Irruption of Ghosts

It was a late start; an indecisive morn. I couldn't decide whether to hit the road or do a bit of research. I'd read of an irruption of Snowy Owls two hours away, at the south end of Flathead Lake. I would have preferred to make a couple of phone calls, get the specific location and take some notes on the Arctic Owls, but that's not the way the new moon morn unfolded. Once a pileated woodpecker swooped by my head it was clear the morning contained magic.Wood Tick was game.

We knew the area from an article description: Skyline Drive, at the top of a hill in a subdivision, overlooking the town of Polson. Subdivision? We drove the hill but didn't spot a bird as we continued south onto barren plains. This is where the owls would prefer to hunt; where the landscape resembles their barren tundra home. Alas, no white birds. I spotted a car ahead on an otherwise empty and straight gravel road. Catch up, I said to Wood Tick ... it's a birder and he'll know where the the owls are. Wood Tick cast me a how-do-you-know-look. I'd been watching the vehicle. I recognize my ilk. Sure enough, the kind man had just spotted seven snowy owls and gave directions. Back we went to Skyline Drive.

We turned onto a side street and there they were, ghost owls perched on snow-blotched roof tops with a 360-view that included Flathead Lake to the north and hunting fields below. Puffy, fluffy magical white sentinels. I counted twelve as we drove around the neighborhood. We parked and walked through snow to a hilltop for another angle. Their beauty ... and presence ... defied description.

I'd never seen a snowy owl. Irruptions are normal every few years, when nomadic groups depart their Arctic home in winter and travel further south than normal. The last irruption to Polson was in 2005-06; they wintered about a mile from this subdivision home, laying claim to fence posts and old farm machinery. Now the solitary birds were hanging out on houses as if they were the most sociable creature alive. Irruptions are usually regional. They might occur in the NW or the NE, but this year thousands of owls have come south, in pockets from coast to coast. Seattle. Kansas. The Ohio River Valley. Boston. In fields north of Denver International Airport.

The Snowy diet is 90% lemmings. If the food supply dwindles in their circumpolar home, they move south in winter. But these primarily diurnal birds were not starving or stressed. It felt like they came to dazzle. To reach into souls with pure white awakening. A female defending her chicks will launch like a stealth bomber  at a predator from a half mile away at 25 mph, tearing through cotton layers, down jackets and flesh with ease. No wonder Oglala Sioux warriors who excelled in battle wore a cap of their powerful feathers.

When the subconscious is out of sorts and needs to give us a wake-up call it sends us dreams. To the extent we ignore the dreams, it sends stronger, more outrageous symbols until we can't ignore -- a person we dislike; a nightmare of fright; vivid images in those minutes before we wake up.

Snowy Owls from coast to coast, never before witnessed on such a scale, can not be ignored. They take to silent flight from melting ice caps and land on rooftops that we might marvel and give thought to a planet out of kilter. Just what will it take to open hearts and minds and turn the world around?

Late starts do reap results.

____________

Thank you for reading!
I invite you to check out my updated, spiffy website at www.christinanealson.com 
And as always, I love reading your comments.

Assassin's Return: Guatemala Revisited

I made several trips to Guatemala in the late 1980's. My first solo excursion was to Antigua for a seven week language school. My heart was hooked from the moment I stepped off the dilapidated school bus packed with chickens, mothers and endearing Mayan children. My soul followed suit as I observed Mayan women on the streets, their elaborate cosmos woven into colorful fabrics and finely stitched designs; their solid presence upon the planet; the immaculate simplicity of their swept-clean dirt floors. Several weeks into classes I boarded a bus for the famous market in Chichicastenango when I was stopped short at remote bus stop where rural Mayan women, destined for Guatemala City, held large photos of young boys and men. "Donde esta mi esposo?" the posters read ~~ "Where is my husband?" Where were their sons and mates, kidnapped and disappeared from the face of the earth?  The mothers risked their lives to travel days across country and stand silently, holding the remnant of their loved one in public. They journeyed to remind the president and his murderous military that they would not forget. That the holocaust against the indigenous peoples would not go unnoticed.

I continued to Chichi that day as I witnessed sudden stops of buses by the military, including mine. Everyone was ordered off the bus. We few Gringos were not hassled or touched as we were ordered to stand aside while poverty-stricken women, children and men were frisked and intimidated. The following weekend I, too, began to make the weekly sojourns to the City and photograph the courageous women. When I returned to the United States I joined a group called "Women for Guatemala" and began to spread the word through writing and slide show presentations.

