animals Archives - Laurell K. Hamilton

Whiteout, a dog, and a prayer

I’m sitting in my office listening to the dry, sharp sound of sleet hitting my roof. It sounds like sand being poured out, except wetter. Somehow my brain knows its nothing as dry and warm as sand from just listening to it. I grew up in Northern Indiana where winter is much more serious than it is here in St. Louis, Missouri. I’ve been in blizzards in a car and out of it. I’ve stood in the middle of an open field as the white out barreled down on me like a solid wall. Until that moment, I thought darkness, blackness, was the only thing that could steal my sight. I learned that day that white can be just as blinding, and you can be just as lost.

I could have outrun that wall of snow. I saw it coming and I was only yards from the house, but the dog we’d inherited, King, was with me. He was sixty pounds or maybe a little more of white German Shepard/husky mix, but looked like just a white shepherd. We inherited him after he got shot and after my grandmother and I had paid the vet bill, which was a hardship on our finances, I tried to take King back to his home. I started talking about what the veterinarian had told me, the physical therapy that would be needed daily, the walks on leash, the tending of the wound. The man who I’d thought was nice until that moment, looked me dead in the eye and said, he’d take him out and shoot him that he wasn’t going to do any of that. It was too much trouble. I went back to my car where King lay on blankets on the seat and drove him to my home.

My grandmother was not happy when she saw me pull up with the dog still in the car, but when she heard why, she let me make King a bed in the brand-new attached garage where the first car I’d ever owned got to park. She never allowed pets in the house except for once a year on Christmas Day. There were no exceptions, but the garage was insulated, and the bed blankets were thick, and he was half-husky. King was warm and safe with us.

It was my freshman year of college, and I lived at home so my grandmother wouldn’t be alone. I had an 8:00 AM creative writing class that meant I had to get up before dawn every day to do King’s physical therapy, so he didn’t lose the use of his leg. He let me do it even though I know it hurt, just as he’d let me pick him up and put him in the car when I found him bleeding the day he was shot. He’d screamed, but he never offered to bite. The only time he ever bit a human was to protect one of his people. He was a great dog.

When he was well enough, I started walking him in the predawn darkness. I was half asleep sometimes, so I let him lead me through our small town of a hundred people, or out into the fields along the roads. I learned his routes and what dogs were his friends and the ones that weren’t. But mostly, it was just King and me. We got snow storms and blizzards that year. There were mornings that I shoveled out the driveway and it was blown shut before I could finish changing out of the wet clothes into dry ones to drive to college. On those days I called in and said, I can’t get there safely. There were drifts as tall as cars across the highway.

It was bitterly cold that year, and the metal they’d put in King’s leg to save it got cold and he’d start limping and then sit down in the snow and refuse to go on. I’d take my gloves off and put my hands over his leg to warm him up until he could move with less pain, and we’d finish our walk. I’d stopped in the middle of the field to do just that, the snow was over my knees standing, so I’d brushed some of it away so I could kneel down without it covering me as I knelt beside my dog. He was whimpering with the cold in his old wound as I tried to warm him enough for us to finish the walk.

I don’t know if I heard something or if it was like that sense you get about weather, but I looked up and saw a white wall of snow and wind coming our way. It covered the horizon, and it was low and moving fast. I had minutes to run to the house and shelter. We were in a large open space with houses all around, but I knew once the white out hit the chances of missing the houses and heading out into open fields and never finding shelter were high. I had seconds to do the math in my head of risking freezing to death in the storm or running for the house and safety. I could have made it but King couldn’t, he was still too injured to run. I was in judo and in great shape. I could carry him if I had to on flat ground, but I couldn’t do it in knee deep snow and I couldn’t carry him as far as the house. Seconds of me staring at the storm and then down at my dog with his brown eyes looking up at me. I made my choice; I couldn’t leave him. I hunkered down on the far side of him to protect us both from the wind that was coming with the back of my winter coat and prayed it would pass quickly. Some whiteouts are just instances that descend and blow past; if it was that we’d be okay.

The world became white and the wind hit us like a giant was slapping to try and knock us to the ground. I’d never experienced anything like it, and as I huddled by my dog I had no regrets, but I knew we were in trouble. This storm was here to stay, and we could not be out in it and survive. I was maybe a quarter of a mile or less away from several houses and safety. My home was so close, but I couldn’t see anything and King was still too injured to play Lassie for me in the storm. I had been breaking trail for him in the deep snow all morning, he could not lead the way. I had a mental picture of our house before the whiteout happened. I visualized it as hard and solid as I could and prayed. Prayed that I was right, prayed that I wouldn’t miss the house by a few feet and wander out into the storm. Some of the blizzards that year had lasted hours, all night, or most of a day. King and I din’t have that kind of time.

