Two Bird Myths for Us

Written in our time, from another time

In my recent reading, I’ve come across two bird myths that fit together across imagination-time. Noema was released a couple months ago, and The Unbalancing was released yesterday. Let me show them to you here together, that they may bird to you.

‘Noema’ by Dael Akkerman

Maya, daughter of Frey and Bran, is murdered. Instead of merging with the All Life, she returns. “Of course, I didn’t actually turn into a bird,” she says, but “it was the only way I could really describe what had happened to me.” She was “standing alone in darkness,” approaching a single point of light until she is “bathed in the most brilliant sunlight I had ever seen or felt.”

Later, Arlen reports: “She said it felt really good. That it felt right. As though she was coming home.”

“I have to reveal Myself to you, but you have to let Me do so, which means you forming your own ideas of Me and the world I have told you about, ideas that will then become part of you.”

Maya might be the All Life, or she might be Arlen, or someone who has “lived and died so many times,” but in any case “I would never be just Maya again.”

Find Noema (2022 re-release) at tRaum Books

‘The Unbalancing’ by R.B. Lemberg

The ghost Semberí tells the poet Erígra Lilún how the Bird works: