"The Occultists, however, know that the traditions of Esoteric Philosophy must be the right ones, simply because they are the most logical, and reconcile every difficulty." — Helena Blavatsky
Today, I wish to talk with you about birds. Yes, those creatures in the skies we pay little attention to; however, if we did, our lives would have more meaning.
Before I was an Esoterist/Nichiren Buddhist/Nice Guy After Coffee, I worked as a banking software guy. On one of our install trips we hit a bird with our car while driving to the client. The driver thought it was funny, and said something like, "That 'ill teach it." For me it wasn't so funny, I knew it meant something, and it did, the trip was a disaster and we all ended up losing our jobs. I'm not saying it was a bad thing, but it was the warning that change was coming, in my book.
In the Navy, many moons ago, in San Diego one of those crazy Cuckoo Birds who are crying all the time, took a flying dump on my white uniform as I was headed for a Friday morning inspection. Because of the yellow crap on my hat, shoulder, and sleeve -- this must of been a sick bird --I failed inspection and got two-weeks detention which kept me from leaving the base. During that time, a few buddies I most likely would have been out drinking with, got into a terrible car accident. So that Cuckoo Bird with its undiagnosed bladder ailment, was really a stroke of good fortune from the heavens.
When my mom was dying in the hospital, of lung cancer, I slept in a chair beside her bed next to a window. It was a cold, dark, rainy day outside that window where I noticed a pidgin and her kids, cubs, chics, whatever a birds offspring is, shivering close together on a ledge. I knew it meant something; something like a message from the heavens reminding me that I needed to be thankful for the time I had with my mom, who protected me from the winds and rains with no help from a man, during a time they still called boys like me a "bastard child." A few minutes after seeing those birds, mom woke from her morphine-induced bliss, and spoke as clearly as ever, as she said, "Terry, I didn't give you much, but I did give you love."
Those were her last coherent words to me as she morphed into a living skeleton before finally giving up the ghost and dying. Seeing those birds was a sign to enjoy that last encounter with my wakeful mother.
I could go on and on about birds in my life, how a bird flew into our garage door and was suffering, and my wife took garden cutters to cut its head off and end its suffering. I buried that headless bird in the backyard, soon after that we divorced.
I have always been sensitive to birds, so sensitive in fact, that I've actually been feeding them from a bird feeder outside my bedroom window. And over the years they have even pecked at my window when their feeder was empty. However, something changed a few months ago, they stopped feeding, and my luck changed. I haven't won a a cent in daily-fantasy sports, something I do for fun, just a few dollars a day. Nothing big. Then there is my cancer, which I'll talk more about later, right now I was to talk birds.
In esoteric traditions, birds serve as living metaphors for our souls, some consider them psychopomps: a spirit, or deity whose job it is to guide our souls from Earth to the afterlife.
In Persian mysticism and Sufi tradition, the Simurgh is a giant bird that represents divine wisdom, unity, and the realization that ultimate truth is found within oneself.
To the alchemists, the firebird, or Phoenix, represented the rebirth of one's soul, rising from the ashes of failure.
The Native Americans honored the Thunderbird as a celestial being whose wings generate cosmic rumblings to alert us of trouble.
Then there are the Avian Oracles, tarot type cards of birds and the meanings of their chance encounters.
For a better understanding of bird symbolism you can go to Journeytreehealing.com, and be prepared to have your mind blown away. In their Bird Symbolism section you'll find that the kingfisher bird represents peace and prosperity; and that the crow, which is often linked to“darkness,” is actually a symbol of change and transformation. i.e., it was a crow we killed that day my software career unraveled.
The Humming Bird symbolizes the nectar of life and teaches us to draw on life’s sweet essence to sustain ourselves through challenging times.
Seeing a sparrow is a sign to recognize your inner strength and use it to bring about the change you need in your life. i.e, dump the guy.
Birds are always around us. And everyday we should take a moment to stop, look, and listen to them, for they really are messengers to help guide the way.
Now, let's turn to today's post, titled, My Birds, My Cancer(?)
I've been feeding the birds around my condo for ten years now. Actually, they've been fed here since my neighbor, Goga, was feeding them before she died around the time I started feeding them.
I call them my pets because they are always chirping outside my window, and sometimes they look at me from my window ledge to remind their feeder is empty. They've even tapped on the glass a few times.
The problem now is that they've stopped chirping and eating. There are a couple reasons to consider why this has happened:
One. I changed feeders when the bottom fell out of the old one they had been feeding out of for ten years.