I know that walk didn’t last as long as it felt, but in the white blindness with the world narrowed down to the wind, the driving snow, the air so cold it hurt to breath, and the dog that I was leading behind me as I broke the deepening snow, it felt like forever. At one point King refused to move forward and I almost cried. I pleaded with him that it was just a little farther and prayed that I was right. We’d be okay if we didn’t miss the house. The growing fear was that I had already missed the house and I was urging King out into the storm away from all shelter. Then I ran into the side of the house, the wind and snow as so bad that even standing with my hand on the house I hadn’t seen it. The wind died down for a second, enough for me to orient and head down the side of the house towards the back and the door. I kept one hand on the house and the other on King’s leash. We were almost home, almost safe, but the wind was howling. I had one of those thoughts you get sometimes, that if I yelled for help my grandmother wouldn’t be able to hear me inside the house, but that was just the fear talking. I had a hand on the house, I wouldn’t get lost now.

Once we got round the corner to the back, some trick of the wind had blown the snow into a trough so that it wasn’t as deep. King and I could both move better those last few feet to the back door which led into the garage. I got the door open, and I stumbled inside. The moment the door closed behind me the silence of not being in the wind of the was so loud in my head. It was the first time I realized that silence is its own sound, or that the absence of noise is a sound all its own. I locked the door behind me and leaned on it. I said a prayer of gratitude that we were safe, then got King settled in his bed. I can’t remember if my grandmother came out and helped me pick the snow out of his fur and get him settled; I just remember standing in the warm house with the snow caked to my clothes trying to warm my hands by the heater. We didn’t have central heating, so I huddled by the warmth in the living room. I remember the pain as circulation returned to my fingers which were mottled in colors I’d never seen on my body before. My fingers still ache in the cold to this day as a reminder of how close we came that day.

The First Bird of the New Year

I have been a birder since high school, long before I took my first ornithology class in college for my biology degree. Yes, I mean bird watching. I’m like a ferret on crack for anything winged and flying near me. Yes, this is the same person that writes Urban Fantasy featuring Anita Blake and Meredith (Merry) Gentry. My world is not all zombies, vampires, and wereanimals, thank you, or even fairy princesses that happen to be private detectives. It’s not even just violence and sex, or is that sex and violence, sometimes I forget which order they go in. Hmm . . .
I hear crows calling, and I know that call. There’s a hawk somewhere nearby. Binoculars are sitting right here on my desk, because, yeah. I few seconds of looking near the crows and there it is. A big red-tailed hawk, beautiful bird with a paler than normal golden red tail, some can brick red almost brown, and it’s that rufous tail that gives them their name. It’s probably a female from the size alone, males are smaller. Bluejays and other tinier birds have joined the crows in harassing the hawk. They’re all doing the bird equivalent of, “Get out of our neighborhood, you trouble maker!” Though I suppose it’s more like, “Get out of our neighborhood, you killer!” Red-tails don’t normally take small birds, but they will kill and eat most anything they can catch, if they’re hungry enough. The crows and other birds aren’t taking any chances. The bluejays are even dive bombing the hawk, a few striking it on its shoulders and back, then dashing away. Brave birds, and puzzled hawk as it tries to keep its footing on branches too small for its large taloned feet. When it settles into stillness again if I look away for a moment it’s hard to find it again in the autumn leaves and dead tree branches. It’s remarkably camouflaged for a bird about the size of a toddler.
Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, I’m a birder. *laughs* There is a tradition among birders that the first bird you see on the first day of the new year will be your theme for the year. Some serious birders travel to exotic locations to stack the deck in favor of something exotic for that first bird. I was someplace exotic last year, but I honestly don’t remember my first bird. It maybe the first time in years that I didn’t make a note of it, so getting back to tradition I will be looking for my first bird of the year when I get up tomorrow.
I’ve had years where it was starlings which are all about group communication, and squabbling if you watch them for very long. The hawk has just flown higher on the tree and is sitting so pretty. Maybe my first bird will be the red-tailed hawk and I will have a predatory year where I have to remember to aim at what I want and commit fully to getting it. If a hawk hesitates, or isn’t sure it wants that rabbi, it will miss it’s mark and go hungry. If it misses too many opportunities it will starve. Predators are all about committing fully to your goals. For two, or three years running it wasn’t a bird, because every New Year’s morning there were squirrels playing in the yard, but not a single bird moved until after I’d seen squirrels. They were always in groups of at least three and they were chasing each other, and playing. I finally figured out the message, I was supposed to balance work and play better. This was back when I was doing two big books a year, and basically was a workaholic with very little time for other things. And before someone asks, no the dogs, cat, or domestic animals you keep do not count as your first “bird” of the year. Go outside, see the real world, and find out what it has to teach you.

