I just spent the larger part of this week camping with new and less new friends at a folk festival in Kerrville. I only planned on going for the weekend but found myself back there a second and third time as the week went on, scrambling to get shifts at work covered or moved so I could make the trip back again and then again. We spent the days at the river, trudging with beer on our heads to hidden dark green spring fed pools, and the nights hooping and howling in packs. I guess what I hadn't realized is how much the city and my stagnancy here is really getting to me. The cars, the routine, the worn paths back and forth to work and home (which is actually quite a loving and creative haven from it all usually) and to the other few places that I most often frequent - its all choking me. It's all driving me so mad that all I could do was escape and escape and escape to what Joe calls accusingly (but fairly accurately) a "hedonistic" place, a sort of Never Never Land - only in the rolling hill country of central Texas.
There's no one to blame in this dim scenario but me. I'm in a great town, surrounded by great people, probably spreading myself to thin and not searching or being nearly as contemplative as I should. Being stagnant, being content. Making money, spending money. The city, to my weak defense is cyclical and distracting and big and flashing and its weighing me down. I had to get out to realize what I was missing. And now all I want to do is leave it and travel and read and expand my spiritual exploration and let all of it, everything, go in search of the north wind that blew me in here and hasn't blown me out. There's just more. MORE more more - that I should be doing. I got caught, for good reason, but I'm no longer moving up, rather side to side on an endless horizontal plane going no where much at all.
Wait, that's not true. I've met wonderful inspiring people here who I don't intend to leave behind. In fact they are the ones that have pushed me, no, ushered me to this point. Long car drives discussing metaphysical experiences and music played late into the night to early mornings is all I could have possibly asked for from this relocation. Austin has provided me with everything I knew I needed when I left Arizona and probably isn't done putting teachers and lovers and companions into my path. I don't feel done with this place. In fact, I suspect that it still hasn't reached its apex, BUT I am a sign of fire, and an archer, centaur and my arrow for the time being has soared and fell beyond the mountain out of my sight and I must retrieve it, however far it takes me.
At the river one of the last days I spent in Kerville, we discovered a vulture dead and tangled in an oak tree. After some awe-full observation we collected some of the feathers that had fallen onto the ground beneath it and washed them in the water with soap we had brought along for bathing. Back to the campsites we waded, our tribe all adorned with one or more feathers either in our hair, hats, or in one case, a staff which had been made from bamboo growing along the riverside. In the bed of the truck headed back to the grounds someone worried that the vulture feathers might bring bad juju. But that idea didn't set with me. Upon returning home, to the city which I reveled so purely in my short-lived withdrawl from I looked up Vulture magic, and this is what it said:
The ancient greeks considered vultures to be descendants of the mythological "griffin," the king of the beasts and a protector from evil magic, and slander, and symbolized courage and leadership. In other cultures, like native American, the vulture or buzzard represented purification, as it literally "strips down to the bone," the feathers were also used at the end of shapeshifting ceremonies to "ground its participants and dispel evil" as it is thought to help break the connection between the two worlds of the living and the dead. In alchemy the symbol of the vulture reminds us that all suffering is natural, temporary, and necessary, and represented the connection between the psychic and cosmic energies on earth.
The vulture is the only predatory animal that DOES NOT KILL. It also does not eat other birds, even when they are already dead therefore they are looked upon as compassionate and noble creatures who serve a very important environmental roll that reduces diseases spread by carrions, the carcasses of dead animals. It is also one of the birds that is thought to soar through the air for the sheer joy of it - when it is not hunting at which time it flies tight circles around its target.
The vulture is indeed very powerful, that much is undeniable, but to say it has bad juju? The buzzard is just truly misunderstood and its popular reputation misused. I can feel the heat of the feather when I wear it in my hat. A slight pressure like a warm hand on the area of my head where, in the brim, the feather sits. Now what to do, how to liken the symbolism of this compassionate misinterpreted creature to my own situation? How to let it assist somehow the discernment of my current actions? Maybe I'll ask it to come to me in a dream, sleeping with the feather nearby.
