Buzzards

I spent last week at Cae Mabon, a wonderful encampment in the woods of Snowdonia, with a group from GreenSpirit. It was immensely rewarding, though not quite in the way we had been anticipating. We’d been aiming for holding a “Council of All Beings” in which we would come together, each one representing a “being” of this planet – a species, a place, an element, or whatever – which we had previously chosen, or which had chosen us, and we would be asking these beings what message they had for us humans at this time (see http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/coab.htm). The night before we were due to hold the Council, one of our members had a seizure and had to be winched out to hospital in a helicopter; the energy changed, with more of a focus on the human, but we realised that in the course of our preparation we had already learnt what the earth was saying to us, and we only needed to come together in a circle to draw it together.

I’ll describe my own process in this. The first step was to go out and open myself to being chosen by some being, to represent them. In the past, when starting on a significant journey like this I had sometimes been guided by a buzzard, which I had seen high in the sky, its call seeming to encourage me in my enterprise at the time. On this occasion I had only gone a short distance up a path leading from the track into Padarn Country Park , when a buzzard came down low, a little above the trees, and flew in circles, spiraling forwards to the Northeast and crying at each turn. I followed it until it veered off to the left over an exit from the park, which I took, and it then left me, at the start of a track that led through the disused Dinorwig slate quarry.

Interactions like this are a beautiful example of so-called “both-and” logic, whcih I prefer to think of as context-dependent logic (in particular, topos logic). From an exclusively rational point of view, or indeed from the buzzard’s own point of view, it was probably carrying out some normal buzzardly activity, such as looking for prey. But from the different perspective that I was occupying at the time it could be seen as conveying a message. It is the nature of context dependent logic that there is no contradiction between different contexts: the rational causal account and my “magical” account are simply different contexts for the same event. Carrying out a ritual like this is a process of changing contexts, of moving perceptions and feelings into a different system, a different way of knowing.

It was in this spirit that I was able to walk through the quarry, and come out at the far end where, with a feeling of  joy and blessing I was greeted by the sight of a green valley stretching ahead. At which point a group of three birds, which I couldn’t identify, flew over from the far side of Llyn Peris and danced, squealing, in the air above me for a while, before returning to the other side. I then knew that the being whcih had chosen me was this mountain whose side I had just traversed, a mountain whose southern flank had been entirely stripped away by the quarrying.