The Year Of The Vulture
Every day I come out here to see you. And every day that I do, I do.
Intention.
New moon two nights ago. Set intentions.
Reservoir Ridge is a grassy natural area tucked up next to, and extending up into, the foothills topped with pines. It’s a place that naturally draws the eyes upward. Today the sky is white with thick clouds, just like that day by Lake Superior on the highway. I know who you are: you are messengers, guides. You know who I am — me, seeker, arrogant knower, backward knowledge gatherer sometimes, get the lesson absolutely backwards, but I’m here, I’m looking and listening, watching for signs. I don’t know where to go next … because it’s not next yet. It will never be next. Only now.
I’m looking up. Seagulls as harbingers; there’s water here, up at the manmade lake, made from an intentional flood. My beloved Camino companions, the gulls, encouraging my final steps from the hills, singing me to the beaches.
I thought you were condors in Spain — but now three times, THREE TIMES, I have been corrected, by three different people, that there are no condors in Spain. Yet I know people in Spain told me “condors.” Now I find news that, in 2017, a juvenile Andean condor was found in Andalucia. 2017, the year I went on Camino. Only one? Maybe I misunderstood in Spanish. So black vultures, then — you were black vultures with 10-foot wingspans, or griphus vultures, like griffins, but no, not those white heads and frilled necks. You came to see me on the high road of the Primitivo, walking to Alta. You came to see me on the highway by the lake. Superior. You came to see me in the middle of the Rio Grande run dry. I see you everywhere here in northern Colorado. Every day at Reservoir Ridge. Primitivo. Alta. Superior. Grande. Ridge. I see the dream of the cliff, leaping off.
Yesterday, I remembered the only time I smoked marijuana, on my 25th birthday. I soared into clouds, high into the sky, and that is where I spent my entire high — HIGH. In the clouds, moving through them, them moving over and below and past me. I must have been flying, but I only knew it as moving consciousness. It was exhilarating. I kept catching my breath, like I was coming, like the orgasmic energy of soaring over a waterfall. With One. Only ever that soul-soaring with One. Out of my body and into the sky, onto the sky, but still here, still present. The most shamanic experiences of my life.
Until the Vulture.
So I asked you, Vulture: what is the message? But I cannot hear you yet. Too many words, too soon. Instead, I will remember the high of that first high. You flying up behind me, a silent shadow, blowing my hat off, lifting it off my head on the Camino. Like soaring with the One. The trembling, shaking, and tears after I met you on the highway — but the focus, stillness, realness of that meeting.
I have moved past that overwhelm and disorientation, and now I look for you, wait for you, depend on you showing up, showing yourself. And I greet you. Arms outstretched, face uplifted, I am a Y, a Why, to the sky. And you then fly directly overhead, over me, and greet me. And I have no words for those moments.
I am working on learning to ride the spiral, the thermals of the earth, like warm breath, a warm body, a warm beating heart. Ease, simplicity. Ride that air wave. Watch over the world. Watch over me.
Greeting is the first lesson.
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I tried to make a list of my Vulture encounters:
1. THE Vulture Encounter, by Lake Superior
2. Vulture Sentinel, sitting alone on a burned tree stump, on the way back to my sister’s cabin
3. The Twins, circling above my mother’s house, one came to check on me then left with its partner
4. Fellow Traveler, out near Reservoir Ridge, flew low back and forth across the road in front of the car as I drove, then alongside the open passenger window
5. Vulture Greeter, coming back from hiking at Cameron Pass with my sister, it flew directly over us in a tight curve on Rist Canyon Road
6. Clothesline Check-in, again a pair, again one flew directly over me while hanging out laundry at my sister’s cabin as the other circled away
7. Food Truck Friends, we see them from the canyon store’s wooden deck while eating gourmet food truck sandwiches
But there are so many more, I realized. The condors/not condors on the Hospitales route, and the one who flew directly over me as if wondering why I was on exposed tops of the mountains instead of down in the valleys. I wondered if they were deciding if I was a snack or not. When I traveled to Cumberland Island, that’s where I first hung out with vultures, dead trees near the dunes absolutely full of vultures. That was the trip I first used my name Bo. That was the first time anyone asked me what being nonbinary was like, what it meant. My next-tent neighbor in the camping area, our sites delineated by natural fences of six-foot-high palmettos, sleeping under the live oaks strung with waving Spanish moss, stars shining through the curly branches.
I have been in the good company of enormous, silent vultures over all these years, since 2017. So why now? Why me? What is the sacred lesson?
“What is the message” was too intense. Too cognitive, too much reliance on words. I know how to feel signs, by their energy — an odd rain, too much, too hard, means strange weather, possible flooding, here and in the spiritual world. Searing heat and blinding sun bleaches my bones, peeling back my skin to the skeleton of my soul. Deep snow is deep time, hushed, still.
I went to see the psychic in the back room of the metaphysical bookstore, Vulture. She was tired, used to be a teacher. So what is she now, I wondered. Anyway, I asked her about all this. The psychic said to ask you, Vulture. Ask What, and Where — but not Why. That will break the spell, break our communication, our communion. Our moment.
The way to find you is without words.
Maybe the way to ask is also without words.
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Looked up to see the sun, circle of the sun, its outline only showing, light shining in a small opening in the thick clouds. The circle centered on an image: the light formed a bird, a broad-winged bird of light. The bird then immediately straightened into a perfect arrow. A Camino arrow pointing the way. As I reached quickly to get a picture of it … the image closed. No photos, please. All clouds once again. It was over. Suddenly, for no reason, I had the clear thought: “The Bird IS The Arrow.”