Red Bird and Sky Woman
It’s been a while! In my last post, I said I was pulling back from posting on a weekly basis to afford myself the luxury of waiting for the appropriate openings into shamanic reality to present themselves, guiding me regarding what I should next post about the shamanic East. As is so often the case when one does this, what one expects will present itself for sharing is something one could never have imagined. I waited. And I waited some more. Then, this morning, the opening appeared, but by now we’ve already entered the time of the shamanic South, and it’s summer. To my great astonishment, what came through for sharing was a painting and story about Red Bird and Sky Woman that I wrote some time ago. At first I was puzzled, since I had all but forgotten about Red Bird’s story. But then I realized that red is the color associated with the shamanic South in feminist shamanism, as is travel back through time, which is how I learned of Red Bird’s fate. Red Bird’s story is also about how a feminist shaman would go about healing past trauma. The guidance I received at the time I wrote the story was that I should share it as widely as possible, so that Red Bird’s descendants might learn what had caused the mysterious disappearance of their ancestor so very long ago. For that reason, I hope you’ll share each installment of his story. It will take four or five weekly posts to tell the whole story here, as it’s longer than what I’ve been posting.
It happened in a time long ago and long forgotten, in a time when great dark wood bison still roamed the towering virgin forests of the northeast, in a time when the Red Paint people traveled up and down Maine’s rocky coast during the warm season, gathering food needed to survive the long, bitter cold of the coming winter. It happened to Red Bird and his family on land that I eventually came to own centuries after they were gone.
It was only after the cardinal began appearing that I remembered that my Maliseet mentor had told me that when the dead wish to communicate with the living, they visit them as birds.
The first time the cardinal appeared in a startling flash of crimson in the tall popple tree outside my third-floor bedroom window, I had known it was him . . . Red Bird. I had known because for a brief, magical instant, the image of that brilliant bird in the midst of the tree’s pale, quivering leaves had separated itself from the rest of the forest to fill my entire field of vision. Suffused with brilliant, flickering light, it had floated before my eyes like a numinous image from some other reality.
The cardinal had come again every spring since its first dramatic appearance. But this morning, as I was working in my garden, it had begun calling out to me. I hadn’t realized it was a cardinal’s song that was floating toward me from somewhere within the forest. I had simply been attracted to the bird’s persistent song, which I had never heard before.
I mimicked it. The bird sang back. Five notes. Three notes. More complicated double notes, in sequences of threes, fours, fives. Then an amazing seventeen notes. Each time I repeated the bird’s song, it moved closer and sang again. Suddenly there it was, perched atop the slender trunk of the small birch that had bent towards earth over my garden under the weight of the past winter’s ice storms. Just as it had done the first time I had seen it, the cardinal appeared as though by magic, its image somehow separate from the rest of the forest. Once more, surrounded by flickering, numinous light, the image of the cardinal filled my entire field of vision. With a painful jolt of memory, I understood that Red Bird was attempting to communicate to me that it was finally time to tell his story.
I had first encountered Red Bird during an astonishing event that I could only describe afterward as a kind of metaphysical collision of time and space. I had been standing in a field on my land which had always seemed to me to be haunted, somehow. The earth of the field was rich, capable of producing lush crops of vegetables. Yet it seemed that bad luck and contention characterized the lives of those who had lived in the old red cape that sat beneath the only tree in the field, a huge old chestnut.
I had known several of those people. The first person I knew who had lived in the field was a crotchety old fellow. During his residency there, he and several members of his family had jointly owned the large tract of land that included the field. He had constantly been at odds with the others. When he died, the family put the house up for rent, and my best friend and her husband had moved into it. Together, we had created a large garden behind the house, a shared project we had all reveled in. But as time went on, my friend's marriage had deteriorated. She and her husband had separated, and both had moved away.
By the time I purchased the land several years later, one of my daughters had started a family. She and her husband now needed a home of their own. I had given the field and the old house to my daughter and son-in-law, looking forward to being involved in the raising of my little granddaughters, wanting to watch them grow up. My daughter and her husband had completely renovated the house, and had created abundant gardens of their own in the field, but my daughter had always felt uneasy there, for reasons she could never fully explain. Eventually, they had sold the house to a young couple with a new baby, and had also moved away.
