All I know is something like a bird within her sang…
Birdsong this spring has been especially effusive and expressive, as reported from friends around the country. We have been visited by blue jays as never before. One could attribute it to a logistical fact of people under martial law at home more to hear it; or to a sentimental wish that birds are “feeling sorry” for us and thus being cheery. Then there is the cryptic statement from somewhere in the Rudolf Steiner canon that birdsong is what generates the spring, subsequently borne out by research into “sonic bloom”, where leaf stoma open and breathe easier listening to actual twittering, not to mention composers the ilk of Mozart.
We can go deeper. There is an esoteric tradition that birds are angels. Not just that they sing like angels, or are winged like angels, or are symbolic of angelic realms, but that they are angels. Anyone who has seen hummingbirds squabble at a feeder, or chickadees chasing blue jays chasing crows chasing hawks might take exception, viewing this as apparent martial activity. Yet anyone who has studied or worked with the full gamut of angels in spiritual traditions—from their Persian origins through medieval alchemists like John Dee, and thus immune to the new age romantic love and light projection upon them—might be open to this realization. Angels are at least as multifarious as humans, or birds.
Almost every bird has a perspicuous call of its own. As in calling you, and the blue jay’s song is trenchant enough to rip the fabric of experience. In that tear there is a possibility, an opportunity to witness the spark jumping the two great Gemini antipodes of experience: the physical and the spiritual. In the stillness of a morning meditation, or in the sudden chant from an overhead branch while walking, that call is experienced within us. It is a glimpse that obviates the paradox of within and without.
Angel-birds have other songs than gentle cloud harping for a jealous lord (who really should be beyond the need for sycophancy). If we are in Fortune’s favor, they intone a keening threnody, like the unspeakably plaintive Armenian duduk, or Rumi’s famous ney flute. Once cut from the reed bed, and fashioned by breath and proportionate holes, its mournful song of disconnect from source simultaneously composes a vibrational bridge back across the gap home. Or more accurately, reveals the gap to be illusion.
In the Yoga tradition, the subtle element (tanmatra) of sound (śabda) generates space (akaśa) itself. The quality of the sound informs the space generated. The CIA-infused, media-chanted, programmed, corporate culturally-generated space is given to be a physical world that independently exists without us, irrespective of any awareness of it. Most people, unless spiritually trained to recognize it as such have no inkling that what they are being fed is a chant…which then begets an enchantment…which in turn is reified into the false perception of an independently existing reality outside of themselves. And no doubt this is a construct we all have to navigate, however, if we are fortunate, we have Metis, the Greek goddess of navigational cunning, at our helm. Sadly, this false construct holds no space for divinity, so it is on us to conceive it.
Angel birds arrive daily to open our possibility to experience the paradox of space as both generated through us, heard simultaneously within and without. Hamlet (II.2) famously quips O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, which comes across as an enlightened—or at least enlightenment—perspective, until the oft-omitted following line: were it not that I have bad dreams. Angels in the form of birds arrive daily to awaken us from this corporate/governmental/illuminati/AI/fill-in-your-own-blank nightmarish illusion, that we can only begin to navigate once we see the construct, and that begins by realizing the origin of space, and thus the cosmos, as arising from within. Only then are we not swayed by all the false manipulative overlays, one virus after another, that occlude true vision.
Opening quote from Birdsong, lyrics by Robert Hunter (for Janis Joplin); photo of angel wings in the sky by Krys Crimi, summer 2019.
