pick up a garden tool when suddenly, I felt an enormous swoosh of air. She swooped over my head, close enough to trail her tail through my hair as she pulled out of the dive. Startled, I watched her land in the hackberry tree and bob her head at me -- a behavior I'd seen often but still do not understand. When I turned back to face the fence, I found two long, black wing feathers in a perfect cross directly behind my feet.
I continued to leave food out on the tombstone for them even after the first snow fell. Sometimes I'd see them waddling over to the stone to check out what I'd left, but because of the cold I was outside less often, and didn't talk to them as much. Several times, however, I found a single black feather lying on my back step. I saved them all.
One early December night when the Moon was full and reflecting off of the snow, my husband went out back to tinker with the car. A moment later, he came rushing into the house yelling, "You have to see this. Now!" I followed him upstairs, and he threw open the window in my office. We looked out, and there, circling the hackberry tree, were hundreds of crows. They swooped around the tree in an enormous flock, sometimes landing on the branches and weighing them down like a heavy black snowfall, and other times pushing off the branches and taking to the air as one, circling the tree again and blocking the Moon from our vision. We noticed that they moved widdershins around the tree -- contrary to the "right" way of things -- which is fitting for "garbage" birds that have been ostracized for their reputation as eaters of the slain. We watched them, awed, for about a half-hour before they made one last lap around the tree and flew off.
Just over a month later, I was formally initiated into the coven I had been training with. It was a profound experience for me on many levels. Toward the end of the ceremony I shut my eyes, and the image of enormous wings unfolding from my back flooded my vision. After that, I decided I wanted a bird of my own.
The next day, I went to a small pet shop and bought a cockatiel. I figured I should choose a small bird since I had no experience caring for birds, but I was utterly unprepared for just how big their personalities can be. Upon being released from her travel box, the cockatiel, apparently unaware that she weighed a mere 93 grams, flew over and landed on the back of my cat, Sabra. Sabra, despite being an excellent huntress, simply sat there and gave me the most indignant look she could muster. I rescued the cockatiel, put her in her new cage and stared at her. I marveled at the pattern of the feathers in her wings and the way that she could make me understand her with a fairly small repertoire of squeaks and chirps. She quickly learned to ring a bell in her cage whenever she wanted us. We named her Isabeau, after Michelle Pfeiffer's hawk-woman character in the movie Ladyhawke, because Isabeau obviously believes that she is a big hawk in a tiny cockatiel body.
Between Isabeau and the crows, I was beginning to learn a lot about birds, their movement and their language. With the possible exception of raptors, birds in captivity never forget that they are prey, even if they feel secure with their human companions. Because they know they are vulnerable, they are extremely watchful and aware of the slightest details of their surroundings. I can't wear nail polish around Isabeau, for example, because it frightens her. She sees the most mundane things from an utterly different perspective than a dog or a human or a cat. Watching Isabeau and the crows gave me new insight into the cycle of death and rebirth, the mythical descent to the underworld, the shaman's flight and the nature of the element air -- all of which naturally deepened my witchy studies.
Several months after my initiation, a new student, Jeffrey, came to our coven's training classes. He explained to us that he believed that he was a shapeshifter, and that his alternate shape was a wolf. Naturally I took that with a grain of salt, but the feral energy that he gave off in our training circles was undeniable. I asked him how this had come to be, and he told me that it had simply always been. As he grew up, he told me, he learned how to control and channel the energy for the most part, but it was always lurking under the surface.
That summer Jeffrey, his wife Jody and I went to the Pagan Spirit Gathering (PSG) in Ohio. PSG is held over the Summer Solstice, and their Solstice ritual involved walking an enormous labyrinth. The labyrinth was lined with lit votive candles, and there was a bonfire in the center. Everyone was to hold hands and circle the labyrinth three times, then enter and wind through the maze to the center.
Jody had volunteered for childcare, so Jeffrey and I went to the labyrinth without her. We joined the circle and began walking around the maze as a group of musicians played weird, wonderful music on digeridoos and other spirit instruments. About the time that we were finishing the second lap around the outside of the maze, the tones of the didgeridoo, which to me at least sounded a lot like long, low wolf howls, seemed to get the better of Jeffrey. I felt a bolt of energy shoot through Jeffrey's body and into my hand. I felt, and saw, his body stiffen and twist, his ears grow pointed and claws rip through the ends of his fingers. He looked at me, and his eyes were feral. His wolf energy rose from the small of his back, up his spine, down his arm and through his hand into mine. The person on Jeffrey's other side gasped and let go of his hand. As the energy flowed up my arm, I felt a weird pricking and tearing between my shoulder blades like something was struggling to break free from my skin. I began to "see" myself with enormous black wings.
Despite the fact that I really wanted to ride the wave and see what was going to happen next, I knew that an enormous public ritual was not the appropriate time for an experiment. I dropped Jeffrey's hand and placed my hand on the small of his back, pushing his own energy back into him. He shuddered as the circuit completed itself, and then everything -- the energy, claws, ears -- that was rising from his body seemed to subside.
We walked the labyrinth in a dreamy silence, grounded and went to find Jody. Apparently, we hadn't grounded quite enough, because both of us were giggling like giddy children. Jeffrey had felt the wings begin to sprout in my back just as I had felt his wolfy self begin to emerge. The intimacy of what had just happened to us was so intense that I felt like I should light up a cigarette and say, "Was it good for you?" When we wandered, tipsy on energy, to Jody and told her what had happened, she laughed her ass off at us. "Well, the wolf and the raven do hunt together," she said.
