Ancestral Plummage

and the song of the hummingbird

It seems the spring winds bring the hummingbirds back each year, to our little high desert mountain abode here in western Colorado.

Each spring, we have a few friendly visitors from who-knows-where (the ocean?) who come back to make their homes and songs alongside ours for a little while.

I have been, for the last few weeks, grocking the incredible wisdom pool of Martín Prechtel in his book The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun, while also negotiating my allegiance to (our) cultural norms and general sense of place as story on Earth.

In cultivating my own flowering authenticity, I am amazed to see how direct experience is rooting me in my own, very culturally obscure, vision of my life and of Life in general.

How the ocean yearns for the high mountain's fresh water. 
How grief pulls salt water from our eyes. 
How we are, sometimes, just an open canal for the greater dreaming of Earth’s heart.

This morning, I was born anew through the direct experience of mythological embodiment: when we become the story of Creation, of Sun and Moon, of Sky and Earth, through conscious quietude and the slipping away of Ancestral Plummage that has guided us otherwise.

When we gently release the veils of indoctrinated meaninglessness.

We, a living mythology, wrapped in the living mythology of Nature, wrapped in the living mythology of the cosmos.

Allowing such an ancient and unhindered perception of meangingfulness to enter the conscious witnessing of our lives, as we navigate our place as a people who lost their stars of origin, their ancient Life mirrors, their breathing entanglement with the rooting Rowan, Holly and arctic Lily.

To return a seashell to the mountain top. 
To plant a seed of fresh water in the earth.
To reconstruct our conscious knowing of body as earth, as water, as story. 
As meaningful.  

So, each year these hummingbirds return, making their tiny nests in the junipers near our home and this year, I heard the first one while walking the goats in the forest with my daughter, Amara. A dear friend had been visiting, sharing stories that kept blowing the cap off my previously held “truths” about “the way things are”, and I must admit the relief I feel in the presence of these stories, at the obliteration of the old cloak of constructed meaninglessness.

And like our friend, these hummingbirds are bringing the breezes and songs and memories of a place far away, where the people are still connected to the living mimicry of their world as the world of Nature. Where the Sun/Father/Time rises early to hold the world together. Where the Moon/Mother/Ancestral Time cooks and shapes the Lifeblood, the Water, of the future. Where a person is expected to evolve beyond the Ancestral Plummage that came before, becoming a mystery, a never-before-seen bird of flight, a carrier of life and love; becoming a true adult through their humbled, failed and ecstatic flowering into that which they love.

To return the seashell to the mountain top. 
To shake the cowrie shells in your hands, making a sound, an offering. 
To allow all that Wisom to enter, through silent reverence of all that lives, 
and
to become Sunlight
dancing on Water
in a forgotten Forest
somewhere, near here. 

Artwork by Indigo DeGaia

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