[Photo: © 2008 Keir Morse]

Dissolution and Augmentation

The caterpillar shakes in time lapse like one possessed. It shrugs off its skin, like an overcoat, wads it up and sets it aside. You’d think you would be able to see it now, the real thing, the caterpillar naked, shorn of ornament and true, but underneath the mask of colored bands lies armor. We can never see the transformation itself: the rearrangement of cells, the shifting of body parts, the dissolution.

Inside the chrysalis, nothing has a name, but then, before the conscious idea of a form even emerges, the goo inside the armor aligns itself, the unnamed and unnameable cells have been shunted into a pattern and suddenly there is a body. The wings are carefully folded in on themselves, like a parachute ready for use, except that no one has folded them. Instead the cells have just arrived in their places to tell a story.

Once upon a time there were wings. We don’t even know what they look like yet, but we are becoming these wings.

The story breathes and the cells remember. And in remembering, they discover what wings are. The breath of capillary action moves through the wings and they become what they always were, what they were even when the caterpillar was scrunching along eating leaves. It could feel their presence, on another plane, waiting, whispering their story. As the imago emerges from its armor, the cells remember and slowly tell the story of wings.

What story do your cells remember?

Food Meditation 1: Fresh Fruit

Find some really fresh fruit, something you love, maybe berries or watermelon or an apple. Find a fruit that just thinking about that fruit makes you a bit happier. Find the freshest one you can. If you can find a tree or a bush that is okay for this, pick the fruit yourself. Or go to a farmer’s market and get something picked that morning. Or it can be the day before; really you just want fruit that hasn’t sat around forever.

Have the fruit ready to eat the way you want to eat it. I once demanded to eat my banana "like a monkey" when my grandmother tried to slice it up and put it on a plate. But if you picked watermelon, you will probably want to slice it up. And make sure pets can’t get to it (I knew a dog once who loved grapes.) When you've got your fruit ready, go to a place where you can relax comfortably for a while without being disturbed, someplace peaceful. Hammocks are good, but it can be a yoga mat or lazyboy chair, whatever.

Get into a meditative space, breathe deeply, ground, do whatever brings you into awareness of your body. And just get a felt sense of your body. You don’t have to put names to whatever you’re feeling, but if words come, note them and let them go.

When you are ready, eat the fruit. Notice the taste, the texture. Feel yourself chew and swallow. Enjoy every moment.

When you are done, take a moment to notice how your body feels now. Allow all parts of your consciousness to notice the difference. Again, you don’t have to put words to anything, but if they come, notice the words and let them go. For the next while, however long that may be, just lie there and pay attention to your felt sense of your body.

You can fall asleep if you want, especially if you are in a hammock and the afternoon sun is filtering through the tree leaves. If you aren’t in a hammock, feel free to imagine that you are.

At The Campfire

[Click Dogs to see all installments of the Legend of Fowl Feng .]

“I am the Wisdom of the Ages, the companion of Adam before she was Adam,” said the small child with her chin lifted just a bit and her voice solemn, then she broke out in a smile and said, “But you can call me Sophie.”

The girl turned to the man next to her.

The man's skin was as red as a ruby, and his eyes were small and black. “Oh, are we giving out our names now? Shouldn’t we wear nametags? ‘Hello, my name is…’ and that sorta thing?”

He said this smiling, but he was looking right at Sophie and leaning toward her in such a way that Fowl Feng bared his teeth and growled, “I wouldn’t be saying that kind of thing what with you looking like a boiled lobster and me being rather hungry!”

From the other side of the campfire, the pelican shook its feathers and replied, “Don’t let him get under your skin Feng. It’s just his way. He’ll argue to the death but he wouldn’t actually fight.”

“Oh, I may just come over there and teach you otherwise!” said the red-skinned man.

“Of course you may,” said the Pelican, and turned to Feng, “You may call him Rubeus. And I am Hydra, the Augmenting Mother.”

“Nice to meet you all, I’m sure,” said Feng, and then because Rubeus was smirking at him, he swallowed his fear, tilted his chin up, and added, “And who are you, big guy?” to the hooded figure.

“Hmmm,” rumbled the figure.

Something moved a few yards behind the voice and then Feng made out more motion above. He shivered as he realized it was all the same giant form rising up into the sky just beyond the light of the fire. Feng was suddenly filled with a burning need to stammer an apology, but stopped as a face loomed out of shadow. The long snout was dead white, the eyes above looked blind with pearly light, and over them two gilded horns curved gracefully.

“Yeah, he’s a big freakin’ dragon,” laughed Rubeus.

The dragon turned to Rubeus and snorted, whipping the red man's clothes about his burly body for an instant.

“Hey, it was a joke!” yelled Rubeus.

“I’m laughing on the inside,” said the dragon. He turned to Fowl Feng. “You may call me Chalydrus.”

Fowl Feng hesitated then dipped his head, not sure what to say. He had a sudden image of himself, racing across a plain, the sky above blackened with the shadow of giant wings. He shook his head and forced his hackles down, refusing to look afraid.

