Once I finally crossed everything off my list today, I finally allowed myself to sit on a massive slab in the middle of the creek. The volume of water coursing downstream was significantly less than yesterday, yet its roar continues to be deafening.
Every once in a while it’s deeply satisfying to find one’s self ensconced in the midst of so much noise. There’s no easy way to discern if anyone is trying to get your attention. In fact, unless movement catches your eye, it’s almost impossible to know whether anyone else is even around you. Instead, there’s this ‘white (water) noise’ pouring into your ears.
Layers of Flow – Photo: L. Weikel
It Takes Me a While
It actually takes me a while before I fully settle down and allow myself to just be with the relentless sound of the creek.
I eventually succeeded, but now I’m finding myself feeling like I left myself at the creek. I’m profoundly tired. Tired right down to my bones. It’s probably all the emotional upheaval of the past week.
It’s hard to believe it was only last week at this time when I heard a noise erupt from Spartacus that I thought was a massive and very peculiar sounding fart – but which I now strongly suspect was something bursting inside him.
It’s thoughts like these that are curiously similar to the swirls and eddies of the creek that I witnessed quite close to where I was sitting. If I let myself dwell too long on that weird sound then my feelings get stuck in a shallow little vortex that is hard to escape.
And that’s when I realize once more how brilliant it is to just succumb to Mother Earth’s healing ministrations.
She makes the creek loud enough to drown out the thoughts on purpose.
And when I re-emerge from my perch on the slab, I feel different.
Knowing a good thing when they’ve found it, several grackles continued to frequent our feeders today. While they did become a bit petulant and mouthy as the afternoon grew long and the peanut coil emptied, this only reinforced my commitment to sharing with you the message of Grackle Medicine – Part 2!
And so it was that, when I checked my trusted and dog-eared copy of Ted Andrews’s Animal Speak*, the entry for Grackle made my jaw drop. I will synopsize here:
Grackle –
Keynote: Overcoming Excess and Emotional Life Congestion – Cycle of Power: Early Spring
Although the grackle is often considered part of the blackbird family, along with crows and starlings, it actually is not. It is part of the meadowlark and oriole family of birds. It is a large black bird with an extra-long tail. About its head and shoulders are iridescent feathers that change from blue to green to purple or bronze, depending on the light.
This coloring often reflects a need for those to whom the grackle comes to look at what is going on in their life differently. It says that situations are not what they appear to be and you may not be looking at them correctly – particularly anything dealing with the emotions.
Keep in mind that black is the color of the inner and the feminine. The purple and bronze coloring about the head especially usually indicates that emotions are coloring our thinking process. The grackle can help us to correct this.
During courting season, the male grackle will fold its tail, creating a diamond-like trough. This diamond shape is often reflective of activation. It hints at a need to become active in regards to emotional situations. Have we been too passive in our emotions? Are we simply rehashing and talking about them without doing anything to correct the emotional situations of our life? The grackle is a noisy, chattering bird and may be a reminder to quit talking and do something.
(…)
Grackles have inside their mouths on the hard palate a keel which helps them cut open acorns and eat them. We have often heard the expression, “It’s a tough nut to crack.” Well, this reflects the role a grackle can serve as a totem. Dealing constructively with our emotions and those people and things in our life which aggravate them can be a tough nut to crack. The grackle can show us how to do this.
Grackles love to live in pine trees. Pine trees are very therapeutic to emotional states. In a form of homeopathic medicine known as flower essences, the essence of pine can be used to help alleviate strong emotional states, particularly feelings of guilt. Again this reflects the grackle showing up as a sign to help you clear the emotions.
Emotions that are not dealt with can congest our life, aggravating or even creating congestion in the body at some level. The grackle can serve as a warning to be careful of this possibility, but it can also help show us how to prevent it from occurring. The droppings of grackles can serve to culture fungi which, if the wind blows, can cause a pneumonia-like infection.**
Most illness is symbolic. Congestion, especially pneumonia-like in appearance, can tell us that we are holding in our emotions. It can reflect a suppressed crying or a refusal to deal with certain long-standing problems and issues. (Have we neglected situations, giving them time to be cultured?) It can reflect a refusal to take in new life and new approaches to life, and so we become congested with old emotions.
The grackle shows us how to handle this. It can teach the proper expression of emotions. They can show us where excesses are dissipating our life force and facilitating a congestion of growth and movement. They can teach how to get back to creative and beneficial experiences and expressions of emotion.”
Grackle sampling – Photo: L. Weikel
So Many Take-Aways
Hmm. Wow. A lot of the information contained in this entry set bells a-ringing and whistles a-blowing for me.
First of all, who can deny that emotional overload hasn’t been an increasingly powerful factor in our lives as Covid-19 took root in our country? Since none of us have faced anything like this pandemic in our lifetime, we don’t have a first-hand frame of reference with which to deal with it. So our emotions are all over the place. And when we don’t know what to do with them, they clog up our systems; we become congested with emotion.
Secondly, I had to laugh at the admonition: “The grackle is a noisy, chattering bird and may be a reminder to quit talking and do something.” Umm, yeah. Point taken. Indeed, I think we’re all realizing the importance of action over words. Social distancing. Wearing face masks. We either do it or we don’t.
Biggest Confluence of Meaning
But almost immediately, I see how much more Grackle’s message applies in a cultural sense, in light of the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter eruption over the past two weeks. Indeed, it was easy to draw parallels between our current social experience vis-à-vis guilt and facing hard emotional lessons (tough nuts to crack) in the first several paragraphs.
But I nearly fell over when both the trauma of the pandemic and the trauma of systemic racism in our nation dovetailed in the paragraphs on illness. It is as if Grackle was signaling me with flares and sirens that our current experiences are a perfect storm for transformation. We must process our emotions instead of deflecting and burying and denying them as we have, as a culture, for 400 years.
The pandemic is a symptom of the guilt and shame we carry, collectively, over the shameful act of exploiting others based on the color of their skin. And this infection is, in a sense, carried on the wind (which is why face masks protect us all), yet the brutality and inhumanity we are confronting now has been carried on the winds of time.
A Lot to Contemplate
I’ve read this information by Ted Andrews over and over since I finally succumbed to Grackle’s insistence that I pay attention. And I keep gleaning additional perspectives and tidbits of information that can help us all navigate this cultural storm.
Probably one of the most important concepts we can all apply to our experiences at this point is something one of my most beloved teachers, Puma Fredy Quispe Singona, suggested in a FB broadcast today: We must take care of ourselves as we deal with these great changes. And beyond that, we must remember that Mother Earth is here for us. She wants to support us; she loves us; she stands with us; and she is always there to ‘back us up.’
Grackle – Yum – Photo: L. Weikel
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**Clement, Roland C. The Living World of Audubon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, Publishers, 1974) p. 254.