I carried the image of the beautiful black wings springing from my back with me for the next couple of years as I studied the birds and the teachings of my coven. I'm getting wings, I thought, because they're supposed to take me somewhere -- to a new place, a new phase of life or a new challenge, maybe. Then, about three years ago, I was offered a job in Seattle, and my husband and I decided to jump on the opportunity and move west. As we packed up our things and began to prepare for leaving our friends and family, it occurred to me that the trip was a symbolic death of our old lives and birth of our new ones. I remembered the stories of the crow and raven as the guide to and from the otherworld, and I wondered if the crows had something else to teach me during this bittersweet time.
About a week before we began the long drive to Seattle, my friend Carrie called me at work. "Meet me downstairs," she said. "I've got a going-away gift for you."
I met her in the lobby and she took me out to her car. She popped the trunk and there, nestled in a blanket, was a beautiful dead crow. "She's supposed to lead you to your new life," Carrie said.
I picked the crow up in the blanket like a baby and touched her feathers. She was still soft and had not begun to stiffen. Carrie had been driving and seen the bird, which she believed to be a mother, chase a younger crow out of the path of a large truck, only to be hit herself and thrown to the side of the road. Carrie stopped and ran over to her, but the bird died as she arrived.
"What am I supposed to do with her?" I asked.
"Well, if you keep hanging out with us Indians you're going to have to learn a little taxidermy sometime," she answered. I chuckled because I had seen the array of bird-wing fans and other tools made out of bird parts that both Carrie and Bernyce used in their spiritual work. They were infused with the energy of the bird that they came from and were symbols of respect for that animal's power.
That night, with the help of my husband, I carefully cut open the crow, but not without some tears over the death of such a beautiful bird. She was indeed a female, and we saved her wings, tail, feet, skull and beak. The rest I buried in the back yard by the crows' tombstone. I dried out the wings to make fans. One of the uses of feather fans in Native American traditions is to break up the aura during a healing so that the healer can send energy into the body. Another is to break ties, much like you'd use a feather duster to sweep cobwebs out of the corners of a room. Both meanings seemed appropriate for our impending life change. I put some of the crow's feathers, along with those that the backyard birds had gifted me, into my car to see me safely to Seattle.
In the three years since we moved to Seattle, we've added two new birds to our family. The month after we arrived we adopted Gris-Gris (pronounced "gree-gree," like the magical pouches used in New Orleans Voudou), a young female African grey parrot. Gris is extraordinarily intelligent and sensitive to her surroundings, so I did my best to make her feel at home by mimicking the bird body language that I'd learned from Isabeau and the crows. She responded to that by quickly learning words and creating her own sentences with startling accuracy. However, every day with Gris is a dance of trust. She blossoms and teaches me new things as I attempt to unravel her mysteries. I've learned to shift my energy to match her mood as I approach her. When she's wild, I project calm and she quiets. When she's shy, I project warmth and she melts into my arms. I've learned to read her body language and energetic signals, and in doing so have become much more attuned to my environment and the energies of my home.
As if two birds flying around our living room was not enough, two summers ago as I passed a bird breeder's booth at a bird show, a little sun conure leapt out the booth owner's hands, flew to me and scrambled down my shirt, where she burrowed into my bra. The breeder said, "Well, I'm not going to fish her out of there, so you'd better take her." Although I had reservations about buying a bird from that particular breeder, it was hard to resist a little creature that so obviously wanted out of that place. I took her home and named her Lupe.
If you can imagine the colors, sounds and riotous, giddy atmosphere of Carnival in Rio condensed into a little bird's body, you've got some idea of what Lupe is like. She is tiny for her species, and at first I was convinced that she wasn't very smart, although she was the most loving bird I'd ever met. But just a few days ago, while I was leading my students in a visualization, Lupe leapt into my meditation. In the meditation I was speaking to the God, and Lupe flitted between him and me, alternately landing on his shoulder and playing in my hair. She made herself clear: She's a magick bird, too, and just as smart as Gris and Isabeau, thank you. While Isabeau's lessons are about pride and self-confidence, and Gris's are about communication and steady consistency, Lupe's are about love and the joy of living.
So I guess I'm a "bird person" now. If I had any doubt, it vanished when I was in London during the September 11 attacks. I couldn't get home, so I decided to make the most of it and went to the Tower of London to see the ravens. It's said that if the ravens ever leave the Tower that the monarchy will fall, so they're well cared for. Each one is banded in a different color so you can tell which is which. When I got to the Tower, I sat on the pavement by a grassy area where the raven they've named Munin was perched. I watched her for a moment, and she sized me up with her black eyes. I gave her a little head bob and tried a few more of Gris's body language tricks to see if she'd respond. I was shocked when she flew over and landed in my lap! There are signs all over the Tower grounds that say essentially "Don't mess with the ravens, they bite," but Munin sat on my knee, staring into my eyes. I wondered if she could see into my soul, and if whatever was there met her approval. It was unnerving and exhilarating because she was at least three feet long, and her beak was a good four inches -- enough to do quite a bit of damage if she wanted to. A bunch of tourists came by and snapped our picture, saying things like "Aren't you scared?" "Won't it bite?" and "Are you supposed to be doing that?" but I just sat there calmly and listened to what Munin was telling me. She hung out on my knee for about 20 minutes, filling my head with images and bobbing her head, and then fluttered off to find her mate.
I still don't know for certain if I have a specific bird totem, or if these birds are just traveling with me for a while, teaching me what they can before they move on, just as the wolf in my dreams did. But I do know that they've been my guides during one of the most transformative periods in my life, and I'm certain that the journey that we're taking together isn't over yet, especially because the life cycles of my parrots are long enough that I should have them for many years. So be on the watch for the birds around you. Don't ignore them just because they seem distant at first. They're everywhere, and they've got something to tell you.