New Blog – When I grow up I want . . .

From the time I was twelve-years-old I never planned to marry. I would live on an island with lots of animals and write my stories, because writers could live anywhere; right? At twenty-one I left my grandmother’s house to marry my first husband. I never owned my own apartment, never lived alone, and then suddenly I was part of a couple. It had been just my grandmother and me, and now it was just my husband and me. It seemed not that different, and yet entirely different. I think if I’d come from a bigger family that I might have had more trouble transitioning to this two person system, this couple, but two seemed familiar, seemed right. By the time we celebrated our first anniversary we had one Yellow-naped Amazon parrot, a hand fed luntino Cockatiel, and a canary that would come out of its cage and play on the parrot playground. I was writing and trying to sell my stories when I wasn’t working in corporate America. We’d moved to California, so I was at least by the ocean, I was part way to my island.

Fifteen years later we were living in St. Louis, Missouri, the middle of the country, and I’d almost forgotten that island dream. I was a best-selling novelist and I was separating from my soon-to-be ex-husband. I got my first apartment that was just mine. I was able to pick out a kitchen table and chairs without consulting anyone’s opinion but my own. It was GREAT! I reveled in the freedom of just me. Well, not just me, because one room of the apartment was for our daughter, Trinity. I let her pick the color and the decor. She was five-years-old and wanted a totally pink room. At her age, so had I, and she wanted a pink canopy bed, and so had I, so who was I to argue with her? Besides, I’d already told her she could pick everything, this would be a promise that I would never make to a child this young again. The pink paint was called Candy Pink, or something equally innocuous, but we, the painters, the people who delivered the furniture, all of us, dubbed the color Eye-Bleed Pink, because it was so bright it made us nauseous to be in the room too long. One of the men who delivered her pink and white canopy bed declared the color made him dizzy. But Trinity loved her room! The rest of the apartment was mine to decorate as I saw fit, and I loved being on my own. I was never going to marry again, it hadn’t worked for me, monogamy with the wrong person is a trap I never wanted to fall into again. My ex-husband got to keep our remaining parrot and I got the two dogs; we shared Trinity.

Six months later I would be engaged to a friend I’d known for eight years, Jonathon, and we’d be planning our wedding. My first husband swept me off my feet in a gentle, geeky kind of way. Jonathon and I snuck up on each other, just friends until the moment we realized we weren’t. I’d done the big wedding once, but he hadn’t, and what my sweetie wanted, I wanted to give him, so we did it up big. Trinity and her best friend were our flower girls and they got to ride in the horse drawn carriage at the end after we were pronounced husband and wife, because if you have a little girl and you have a horse drawn carriage they get to ride in it too, that’s just a rule somewhere, or should be.

Jonathon and I celebrate our thirteenth anniversary next Monday. We are happier now, more in love now, than when we started. Having been through a marriage where ten years in, that was not the case, I value this love and our life, all the more. Trinity is happy, healthy, and off to college. We have three dogs and about twenty koi in the pond. We still live in the middle of the country, so no closer to that island I wanted at age twelve, but I am now a #1 New York Times Bestselling novelist (my agent always insists I write it that way *waves at agent*) so part of my childhood dream is on track.

Four years ago, Jonathon and I were in love with another man. He was our third, and I’d hoped he might be a live-in third someday, but the situation was too complicated. No one’s fault, just not enough honest communication and grownup straight forwardness, I think. But our ex-third introduced us to a woman and her partner. The woman was Genevieve, and her partner doesn’t matter much to this story, because two years later he would be an ex for both of us. But Genevieve would be my first girlfriend ever, and she dated both Jonathon and me. Even more than our ex-third she loved us both, equally, and I hadn’t realized how much I, we, needed that until we had it. She was states away, and we settled into a long distance relationship, LDR, most of our polyamorous relationships have been LDR. She met another man. We knew all about Spike from the beginning, because poly has only one hard rule: that everyone is honest. Spike would talk to us for hours as he planned her engagement ring. Who knew her better than we did, after all we’d been dating her a year longer than he had. We were part of the party where he planned to surprise her with the proposal. I got to help distract Genevieve so that when I turned her around he was just down on one knee with the ring held up to her. It was wonderful and we’d worked as unit to pull it off.