 I recently read that Otto Perez Molina, the new President of Guatemala, had the support of the United States. An uneasy feeling came over me. Otto was my dad's name; not a name I easily forgot. It stuck in the recesses of my memory.

"If you want to see what's happening to the indigenous peoples of Guatemala, visit the Ixil Triangle," I was told around 1987. And so I did. Call me crazy; Guatemala had a way of bringing out the risk in me. On my second trip to Guatemala I rented a jeep and headed far from the safety of the Gringo trail, into the highlands of Maya-lands where 70-90% of the villages were razed by the military. When I entered the villages the first thing I noticed were men with machine guns in high parapets at the entrance; the second thing I noticed was that there were no Mayan men of military age. They were "disappeared." Perez Molina was the military commander in charge of the Ixil Triangle. He was trained the in the infamous "School of the Americas" in Ft. Benning, Georgia. Also known as the School of Coups; the School of the Assassins.

Over two hundred thousand Guatemalans were slaughtered during the civil war, Mayans as well as anyone who supported human rights: activists, university professors, doctors, religious priests and nuns. According to a recent article by Lauren Carasik, Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Western New England University School of Law, the new President of Guatemala, Otto Perez Molina denies genocide occurred.

I wrap my fingers around the stunning handwoven bag I purchased from a family of weavers on an unforgettable afternoon in their dark, barren home. I remember the vibrant sharp witty girl children, the stoop in women's walks and the fear in their eyes. I had carried a polaroid camera and spawned joyous scenes of picture taking. The images I handed the giggling youngsters of themselves must have seemed like miracles. Those children would now have children and grandchildren of their own. I pray for miracles in their hands; safety, respect and justice in their villages and homes.

I'm watching you, Otto Perez Molina. Ready to scream bloody murder.

Unlucky Thirteen, Bad Friday

If 13 people sit down to dinner together, one will die within the year. The Turks so disliked the number 13 that it was practically expunged from their vocabulary (Brewer, 1894). Many cities do not have a 13th Street or a 13th Avenue. Many buildings don't have a 13th floor. If you have 13 letters in your name, you will have the devil's luck (Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy and Albert De Salvo all have 13 letters in their names).

Sorry all you paraskevidekatriaphobics — people afflicted with a morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th —  I love the edgy magic of  the "bad luck" day, the superstition most firmly grounded in our consciousness for reasons most don't fathom but go to great lengths to confirm. In a 1993 English study, the ratio of traffic volume was compared to to the number of automobile accidents on two different days, Friday the 6th and Friday the 13th, over a period of years. Scientists found that even though fewer people chose to drive their cars on Friday the 13th, the number of hospital admissions due to vehicular accidents was significantly higher than on "normal" Fridays. Their conclusion:  "Friday 13th is unlucky for some. The risk of hospital admission as a result of a transport accident may be increased by as much as 52 percent. Staying at home is recommended."

It's fun to tie these things together. But fun turns serious when this day is connected to a woman's disconnect from her source. It begins with the 'unlucky' number 13. Imagine, if you will, living by a calendar that is tied to our cycles, as used to be the case. Thirteen months of 28 days (13X28=364 days), in which women ovulated together on the full moon and bled on the new moon. Time when our dreams and bodies corresponded to the ebb and flow of lunar light. There was good reason for all of those raucous full moon fertility dances!

The "Earth Mother of Laussel," — a 27,000-year-old carving found near the Lascaux caves in France, often cited as an icon of matriarchal spirituality — depicts a female figure holding a crescent-shaped horn bearing 13 notches. As the solar calendar triumphed over the lunar with the rise of male-dominated civilization so did the "perfect" number 12 over the "imperfect" number 13. If Friday was a holy day for heathens, the Church fathers felt, it must not be so for Christians (much like Winter Solstice and Christmas, the exchange of worship of the SUN for the SON) — thus it became known in the Middle Ages as the "Witches' Sabbath."  Twelve disciples, 13 witches in a coven. You make the connection.

