The Red Birds
“My mother’s voice is a lullaby in my cells. When I am still, my body feels her breathing.”
— Terry Temepest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations On Voice
“Each woman must come of age herself—she must find her true center alone. This is such an exciting process and you will find fulfillment and self-growth.”
— As cited in a letter from her mother to Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations On Voice
When women were birds, we flew to places no other creatures could find.
We nestled in these faraway places, spreading our feathers instead of our legs and calling to each other in now forgotten songs. Songs of how it felt to have the wind breathing beneath us, lifting us, holding us as though we were dancing, and we were dancing—always dancing—always swooping low and rising high, swallowing our songs. And then singing, then transforming between woman and bird, bird and woman. When women were birds, we still found freedom and solidarity as women.
Were all women really birds at one time?
Did we come from the desert?
We all have inner caverns and caves, and the wisdom of our souls can be found there still because at one time we were cave-dwellers. So, why not the wisdom of flight?
Perhaps the wisdom of flight is not meant to be remembered for some things are so sacred they don’t belong to us anymore. And maybe, they never did.
Mythos equates women with birds. Witches turn into ravens, hawks and eagles. When girls come into power as women, we claim our wings and rise like a phoenix or turn from a duckling into a beautiful swan.
I understand. I wing dance because it’s beautiful. It takes power and grace, and the colors of my wings, their different materials, and wing capacity can show the different sides of the woman I have become. At once vicious and embracing, predatory and motherly, proud and singing.
The first time I heard Christine Tulis sing, tears came subtle but prickly, filling the eye pillow she had placed over mine at the beginning of the sound healing with warm moisture, my whole body remembering what I hadn’t known I longed for: the sound of my birth mother’s voice singing a lullaby. The absence of lullaby as a baby was so clear to me in that moment, I shivered. I had never heard anything so cellular. My mother sang lullabies, but the lyrics and melody were memorized and sung from the head, not her heart and certainly not her soul. These sounds were of such an infinitesimal nature they transported me to a forest clearing.
In the clearing, I could see myself looking through reeds, searching for some thing. I’m still not sure what I was searching for.
And then, I was transported to a blizzard and all around me was white snow. I was still searching for some thing in all of that whiteness.
And finally, I was transported to a desert village, zooming in with a bird’s eye view on a woman wearing a red gown with red wings. She was dancing in the air.
I wanted it to be me in another life, but she told me that she was actually my lover. Then she told me I have always been powerful and felt guilty for it. She told me to let go of that guilt now. I had chosen to experience abandonment and loss in this life from that old wound, and I opened my eyes to roll over onto my belly, shivering.
Birds shiver after they’ve just been bathed, during the winter to keep warm, or when they’re excited. Apparently, “their breast muscles involuntarily contract and expand to create body heat,” and it’s a natural part of their body language. It’s a natural part of our nervous system to contract and expand too. Maybe it’s the same with human shivers, and I was excited in that moment and/or trying to keep warm.
I remember driving the woman who would eventually begin to sexually abuse me in my own bed home from my apartment one morning. The sun was rising over the tunnel we were heading into. She asked me to tell her a story, so she could stay awake, and the only one I could think of was a fairy tale called Mistress Lucía.
It’s a folk story from Mexico about the most beautiful woman in the whole world. Not only is she the most beautiful woman, but she has three magical powers. When she brushes her hair, pearls fall to the floor. And when she washes her hands, flowers fall from her fingertips. And when she cries, it rains. A king sees her portrait in the market one afternoon and is told of her powers by her brother, Juan. He wishes to marry her, but on her way to the palace, her maid throws her out of the carriage into the woods and rides on to the palace herself, claiming to be the Mistress Lucía. But though the maid is also beautiful, no pearls fall to the floor when she brushes her hair, and no flowers fall from her fingertips as she washes her hands, and when she cries, the rain does not come down from the sky. The king believes Lucía’s brother has lied to make his sister a queen, so he has him killed.
A parakeet sees all that is happening at the palace and flies off to guide Mistress Lucía back from the woods. She follows the parakeet’s mocking songs to the palace where the king is in need of a servant to mend his buttons. No sooner has she begun to sew, but the parakeet sings a song of her brother’s death. When she begins to cry, rain falls down from the sky outside the windows. And when the king invites her to have some chocolate, she goes to wash her hands, and flowers fall from her fingertips. The king knows he has been fooled, and this woman is the real Lucía. He marries her at once, and the people demand to witness her magical powers, so she goes out onto the balcony and brushes her hair. Pearls fall to the ground for her people to wear. And when she washes her hands, flowers fall from her fingertips. And when she remembers her brother, tears fall from her eyes, and the sky opens up for the rain to shower down on the kingdom. The people run for cover, and it is said they’re running still (Bierhorst).
I thought the most beautiful woman in my world would be bored by this folk tale, but as I looked over at her, she was wide awake listening to every word. She was listening so intently, I shivered and even remembering it now, I shiver still. And I wonder what has become of her and her best friend.
I still see them both as beautiful swans. The first one black and the second white, but both of their feathers fading against the waning light. They dated each other in their early thirties and for two decades now, they have dated the same women, sometimes at the same time, and have formed a long history of friendship, love, chosen family, manipulation, trauma bonds, emotional abuse, enabling, dysfunction, wine and cocaine. I loved them both. The one for her darkness and the other for the light I imagined she had found in her escape from the other’s darkness.
