Raven and the moon …

An Old Story

The reason that people could once read the language of the birds to tell the future is that if you are a place you do not move, just as a woman who is a carpenter today does not move from being a carpenter or a man who is an artist is something other than a man. It’s in this way that a farmer was his farm (most everyone was a farmer) and was acclimatized to it, in the way sheep in Iceland are acclimatized to their mountain and do not stray from it.

Eagles and Heron Rookery

At home in the world.

In such a condition, any change is significant.

Hawk and Saskatoon Bush

A tired storyteller.

A bird changing position, and operating in a world of movement in general, is read against the backdrop of a landscape read simultaneously as one’s mind and body — a landscape in which all time doesn’t move, because it is physical. In a landscape like that, a bird makes connections.

Robin and Poplar

One did not need to be “creative” to make these connections. That is a contemporary term, that attempts to translate the old language of the birds into the speech of individual consciousness.

Canada Geese and Gulls at 20 Below, Okanagan Lake

In place, one just needed to see, or to read, but you had to do it with your whole self and body at once, in all extensions of it in space and time.

 Magpie and the Cross

Humans learned to be human by watching the birds. Trickster behaviour is best learned from being tracked by cheeky birds in space and time. Then it is yours, too.

That is a definition of art. The dominant contemporary art form, the photograph, does no more. It operates along the same principles, but does not do so with the same character-changing and character-anchoring depth. It is a part of the technology of individual consciousness, rather than place consciousness.

Starling and Rainbow

Well, he’s not very big.

Yes, it is possible to read the language of the birds today, but the answer is not going to be the kind of answer that comes from books. For that, one needs a translator.

Western Mountain Bluebird and Apple Tree

What the bluebird says: Western Mountain Bluebird and Apple Tree. This is, however, significant.

What is translated is not some romantic nonsense from the gods, which is the argument that was used to dispel earth-based thinking, in that time when humans thought with and as the world.

Great Blue Heron Claiming a Barn Roof

It is your self, which is to say it is the world around you and in which you are embedded. You are still and all the world. Birds, which are the agents of movement, are thought.

Raven and Hawk

I learned all this in the Church of St. Nicholas in Leipzig, where the demonstrations that led to the Wall (and the Iron Curtain) coming down in 1989 began. The organist was playing a piece Bach had composed for the church. The church was the sounding box for the organ. Rather than project the sound outward into the square, however, it projected inward, into my body where I sat in a pew. One note played my liver. Another my femurs. Another the muscles in my arms. One chord played my thighs. Another played my lungs. Chord by chord, the music was transmitted through me. In the Leipziger Nikolaikirche, Bach is still alive. It’s like that with birds.

Crow Talking With Her Whole Body

Mackenzie Beach, Vancouver Island

It is all direct and simple, but it is not the modern way. That’s a shame. One might get knowledge without being able to read like this. One won’t get wisdom.

Gull on Drift Ice, Okanagan Lake

Go for the wisdom.