Next week, just after Jon and I celebrate thirteen years of wedded bliss, Genevieve and Spike are moving in with us. They are bringing their two dogs, and yes we have introduced our packs with the help of a local “Dog Whisperer”. Genevieve will also be bringing her fifty-five gallon aquarium of fish. She and I have already talked about a possible lizard, and more fish. Both Spike and I are terribly allergic to cats, and that is a blow to her, but she loves us both, even enough to risk never owning a cat again. I am getting shots, and hope to find a way, someday, for her to have her beloved felines again. She has also asked about parrots, but I am allergic to feathers, which was one reason I had to give up the parrot to my ex-husband. I miss having birds, very much, and hope to find one type I am not allergic to. I’m the writer I dreamed about being, and we will soon have as many dogs as I envisioned as a child, and I hope, nearly pray, that we may add more animals as time goes on, now all we need is that island. Some place tropical, Genevieve?

What Feeds Your Muse?

People ask, what inspires me, well nature inspires me. My short story, “Geese”, came from me walking out my door years ago and seeing Canadian geese settling down for the night on the shores of a lake. I have a biology degree, as well as an English degree, and I have always found equal inspiration in nature and in words. Though I think that nature feeds my soul a little bit more than it feeds my writing. What follows is my early morning. It didn’t translate into many pages for the day, but it was a mood recharging beginning, and sometimes as a writer you need that more than pages.

My first animal of the morning, besides our three dogs, was a chipmunk. How can anyone look at a chipmunk and not smile? Then worms were fleeing across the walkway, well, as fast as worms can flee. I looked to see what the disturbance was and – mole! I watched the earth heave and roll as the little digger chased worms underground. Worms, especially earthworms, are some of their favorite foods. Yes, moles disturb your lawn, but they also aerate it, which is something we pay men with machines to do, right? Why not let the mole do it for free? They will also eat harmful grubs that destroy your lawn, flowers, and vegetable garden. By the way moles have the softest fur I’ve ever touched, though today’s mole never let me see him/or her at all. I carry the memory of the mole that got into our house in Indiana like a sensory touchstone. Mole fur makes mink feel rough.

I saved one worm that got lost on the bricks, and put him away from the mole’s hunting area, and then a bird sang high and bubbling in the holly tree just beside the house. It sang out several times the sweetness of the song falling down around me as if joy could be translated into sound. I’ve checked and double checked and the small bird that I barely could glimpse through the thick branches, I believe was a field sparrow. They are supposed to like more prairie than we have in our yard, but we do have a hedgerow area, and with habitat vanishing maybe they’ve gotten more adventuresome, or maybe he was just passing through for the running water. We’re getting birds to the water that wouldn’t normally bother with suburbia. It might have been a warbler who’s song I’m unfamiliar with, but it moved more like a sparrow, and wasn’t quite as small as most of the warblers I see in this area. I’m always loathe to bird just by ear – I don’t seem to trust it without another birder to say, “Yes, that’s the song.” But for right now I think it was a Field Sparrow, and whatever bird it was, another male answered in the distance. I’ll have to check that direction and see if there’s a grassy field area. If I’m closer to the right habitat then them coming for the water makes more sense.

To top it off I had a pair of Cedar Waxwings just outside my office in the big sugar maple right by the pond. They are one of my favorite birds! I never saw any until just a few years ago. They love the water garden. One of our robins chased them off, because Waxwings are fruit eaters and so are the robins. Everyone is raising babies, so they guard their food sources.