Two. The store ran out of the cheap stuff and so I used the more expensive seed.
Three. Global Warming - yes, I'm old enough to call it what it is.
Okay, "Climate Change," that word we are not allowed to say in Texas anymore without being looked down on as a radical... Who cares, what I want to tell you is that there is this tropical plant that grows next to the bird feeder, and it has been there since the place was built. Every year it starts out as nothing but little plants and by the end summer, it is a nice shade bush just above the feeder that the birds sometimes land on to keep the rain off them. Every winter, it dies, and starts over again the next year. It has been that way since 2007, the year I moved into this condo.
Last year, for the first time since I've been here, the tropical bush didn't die, it just kept growing because of the mild winter. And so it was already full grown when this summer started, and within a few weeks It had grown over the bird feeder with a cave of tropical leafs.
I kept telling myself I would trim back the leafs so the birds would use the feeder again. But I didn't. Too busy. That was about three months ago. Since then, I have had no luck with sports gambling, as I said, and, most notable of all lung cancer.
Are the two connected? Who knows, but what I do know is the cancer in my lung is now the size of a dime, and I am scheduled to have that section of my lungs removed, just as I did five years ago. I'm confident I'll survive this, that is, if my birds return.
Another Labor Day Weekend. Remember when "Labor" meant something? I do.
In the late 1800s, many Americans toiled 12 hours a day, seven days a week, often in physically demanding, low-paying jobs. Children worked too, on farms and in factories and mines. Conditions were often harsh and unsafe.
It was in this context that American workers held the first Labor Day parade, marching from New York’s City Hall to a giant picnic at an uptown park on Sept. 5, 1882.
The America Labor movement had begun and over the next century we would see a minimum wage, 40 hour work week, child protection laws, etc...
Personally, I celebrate Labor Day by relaxing and hiding from the world. It's MY day. I do this for my grandmother, who in her early twenties, back in 1922, had the misfortune of working in a Detroit auto-factory where one of the giant presses skipped a beat and took three fingers off her right hand. A hand you wouldn't see because she kept it hid behind her purse, or wore gloves whenever possible.
I can't imagine the pain she must have felt that day as they took her away screaming with a greasy rag over her hand. She didn't speak much about the accident, but she did speak about the employer who gave her a one-week's pay before letting her go because she no longer had two good hands. That was all she got. She would join in labor strikes after that, showing off her hand as a reason to fight for justice from greedy employers who choose profits over worker's safety.
Why am I writing about Labor on an Esoteric blog? Truth is, the Esoterics have always been for workers.
For example, the argument that, Pythagoras and his students were for the workers of the day can be made by his philosophy that the basic property of numbers was expressed in the harmonious interplay of opposite pairs, and that, harmony assured the balance of opposite forces. This obviously means there must be a balance between the workers and the profiteers.
Freemasons like Uriah Stephens who created a "brotherhood" to bring together every laborer, mechanic, and artisan who desired professional improvement, was founded in 1869, and was inspired by the ritual and lessons he himself had learned as a Mason in his Philadelphia Lodge.
Probably the greatest testament to esoterist involvement in Worker's Rights is none other than Madame Blavatsky. That's right, the woman who gave us the Secret Doctrines which is the foundation for most esoteric studies today, was also a supporter of worker's rights.
Annie Besant was a Theosophist who studied under Blavatsky during the last years of Blavatsky's life. In her biography, Besant gives a written documentation of Madame Blavatsky's support of the early labor movement in England. Besant writes, "Thus was ushered in 1889, the to me never-to-be-forgotten year in which I found my way 'Home,' and had the priceless good fortune of meeting, and of becoming the pupil of, H.P. Blavatsky."
Besant goes on to explain her personal growth in Spiritualism from her studies with Blavatsky, but also tells of her involvement in fighting for the working class people, more precisely, the "Female Labor" called the Matchmaker Girls, which Besant called "White Slavery" in an article in which she points out: "A typical case is that of a girl of sixteen, a piece-worker; she earns 4s(English Shillings) a week... out of the earnings 2s a week is paid for the rent of one room. The child lives only on bread and butter and tea, alike for breakfast and dinner...."
Besant's article title "White Slavery" got the girls fired and Besant sued for libel. The factory owner won the law suit by paying the workers to lie, and painting Besant as an evil atheist -- worked every time in 1882. Without jobs the workers were thrown out on the streets and Besant trashed in the newspapers. Still, Besant wanted to give the woman a home filled with "comradeship, and self-respecting freedom." This is where H.P. Blavatsky steps in.
