Bones: Dead Birds

A little blue bird began to appear in my dreams. In one dream I opened a small brown drawer and found it filled with little dead blue birds. The drawer was in a Sunday school room, a room where I fell in love with my favorite Sunday school teacher, a woman I loved like a mother. It was a place where I felt the Holy Spirit—that great bird transcending from the sky, soaring, wings on the wind, speaking the words of life. But here packed away in a little drawer, lied all my lifelessness. My spirit was dead—dead many times. In the center of the room the baptismal fount was missing, replaced with a trashcan. I think about this room like a Mandela image, the room, a sacred space, set like a circle. But in the center was a deep void, a garbage dump. It was a stark picture of an inner reality.

When I was about twelve, we had a pet parakeet, a little blue bird named Paquitta, which means “little bit.” I had let her out of her cage and was holding her. But her wings, which we kept clipped, had grown and she began to fly away from me. I ran through the house trying to capture her, but she had flown into my parent’s bedroom where their ceiling fan was on at high speed. I knew I was supposed to check the ceiling fans before letting the bird out and I forgot. She flew up to perch on it, but the poor thing was thrown hard against the wall and her feathers rained down like hail in my heart. The little bird miraculously survived, but she was never the same. She had a concussion and she shook from time to time. About a year later, we found her face down in her water dish.

I think of the drawer, filled with all those dead “little bits” and how together they add up to a lot of loss. I wonder what ceiling fans are still on inside of me. I wonder what “little bits” need my protection.

Shortly after dreaming about the dead birds in a drawer, I had a dream that my little blue bird was alive, only now it was a boy and it looked sickly. It began to fly up towards a ceiling fan that was on at high speed. The dream was replaying my childhood trauma, searching the unconscious for a healing symbol, looking for medicine for an old wound. This time I ran towards the walls frantically trying to figure out how to turn off the ceiling fan. But the switches were too complicated and I couldn’t make them work. Finally, I stood under the blades and punched my arm up with a tight fist and I stopped the fan, and saved the bird.

I think about the ceiling fan and the little bird, both have something to do wind, with Ruach— that life-giving spirit that blew over the waters of creation and brought existence into being. And then there's the dark side of the wind maker.

One wind-maker is powered by a man-made machine. The other is powered by nature. Both exist in my psyche. My challenge is to mediate between these two. The unconscious machine energy needs someone to stop it, to switch it, to transform it, to protect the little bits of Spirit who naturally want to take flight. I think of Herod and baby Jesus as internal figures, as a story that continues to take place today. Will the unconscious machine kill the Spirit or will humanity have the courage to fight for Spirit, to protect it at all costs? Where will I find my own power to stand up against the machines that take my little bits out? The dream tells me that the power to protect and nurture the sacred Spirit is not far off as it seems sometimes, but very near, within me. Immanuel, God with us.