Feathered
The name of Horus, the falcon-headed god, comes from the sound of wings churning in flight... huor huor
Let us go first to the Nile, the river. Let us go to the Nile river at sunrise, and let us look upon the birds. Can you see it? The field of reeds at sunrise, the steady plunk of the ibis beak in the water, the call of the cormorant, the flight of herons in the morning…. each of these birds has a story… Each murmuration, each arching flight, invokes Story. Invites bodies to soar into imaginal spaces… All across the world the myths are alive with birds.
My work was basking in the winter sun noting the black-capped chickadees in my friend’s snow-blanketed garden, listening to a brilliant bird woman, together singing down the magic of darting hummingbirds and swooping swallows and the clear cries of warblers to answer questions like strategic conservation goals and species of concern and longitudinal discrete population surveys.
May your work be full of feathers.
Birds were already winging through my head when I drove to the Rock Dump, Áak'w Kwáan Aani’s climbing gym. The white gulls gliding over the docks, the ravens lining the cafe roofs, the eagle watching on a wintry branch — daily friends in Áak'w Aani, whose Native language, by the way, emulates ravens. Winged ambassadors of air called my awareness, the feathery aliveness in the airspace around me.
How many birds are circling the world right now? How many aloft in great spiraling bands? They orientate by the poles and the constellations, riding the magnetic waves of the earth … Can you feel it? … This many-tiered world is encircled by birds.
My lovely climbing partner Claire and I climbed for a couple hours, laughing and relatively easy climbing. When she parted for other Friday night diversions, I found myself hyperanimated. My heart pounded and my hands shook.
All across the world the myths are.. alive with the sound of flapping wings… In the myths, in the dark surrounding forests, the sudden light of a firebird ignites, a spark is initiated, an idea is formed, a quest is begun. A space is opened up. An invitation given, to fly.
Perhaps it was the birds, my spontaneous internal attunement to flight, the odd way my meditations of late have been drawn up, to sun and moon and stars. I seized the autobelay.
‘Rapture’ and ‘raptor’ come from the same root: to take away. To be taken out of the limited perspective into something higher.
Above me three lines of plastic. Because auto-belays are often used by folks newer to climbing, unfamiliar with belay or still without partner, the three lines were labeled green, “5.7 /easy”, purple, “5.9+ / medium”, and yellow, “5.11 / hard.”
I’ve repped this yellow route a few times. I love climbing reps. I love the melodic flow that comes in repetition. The peace in giving all my attention. My mind is vast but it is unwieldy; at any given moment I have thirty-seven tabs open on my work computer; if you could screenshot my brain in any given moment, I am computing my discretionary budget compared with the high-pressure weather system rolling in as to whether I ought to take my dog for a bath this month (no point, if it’s going to be muddy for weeks); untangling lines for my novel; softly thinking the name of the one with feathers; drafting a letter to my grandmother; accepting a spontaneous burst of inspiration for theming my next yoga class; mulling over the edits in a friend’s query letter; hoping my brother will find a spirituality that serves his beautiful capacity for devotion; curious if I drank enough water today; wondering how I can serve my friends; cursing as I realize it’s too late to apply for a community garden plot and mentally composing a friendly email plea to the committee; planning a hike; and remembering I need to fix my camera. All in the course of, like, picking an avocado. Oh, and in the background, Yo-Yo Ma is playing Attaboy on the cello.
It is peaceful, to give something all my attention.
Birds asked us, from the beginning, is there something in us, too, that flies? .. For Egyptians, human spirit, “bah”, was a bird…
For reasons with feathers, I decided, this time, to rep the 5.11 until muscle failure. Until my body fatigued beyond ability to continue. Until the pump of forearms, until the veins in my shoulders swelled to send blood to my arms, until the swell of lactic acid at muscular exertion cost my hands the ability to grip.
I didn’t think it would take so long. I’d already climbed for two hours, and sustained climbing requires an endurance humbling in its draining difficulty.
The sequency 5.11 demanded attention. Sequency is straightforward climber term for a climb that’s all there, but requires an intentional order of operations to make it work.
Like ritual. Precision.
Trust a soft hand. Foot up, solid crimp. A curtsy to the right on plenty of feet, leaning back into an angled hold. An excellent power move — a full body pull up on the angled hold, smear foot to balance a big reach to the left, which was solid. Pull across. Re-orient feet. The tricky part — compression through an undercling, using core to step left foot high, but from there, if I bumped the right toe, the sloper was just fine. Cruiser crimp flow to the top, reachy last hold.
I popped on my favorite podcast, blinkering my world into tales of the Tibetan book of the dead and the task at hand. I climbed the 5.11, dropped down, climbed it again.
And again and again and again.
I meant to climb to muscle failure, but my muscles… wouldn’t fail. At first I shook, thinking each time, this time, surely I would fall.
But the more I climbed the route, the easier it became. I did not lose my ability to grip.
I didn’t grip at all.
What is it, to fly? To fly is many things. But certainly one of those things it to experience unbridled joy. You can say birds fly because it’s an evolutionary adaptation… a survival response, even a defense mechanism... But what if what we call evolution is actually the fractal expression of the freedom, joy, and bliss of creation in action. And therefore birds fly because it’s a f***ing blast.
Each time I climbed the route I used less and less effort. I heard the rustle of feathers. Lightly. Lightly. My fingertips were of lightest keratin.
A door opened in my mind. I stepped through.
The trance state is as old as human consciousness. The shifting away from self-mind into the mind and feeling of another. Some speculate consciousness itself — things like curiosity, empathy — came from the pattern recognition of watching wild things, predator and prey and wild cousin, moon and fire and river and tree. Attuning to their energies, changing our own. Matching. Predicting. Attuning. Mating. Disciplined repetition is one way to trance, as the mantra chanter or surya namaskar enthusiast or musician knows: there is grace in rhythm, soothing in pattern.
It was good, to physically move upward, feeling for birds.
What would it be to drop everything for a moment, drop everything, and delight in the soaring? Can we do this? Delight in flight? Seriously, sometimes I just want to shout: what has happened to the joy of life? Buried in smart phone-induced somatic numbness and endless polarized drama, stifled by too much news of the end of the world? “I would rather learn from one bird how to sing,” said e. e. cummings, “than teach one thousand stars how not to dance.”
I became completely absorbed, from toe tip to finger, in the repetitive motion.
Soft hand. Softer. Curtsy. Skip holds, eliminate unnecessary shuffling. Power move. Ha exhale, swing across. Trust it. No effort to balance on the sloper: the balance became wired in with repetition, so standing on the very edge of my climbing shoes toe tips, balancing one hand over a sloper, I felt no more effort than, say, standing in line for groceries.
Then I became a thing with feathers. I became a bird.
Flight is inherent to the trance experience… despite the voice that says you cannot, or should not, or don’t deserve it, or aren’t allowed, or are too privileged, or aren’t privileged enough, despite this, you also fly. There is that in us that longs to fly. What do we do, with such longings?
A young wild marsh hawk, specifically. A bird I met. One whose chest I brushed with my finger after she was bombarded by eagles, one memorable early winter dog walk on the shore outside my cabin. She stared at me and did not look away, though my neighbor walked her away from the eagles. She stared at me through his hands. She had felt the vulnerability of her own light bones, the thinness of her feathered chest, she had learned what it was to fight for her life. I do not doubt, for just a moment, that bird saw us as friends, my neighbor who saved her from furious talons, and I who met her eyes with calm. I trusted her wild and some wild thing in her received my calm. I watched her soften.
The birds in my chest felt like a buoyancy. Lightness like wings lofted down my arms. I climbed like riding a thermal. Again. There was a lightness and a lift. Again. Less climbing, more floating. Again. All I had to do was surrender. All I had to do was weigh less than my bones. Again. Again.
I don’t know how many times I climbed that 5.11. I lost count around a dozen. Numbers didn’t matter. When I finally slipped off, I shouted YES, genuinely relieved — I was starting to worry I’d be unforgivably late to dinner.
A woman laughed. I turned around: three women were watching me.
“I couldn’t believe you were still going,” the one who’d laughed said.
“I was trying to go to muscle failure,” I said. “But apparently my mind is not as strong as my chest.” I glanced at my phone: the number didn’t matter so much as the sense that no time had passed, or several years had passed. Still. 40 minutes sustained climbing 5.11. That was. Actually pretty awesome. I felt like I’d been on a journey.
I rested for a moment (read: slumped facedown on the floor like I’d been washed up on a carpeted shore), climbed the yellow 5.11 one more time, clean, for good measure, and went to dinner, my hands still light, and something across my chest still soaring.
May your heart be full of feathers.
Those questions you have about what’s next and what to do, and how to embody ideals in the body of community? And what is the great way forward? Instead of letting those questions turn over and over in your brain, have you tried, instead, whispering those questions into the ear of a falcon?…
What do I do, I asked the falcon? And the answer that came was, wait until winter.
What do I do, I asked the falcon? And the answer that came was, wait until spring.
I asked the falcon, what do I do? And the answer came, Plummet. And then rise.
Love the bird-story excerpted here? Please check out the incredible Joshua Schrei at The Emerald Podcast. Animism for the modern world. A profound storyteller and spiritual historian. These words are gratefully borrowed from “On Birds and the Imperative of Mystic Flight.”
Every single one of his podcasts is a genuine interactive piece of art. Which I was not expecting the first time I listened to “The Revolution Will Not Be Pathologized” as just like, a thing to do while running errands, and the next thing I knew I was sobbing in Costco, then spent my afternoon body drumming. So. Clear space, is what I’m saying, and I’ll see you in the revolution.
**There’s a longer story here about the ethics of humans interrupting the natural world. Newsflash: we have already done a bang-up job of interrupting the natural world. Speaking as a person, not a conservation professional, the eagles on the shore were stronger and older and bigger: they could damn well eat something else.