Besant writes in her autobiography: "On August 15th it (the women's home) was opened by Madame Blavatsky, and dedicated by her to the brightening of the lot of hardworking and underpaid girls...Very tender was H.P.B.'s heart to human suffering, especially to that of women and children. She was very poor towards the end of her earthly life, having spent all on her mission, and refusing to take time from her Theosophical work to write for the Russian papers which were ready to pay highly for her pen. But her slender purse was swiftly emptied when any human pain that money could relieve came in her way. One day I wrote a letter to a comrade that was shown to her, about some little children to whom I had carried a quantity of country flowers, and I had spoken of their faces pinched with want. The following note came to me:
My Dearest Friend, I have read your letter...and my heart is sick for the poor little ones! Look here; I have but 30s. of my own money of which I can dispose (for as you know I am a pauper, and proud of it), but I want you to take them and not say a word. This may buy thirty dinners for thirty poor little starving wretches, and I may feel happier for thirty minutes at the thought. Now don't say a word, and do it: take them to those unfortunate babies who loved your flowers and felt happy. Forgive your old uncouth friend, useless in this world!
Ever yours,
H.P.B
That's my Madame Blavatsky Labor Day story. On an interesting note, I will leave you with this passage written by Annie Besant about her work in 1882. It was written over a hundred and forty years ago, but seems like something written today.
This branch of our work led to a big fight -- a fight most happy in its results. At a meeting of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black gave a capital lecture on Female Labor, and urged the formation of a Consumers' League, a pledged only to buy from shops certificated 'clean' from unfair wage....
So I got the biopsy results today, and the cancer has returned. I guess it didn't get enough of me last time and so is back for more. That's a joke, but cancer isn't. The whole key to defeating cancer is the same secret to everything else in life: determination and confidence. Yes, those two most important ingredients in my life I never had.
Fortunately, I'm still alive and so have the opportunity to find these skills now; it's the thing all successful people know: we manifest what's in our mind. I know this now through my Buddhist practice which has taught me I am the power to be. It's what we call the Mystic Law, or Law of Life if you will. From now on I'll just call it "the law."
So I'm at this crossroad with this illness where I have to decide if I will give my all to defeat this cancer, or, let the chips fall where they will and hope for the best.
That's how I handled it five years ago, the first time they told me I had cancer. I've documented how I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo back then and the cards fell into place for me to have the cancer cut out of my lung without needing chemo. I chanted with hope back then, and got lucky. This time, hope won't be enough, my determination will be the ingredient necessary to win. I share this with you now, because no matter what you are attempting in life, your determination will determine the outcome. Simply stated, don't give up, keep trying and you will succeed; that is, if you have the determination within you. If you are just going through the motions, you'll fail.
In my last post I talked about signs from the heavens, and said that if I got the biopsy results on the 26th of August, it would be good news for there was a rare "Finger of God" celestial-alignment happening. I also told you if I got the results on the 27th of August, Mercury was in Virgo and the fight was on. Neither happened, and so I woke up early this morning and saw a full moon from my living-room window, and knew it was a sign. It was what they call a Sturgeon Moon, or Harvest moon, and I caught it just as it was descending on the horizon of buildings outside my window. Yes, a setting moon, which, might sound bad when compared to the obvious meaning of a "setting sun," but the moon is different, and I knew I had to research it.
Research showed me that the Algonquian peoples named the Sturgeon Moon after the Sturgeon fish, a fish that can live to be 400 years old; a fish that spends most of its life dwelling at the bottom of a lake until it comes to the top to feed in the autumn months.
Pow, right between the eyes, that was me, a deep dweller coming up for air.
On my favorite pagan website, pagangrimoire.com, I read that the Sturgeon Moon signals "Resilience, Power, Strength, Release, Breaking through, and Flourishing."
And that was the message the Sturgeon Moon had for me this morning.
In my Buddhist faith, we chant to a mandala that was scribed by a Japanese priest in the 13th century. On this mandala he wrote the figures of the heavenly deities who would protect those of us with faith in the Lotus Sutra. One of the gods on this mandala is the Moon God (Dai Gattenno 大月天王), unlike the Sun God who provokes energy, the Moon God is contemplative, rejuvenating, and as I have already said, Resilience, Strong, Determined, yes, all those ingredients I will now muster to defeat my cancer.
So now, I will see what medical options I must pursue in this fight. Stay tuned -- hint: subscribe.