Will any of the above translate into more story ideas? I don’t know, but one thing I’m learning is anything that fills up the tank of my energy, creativity, or happiness is useful in some way. I spent too many years trying to just write without thinking about where the creativity comes from, or what feeds my muse, what feeds me. In the last year I’ve really looked hard at that, and one of the first things that sparked that excitement that is so necessary for an artist, or a scientist was ladybugs and irises. I remember squatting in the grass by a tree, pushing the grass aside and finding a cluster of ladybugs like bright red and black jewels, so shiny in the sun when I revealed their hiding place. There were purple bearded irises growing against the white picket fence. I stood and gazed up at them as they rose above me. It was the white picket fence and irises, that my grandmother had never mentioned to me that convinced her it was a real memory. We’d rented the house so briefly that she’d almost forgotten it herself, but it bothered her that I remembered it, almost scared her, because babies under two aren’t supposed to remember details like that. I don’t remember anything else about the house, but the wonder of those tall flowers, and the cluster of insects, that first sharp smell of ladybugs as I poked at them with my fingers, that remains. Flowers, insects, birds, mammals, reptiles, all of it can still fill me with wonder and joy. It still feeds a part of me that first toddled out into the sunshine to stare up at flowers taller than I was like some pre-school Alice in Wonderland. As an artist you need to find out what feeds your inner child, because a sense of wonder needs to be a permanent part of you as an artist. I know it’s cool to get jaded and world weary like Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, and Gods know that I can get weary of the world, but if I let it make me feel jaded I lose something I need to create. It harms something I inside me if I forget to admire the beauty and life around me. Think back to your earliest happy memory, what was it? What thrilled you as a child? Usually whatever that was is something you still need in your life. It will refresh your heart, cleanse your soul of that harshness that seems to gather. It will feed your muse.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; –
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away . . .”

William Wordsworth (1710-1850)

Don’t give your heart away, you need it to create, to love, to be.

The picture is of me about the same age that I saw those irises and ladybugs. That may even be the same house. That’s my mother with me. She died when I was six, and she was twenty-nine.

