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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:
The goddess “came for the souls of the dead” and “would appear to each person in a different bird shape, corresponding to their character and imagination.” The bird dances and gives stars to the Starkeepers.
When one makes a star connection, it “flared clear and bright through my body.” It is not only about connecting to a star, but connecting to other humans too. “I ended up throwing my magical structure up to join hers, and how true and important it’d felt, for that bright, brief moment, to contribute a part of that structure.”
One should try to understand one’s “ichidi variation,” that is, one’s gender beyond man and woman, represented by an animal symbol. One might be “all genders — at once or in turn — in one semitransparent form.”
One should also try to “understand the deeds of creation, the great Birdcoming” of a thousand years ago.
“In my vision, I was a bird…I hung in the air…The moment of stillness broke, and I was diving, plummeting through the air…I dove deeper and deeper toward my star…dying people would give their souls willingly to Bird, but she is no Bird. She is human…”
Find The Unbalancing (2022) at Tachyon Publications
