Hermes

Minerva help me, but at Kopachuck just an hour ago with Karma I found another feather.

I feel almost embarrassed - absurd, fantastical, as if surely I am making this up. I am not. I may have actually also seen him or her (Herm, let's say, for reasons I will later explain). S/he flew too high for me to detect anything but a white band on the tail feathers.

I feel in part a bit like what I imagine Solitary Walker feels in his inability to stop writing limericks. Someone save me, quick - only in my case it's save me from this blessed Owl. I know SW's trying, but nothing's working. I've dallied with Crows, and Ducks, and have even considered an Albatross, but I would forsake them all for Owl.

And yet somehow now I'm also getting a different sense. Perhaps it's because of the fourth feather, the Sacred Quaternity, but somehow now this whole experience with Owl is taking on a different and more serious aspect.

On the way home from the park I remembered "Pretty Bird," as shown below perched on my head twenty-five years ago.



She was a tiny baby Cedar Waxwing my much-loved cat Holmes (named after Sherlock, whose complete stories I was reading at the time) brought home one day to my dismay. I had no idea where the nest was and no idea how to help the little bird, but I bought "My Orphans of the Wild: Rescue and Home Care of Native Wildlife," and managed to save her using the book's guidance.

She (I supposed it may have been a he, but I had no way of telling) was a joy. Eventually she would wake me in the morning with her call, and then, once she could fly, she would perch on my shoulder for a ride downstairs to the kitchen.

As you might guess, I was very attached to her (this was before children) and yet she was a wild bird, and as such it was illegal to keep her. I feared for her safety in the wild, yet was resolved to set her free. But when I released her outdoors, she would fly off and immediately return to my shoulder.

Eventually I had the idea to call the local arboretum, who most fortuitously had a netted area that could provide sanctuary until Pretty Bird was clearly foraging on her own. I left her there, and cried, feeling like I was leaving my mother, or my child, I wasn't sure which. But two weeks later, the arboretum people told me she had successfully proved her ability to survive in the wild, and had been released.

In Jungian theory Hermes is a winged Greek god, a trickster, a messenger, among many fascinating other roles and functions. A wonderful article on his significance can be found here, so I'll spare you further description.

The part that so unnerves me is that I have been keeping Owl's feathers (whom I referred to above as Herm, mainly because Owl has taken on a decidedly non-gendered spiritual significance, and isn't just a heterosexual romance) in a little thrift store box (pictured below) before learning, as I just did minutes ago, that Hermes's Egyptian analogue is Thoth, whose animal form is the ibis. That, as you see, is the bird on the cover of the box.





I am truly in the presence of something numinous, but I have no idea how to understand it.

Post-postscript, a couple of hours later. If e. e. cummings is right, and "kisses are a better fate than wisdom," perhaps Owl is telling me we don't have to choose? And what do you think of that?