Not long after the new family had taken up residence in the field, the house had burned to the ground in a sudden fire. Luckily, no one was at home when the fire erupted, quickly engulfing the entire house. The mother had been out walking her baby at the time, and the husband was at work. Rather than rebuild, that family, too, had sold out and moved away. The person who had purchased the field from them lived elsewhere, was very difficult to deal with, and had never rebuilt the house. Due to her neglect, small trees were beginning to sprout here and there in the field, which all the previous owners had mowed twice every summer.
The day it happened, I had been standing in the center of the field, looking about, enjoying the fresh breezes that danced through the open space. My thoughts wandered to all the unhappiness associated with the field, and I wondered what the problem was with this beautiful spot. Lush with tall grasses and wildflowers, the field was bordered on all four sides with tall pines and spruces. A meandering stream ran along its northeasterly boundary, flowing into the nearby bay. I could hear the stream’s song as it tumbled down to the sea, cascading again and again over large rocks in beautiful, small waterfalls as it went.
Suddenly I felt a subtle vibration in the air, a sense of something “other” nearby. I looked around. Everything appeared to be normal, but I had an uneasy sense that things were far from normal. Before I could formulate the thought that I had walked into yet another of the openings in time that occurred in random places on this land of mine, the vibration evolved into a deep humming sound, and my field of vision dimmed.
The last thing I remembered before I began falling was that a strong wind, fragrant with the mingled scents of sweet fern, balsam and cedar, rushed over the field from the forest at its southerly edge. Then I was falling, in a slow, floating, weightless way, down and down, through . . . what? Not the earth upon which I had just been standing, but something that was at once earth and sky, water and air, time and space, and yet none of those things. Trying to describe it later, I realized there was really no word that applied.
After what seemed like an eternity of falling, everything suddenly tilted, and I found myself looking down at the field I had been standing in before everything had shifted. It was the same field and not the same field. The subtle differences in the textures of the field’s grasses and the sizes and types of the huge trees that bordered it made me realize that I had fallen through time again. It seemed that there were certain places on the property that were openings of some kind into the past. That’s always how it was when I inadvertently walked through one of those openings – I found myself in the same place, but in another time. What had just happened was different from every other such experience, however. Never before had I felt myself falling through time and space as I had just done. Every other time it had happened, I had simply walked through some kind of unseen opening or crack in the fabric of reality to find myself in another time. And never before had there been people present in those other times.
Now, I could see people in the field below me, ancient-looking people, and I began descending towards the field, apparently propelled by my curiosity. Those people were also falling, but not slowly and weightlessly as I had fallen. They fell to earth one after the other, heavily, crying out in terror as they were cut down by another group of ancient people, several men with black-painted faces who were screaming in anger. An elderly couple, who were attempting to shield two young women, one of whom appeared to be pregnant, were cut down first. Then the attackers cut down the women the elders had been shielding.
My terror at what I was witnessing somehow arrested my descent. I now floated like a small cloud frozen in time above the field. One of the people in the field, a tall, powerfully built male who was attempting to fight off the attackers, suddenly looked directly up at me, as though startled. Then he turned back to the fight. I watched, paralyzed. He fought valiantly, but there were too many attackers. He had been unable to defend the other people with him, and now the attackers turned their full attention toward him. My heart went out to him, and tears slid from my eyes, falling upon the field like a sudden shower from the cloud I felt I had become.
The tall male felt my salty tears fall upon him. Once more he briefly looked up at me, as though startled by my presence above the field. Then he turned, leapt over the attacker he had just felled, and fled into the forest. His attackers ran after him, uttering bloodcurdling yells, but soon silence fell upon the place. Apparently the defender had disappeared into the depths of the forest, and the attackers returned to the field. They ransacked the provisions the tall man’s group of people had stored on platforms in the field, and walked off into the forest, in the direction of the sea.
Then I was falling again, this time in an upside down world, and the next thing I knew, I was back in my body, back in my own time, standing in the same place in the same field from which I had begun falling.
To read the full story, be sure to check in for the next few Saturdays around noon, for each new installment.