The name "Friday" was derived from a Norse deity, Freya (goddess of sex and fertility). Enter the priests, who recast Freya and her sacred animal the cat, as a witch. So it was, thousands of independent women -- academics like Hypatia, mystic soldier Joan of Arc, common healers and midwives -- died at the hands of Christians. Estimates range upwards from 100,000's of thousands tortured with priest-blessed breast rippers, iron maidens and heretic's forks. Once they admitted they were witches they were burned at the stake in a holocaust of women; lands were seized on behalf of the church. The Inquisition. Fear of those days lives in our genetic memory.

There are three Friday the Thirteenth's in 2012. There's debate on how Unlucky 13 merged with Unlucky Friday to create Unluckiest Friday the 13th. Many point to the stock market crash. Wood Tick says his house burned down a few years ago on Friday the 13th.

As for me, I get a little testy on this day. I feel compelled to shake loose the memory of Freya's day and the number 13; to add another month to the calendar. To purge the past and pet the wild.


_________
Thank you Barbara Walker. What would we do without you?
Thank you David Emery, "Why Friday the 13th is Unlucky."

Bobcat Bounty

I didn't take any chances this New Year's Eve. Janus, the cantankerous keeper of the gateway between the old and new years, has thrown me a curve ball more than once. So it was I prepared. I spent luscious time on the phone with girlfriends. I went online and ordered up a box of dark chocolate bars with cherries, girlfriend-recommended reads -- A Discovery of Witches, A Tiger's Wife -- and a portable reading light. 

Tucked in for the night by ten p.m., I awoke serene, gazing into a Montana pine-spiked, cloudy sky. I made my way to the kitchen and began grinding coffee beans when movement caught my eye. About thirty yards outside the sliding door, across the little river, was a bobcat. She was perusing the area, sniffing grasses and alder thickets, taking her time. I grabbed my binocs and glassed her exquisitely striped body. She was small with sharp edges. She sniffed the deer block, looked across at me for a few seconds, and disappeared into the brush.

I had just received my totem for 2012. Not that I was looking for one; I had java on the brain and the smell of fresh-ground beans. But spirit has a way of knocking me off routine. So it was my next few hours were spent delving into Lynx Rufus research, pulling up memories, honing insights. Cat energy permeates my soul. I am a Tiger by the Chinese calendar. I have had several potent encounters with mountain lions, one with a mother and three yearlings. With this sighting I dropped from big cats to small. To ones with thick, mighty tails, off of which they spring unbelievable distances, to ones with minute bobs and powerful legs.

Bobcats are crepuscular. They are solitary prowlers of the dawn and dusk, immersed in a silent, secretive world. The same could be said of me. It is my preferred time, when muse and magic reign. While they prowl on legs through the river bottom, I prowl the mind, pen in hand through thickets of imagination. Bobcats are stealth hunters, with keen senses. They have an uncanny ability to blend in and survive their environment. They are 2-4 feet long (including the tail), 14-16 inches tall, and 15-30 pounds. This  feline was on the small end of those figures.

I see large, round snowshoe hare tracks on my daily walks. I've been excitedly anticipating a white-wonder, which I haven't seen in years. Now I read that bobcat has been my competition, as snowshoes are her main diet. She also feasts on rabbits, rodents and insects. In mythology the bobcat is associated with wind. He is often paired with coyote as the opposite. Coyote as chaos, bobcat as order. Bobcat is a protector of Venus, the evening star, which happens to be my ruling planet. In Norse mythology (my ancestry) bobcat is associated with Freya, Goddess of love, beauty and destiny, who rides a chariot pulled by two cats.

Bobcats travel up to 7-miles a day and have a range of 100-square miles. I'll be fortunate to see her again. I'm working on sensing her prowl. I know the camouflaged creature is nearby, cocooned in her secretive world as I perfect the properties she represents: stealth, power, camouflage and clairaudience -- hearing sounds and voices not audible to most. Lynx Rufus. Lynx, from the word for light. So named for gleaming eyes; the ability to see in the dark.

When I mentioned bobcat's visitation to Wood Tick he said, "That's a $300 bill!" "Too small," I stammered, shocked by his automatic response. "May be more than that ... the small ones have the best coats."  "Don't you dare tell a soul," I said, as I confirmed trapping season was over. He promised silence. He's not a trapper, although plenty around here are.

Janus is alive and well, looking back and forward simultaneously. From dollar signs to totems. In my world, the bounty of the wild is the holy.