Introductions over, the dragon turned to Sophie and said, “Child, now that we are all here, tell us why we have come.”

Meet Aphrodite Epistrophia

turn towards
turn your eyes or mind
to a thing,
regard

turn round, turn about,
constantly turning, as if to look behind
turned to gaze on something
a lion retreating

curve, twist, distort
of hair, curl
of a tree, crooked
of fir-needles, bent

turn about, turn round
put an enemy to flight
wheel about
of a wild boar, turn
upon the hunter

go back and forwards
wandering over the earth,
observing, studying
turn to the place
of the sun, revolve

wheeling about
tossing, of a restlessness
renewed assaults of ills unnumbered
wheeling through a right angle
of ships, putting about, tacking
have a relapse

turn from error, correct,
exact, strict, severe,
be converted, return,
conduct oneself,
behave, earnest,
vehement
bring into action

flexible, supple,
modulated, varied
of strands, twisting
of a bow, bending
of a river, winding
of a bay, curve
cause to return to the source
of Being,

pay attention

that by which all the revolving
spheres are turned
thus turned about, changed
returned to yourself


This is a found poem. I found its phrases among the examples given in Liddell & Scott, the preeminent dictionary of Ancient Greek, for the family of words that begin with epistroph-, the root for Epistrophia, one of Aphrodite's epithets.

Pausanias* tells us that Aphrodite Epistrophia had a sanctuary at Megara. In Pausanias’ passage about the goddess, epistrophia is translated as “she who turns men to love.” This is a translator’s best guess as to what the epithet means, but the family of words in which we find epistrophia has little to do with love and everything to do with turning. Aphrodite Epistrophia is “she who turns men’s minds,” and because the she who is doing the turning is the goddess of love, love has to be in the equation somewhere. We are, however, left with the question unanswered whether she is turning minds to love or with love.

Epistrophia \eh-'pis-tro-fee-a\ She who turns.

[*Pausanias 1.40.6]

Hail Tiresias

Ferruginous hawks are very solitary creatures.

Many species of animal can live quite happily in captivity. Wild boars, for instance, are often glad to give up a little room to roam if the fence keeps the hyenas away. Some species, like Red Tails, thrive in captivity. Well, it’s not exactly captivity when you let the bird off the tether to hunt. You are literally setting the bird free all the time. And Red Tails will come back. They are a lot like cats, another top predator species who really doesn’t mind someone else doing the hunting.

But Ferruginous hawks belong at the other end of the spectrum. Ferrugs live their lives assuming that once they’ve fledged, they will always get their own food or they will starve. Something in their biology makes it very difficult to accept or trust help. They barely like members of their own species, hanging out with their mates only to raise the kids high enough to kick 'em out of the nest. In captivity, ferrugs' gut instincts scream to get away, but the jesses (the leather ankle leashes used in falconry) keep them tethered and they must override their terror repeatedly. It wears on them and usually they frazzle out after just a couple of years of being cared for.

So when Tiresias was swept up in the invisible storm of a windmill and smashed down hard enough to literally have his eyes knocked out, he and the rest of the natural world assumed he would just die with no one to care.

But humans are a strange bunch. And the one who saw Tiresias fall brought him to the hospital at the Lindsey Wildlife Museum where the medical staff cleaned his wounds and drained his now empty eye sockets, gave him fluids and left him in blessed solitude overnight to pass out of this life as peacefully as possible.

Hawk brains are almost entirely devoted to the sense of sight. Hawks can generally hear pretty well, but they hunt so high up that smell is irrelevant. Really, sight is the way they get their information about the world. For Tiresias, the wide world from horizon to horizon that he had always known was now shrunk down to the physical limits of his body and the sounds of unseen people approaching. What we know of Tiresias is that his body was built for self-reliance and sight, and he had lost both completely.

We also know that for some reason he chose to live anyway.

Not only did Tiresias live, he recovered his ability to fly. His wings worked perfectly. If he’d been able to see, he would have been released back into the wild. But the one thing left of his original being was denied to him because of his blindness.

This didn’t stop him from trying. Staff members found him restless on the glove. He could hear spring and it made him stretch out his wings. We don’t know who had the idea originally, but at some point someone took Tiresias for a short glide in the park next to the museum. It took the hawk a few tries to test the limits of the long jess, but eventually, Tiresias learned to be flown. To do this, he had to trust the human at the other end of the jess not to fly him into a tree or a wall.

Tiresias lived at the museum for many years beyond the span of most ferrugs.

All life pushes against the limits of time, the current moment; we are all at the cutting edge of evolution. From the amoeba to the human, the physical vehicles that allow life and consciousness to come into being are all the very latest models. And in all of them, the possibility exists to push past the instincts and habits that arise from one’s physiology to become something more than just physical. We can look at our limits and see our own opportunities for adventure into the unknown.

Picture Credit: © 2006 Louis-M. Landry. [Alas, this is not a picture of Tiresias, himself. It is a different Ferrug and also how I imagine Tiresias looking as he hunts in the Summerlands.]