First Bird of the Year

Birders have a tradition that the first bird they see on New Year’s day will be their bird for the year. It’s a sort of theme for the year. Some serious birders will travel to exotic locales to try and make sure their first bird of the year is something spectacular, or at least something that they’ll be proud to knock off their life list (the list of birds they’ve seen). It’s part bragging rights for the hardcore listers, birders that seem to live for marking checks off their life list of birds. I’ve been a birdwatcher since college, but I’m not a serious lister. I’m not actually a serious birder, truth be told, but the tradition of first bird of the year is something I’ve kept, because I’ve added it to our path of faith.
We’re Wiccan, a nature based religion so it seemed a natural to use the idea of the first bird, or animal, of the year you see being a theme for the year. When I say, animal, I don’t mean your dog, cat, etc . . . unless it’s the only animal you see for hours. If you manage to not see any birds at all when there should be birds everywhere, then maybe the animal in question is your theme for the year. Two years running I saw nothing but squirrels for hours. One of the meanings of squirrel is to balance work and play, and for me I’d been doing too much work and not enough play. I’ve since fixed that imbalance with a vow last year to play as hard as I work. I’m doing it again this year, with a plan to play even more! I ended up finishing the newest Anita book earlier than I have in years, and I ended more energized and in better spirits than ever before, rather than exhausted.
So, what was my first bird of the year? It was a yellow-bellied sapsucker. Yes, it’s a real bird, not just a punchline for cartoons, or movies. I’ve only seen one of these birds ever, and it was in our backyard in the summer. It’s not a common bird here in Missouri, or at least not that I’ve seen. I’m always willing to believe that someone else’s bird viewing may vary from mine. It was a female, because of the lack of red on it’s head and neck, but even female yellow-bellied sapsuckers have some red on them, this bird had none at all. I looked up pictures of the bird and found that the juveniles can look like the females, but without red, so I thought, well than that’s it, but it wasn’t. The longer I looked at the bird, the more it’s colors looked crisp, and not dull, like the juveniles. I did some research and found that some females can have no color on their heads, and that the color is due, in part, to the bird’s diet. Western Tanager males get their amazingly bright colors from their diet, too, as other birds, as well. Cedar Waxwings’ diet can change whether they have yellow, or red, tipped feathers. Sometimes if we don’t eat enough of what’s good for us, we lose some of the color in our lives.
The above explanation is because not only did I see a yellow-bellied sapsucker, but it had to be the same female, because she had the same markings, or lack thereof. I get on the Cornell site for birds, which is always my first stop on the internet, once I’ve used my bird guides to identify the bird. Peterson’s guide is still my favorite, but I also have the Audubon guide, as well. The Cornell site has interesting facts about the birds, and I find them helpful for possible insights into what the bird might mean. Though, I go to the Ted Andrews’ books Animal-Speak, and Animal-Wise first, but if it’s a bird that’s not in the books, or I just want more possible insights from the natural behavior of the bird.
So, what does it mean that yellow-bellied sapsucker was my first bird of the year? Ted Andrews talks about it meaning that you need to pay attention to the sweetness in your life, the hidden sweetness, since sapsuckers have to drill holes in trees to get to the sap. Though unsightly the holes aren’t supposed to be harmful to the tree. Deep holes, the bird uses it’s long tongue to reach the sweetness, but they also make rectangular holes near the surface of the tree where they just remove the first layers of bark so that sap fills the hole and they lap it up, and they also eat the cambium layer of the bark, and will come back and check the holes to eat insects that come to eat the sap and are trapped in it, sort of insects in amber, when they’re still fresh and yummy. They also drill holes in very orderly patterns. Other woodpeckers will drill here and there and are attracted to dead, or insect riddled trees. Woodpeckers don’t cause insects to attack trees, they actually will eat them out of the injured bark, and help keep the tree healthy for longer, but sapsuckers feed on living trees. Dead wood has no sap, so they need living, growing trees for their food.
What I’ve taken from the above is that I need to work for the sweetness in my life. Sometimes it’s just below the surface, and sometimes it’s deeper and harder to find, but it’s worth the work, and I need it to survive. I need the sweetness and joy in my life to thrive and be happy. I know that seems self-evident, but in years past I have lost sight of that. All work and no play meets some deadlines, but eventually it uses up the writer until the very well of creativity that you counted on dries up from lack of being refilled. You can’t just take water out of the creative well, you have to either put some in, or allow the well time to fill up on its own either through rain, or water seeping up from below. Like the sapsucker there are different ways for the creative imagination to fill up; either dig deep and get the sweetness near the center, or shallow and eat the living “bark”, sweet sap, and more protein (substantive) food will be attracted to the sweetness you’ve made in the tree. I’m taking that the more I work to bring creativity and the fun things into my life, near the surface of my life so its visible and not as hidden deep in the tree, the more food I will I have, and the better I will feel, do, be. Also, that there should be more than one way for me to get sweetness into my life and my work. I need to be flexible enough to do what works, deep round holes, or shallow rectangular ones, but I still have a pattern, a rhythm, an orderliness that works for writing, and for having fun in my life. Flexible orderliness is what I’m calling it. Years ago I would be too wedded to a schedule, and anything that disrupted it threw me horribly out of my writing schedule, but I’ve learned to be more flexible, in this last year, especially, I’ve learned to go with the flow of whatever wonderful, exciting, craziness is happening in my life. This year is going to be more of the same, I think, and that’s a good thing. Also, it is significant that sapsuckers feed on living, growing trees, unlike other woodpeckers. My sweetness and creativity come from things that grow, change, and are not static. I need to embrace that and not be afraid of the growth that will come in this next twelve months. Change used to really throw me, but I’m getting better at it, and this was a message that more is coming, but it’s all good.
Now, here’s the trick to all this animal message, or totem, guide stuff. You could have seen a yellow-bellied sapsucker and taken a completely different message from it. It’s all about what feels right for you, what your inner sense of rightness tells you. Some scholars over the centuries have called it our conscience, or even the voice of God telling us what is right, what is wrong. You have to be still enough, quiet enough in your head to listen, to truly listen. If you are too busy moving around, bustling, talking, lost in activity, the message can get garbled or lost all together. As a Wiccan I believe that the power and beauty of God and Goddess is all around us, that nature is that physical manifestation of Deity. We walk through the power of creation every day. We are surrounded by miracles, but most of us hurry past and never see them. It’s the old idea that there are angels walking amongst us, but you have to be open to the possibility that they exist and are present to have any chance of seeing them. The same goes for any message from Deity, you have to listen, you have to be aware that Deity really does talk to us, not in a flare of trumpets, or a angel in white robes and huge wings, that is possible, but God isn’t so flashy most of the time, I think. I didn’t need something that spectacular, just a little black and white bird, to be reminded that I need to work for sweetness in my life in the coming year, to be flexible in my orderliness and schedule, and that some creativity would come from deep inside, but some of it would be closer to the surface, and that it would have different shapes and sizes, but it was all about keeping it organized, though to others it may look like I’m just hitting my head against a tree.
I hope everyone had fun seeing their first bird, or animal, of the year, and that whatever comes our way we see the lessons we need to learn, do the work we need to do, and walk our path this year in the most positive and productive way possible.