On the last night we spent together, I told her that the dark swan molested me, and she said she wasn’t any lighter. She was just in a different place, adjacent. When we went to bed, I heard her door open. She came out of her bedroom naked, covering herself with three pillows she then offered to me one by one by one in a ritual of covering. She told me I was not protecting myself, so danced a dance of protection over and around me. I shut my eyes tightly so as not to embarrass her, and then thought maybe I was the one embarrassed, and maybe I was being too childish, so I opened my eyes and looked up at her naked form. Her skin glowed in the moonlight coming in through the window next to the chaise lounge I was laying on with five pillows.
“I see you,” she said as she sat bare-breasted on a chair near the lounger. “I care about you, and I want you to know I have your back.”
The next morning, her sister called, and she pretended she was alone, slowly erasing me from her day, then the activities we had planned, and finally from her memory. I wasn’t sure if I should bring up the naked ritual. I spent the past six months trying to gauge when she would pull away from intimacy and when it would be acceptable. I knew she had been sexually abused by her stepfather, and I had not wanted to tell her about what happened to me or do anything that would frighten her away.
But I needed to speak. When she commented on how many pillows I had, I asked if she remembered bringing out the three pillows, and her body stiffened. As I kept talking, she went completely white, and I knew this would be the last time I saw her. Two weeks later, she blocked me from all social media, tried to ban me from her community and sent the Christmas gift I mailed her back to me unopened.
The giving and receiving of gifts is my first love language, and this gift was a white swan ornament covered in gold glitter and soft ivory feathers from Anthropologie. I lost every one of those friends and chosen family over the next month and learned what it means to be surrendered all over again, but I kept showing up in the dance community, and I kept the white swan ornament.
Some things are too beautiful to throw away.
Each year when I hang it on my tree, I am reminded of how magnificent swans are. They may appear mean, but it’s not in their true nature. According to HuffPo, they are defensive not aggressive birds. And a bird flapping its wings is not a sign of struggling. It’s a way of exercising when it’s happy, or sometimes, as part of breeding behavior (Simms). Maybe, in this case, birds and humans are different. A bird flaps its wings against all odds out of happiness, but humans tire of all the flapping, of all the exercising, and even of the things that bring happiness.
It’s funny how this Christmas, I was not able to hang the swan ornament on my tree, and I miss them both again. Even though I know it is best for us to be apart, and it has been six years of therapy, healing, embodiment, dance, energy work and transformation studies, I still feel some part of me remains connected to their story.
The red part—the part that exists deep inside the caverns of my own heart. It’s the part I grieve for. The part who was an abandoned baby and never heard a lullaby sung to her. The part who grew up to tell a fairy tale about the most beautiful woman in the world to the most beautiful woman in the world as they drove out of a tunnel into the sunrise. The part that strives for understanding and sunsets. The red longing that opens still—unfurling, expanding.
My wing dancing teacher had a pair of bright red wings designed specifically for me. I couldn’t get the image of my past lover in the desert dancing in the air with bright red wings out of my head, and I wanted to have a pair that red and that bright to dance with myself. I love that they were made just for me. I love how they open and unfurl and expand so large I trip over them when I dance. I can spread my wings wide and feel their power and majesty or fold them around me and hold what is missing deep inside my heart. And my feet bring me crashing back to the ground.
What is the truth about birds and women?
When women were birds, there was an easy grace, a rhythm and flow to the days: cawing, chirping, clucking. A dance of moments in the air and on the ground unburdened by narrative, just the beauty of the day before us, just the song, just the pruning and plucking. Women and birds, birds and women in a dance of breath, of light, of freedom amidst the trees.
I once drove the black swan to the white swan’s house, and as we were going up the mountain road in Lagunitas, she said the three of us had been monks in a past life, living towards the top of a mountain in peace. That life—like most of my past lives, as well as my current one—began in Asia.
On the way back down this mountain, we stopped inside a store where the cash register stalled. The black swan started flapping her wings and honking. She opened up the box of soda I was trying to buy, grabbed two cans and ran out of the store while everyone else gawked. She always did love to ruffle feathers. I silently handed my credit card to the store worker, and we gawkers went back to our lives as though nothing had happened. Just like whenever I brought up anything the black swan didn’t like, she would say it didn’t happen. And maybe nothing did happen. The soda that had been stolen was paid for. The black swan was preening, leaning smugly against my car while scrolling through the messages on her iPhone when I came out of the store, and we flew back to my home like bird women.
Birds fly high over the mountaintops, but they must come back down to the ground eventually. That’s the truth about birds and maybe life: freedom is about taking flight, and to be light enough to float in the sky, there cannot be any attachment. I want so desperately to fly, to feel that freedom again, to catch the wind with more than my face and hair—with my whole body—but I am not a bird.
I am attached to the ground, to this life, and to feeling more alive in my body than I could before this swan song. And, I have my wings to dance and expand with, for at the core, I am still me. A woman who wants desperately to be free, to fly with the wind catching my whole body to a place I am still searching for.
BIBLIOGRAPHY & RESOURCES
Bierhorst, John. “Mistress Lucía.” Latin American Folktales: Stories from Hispanic and Indian Traditions, Pantheon, 2003.
“Pet Bird and Parrot Behavior.” LaFeber Company: Two Generations of Veterinarians Caring & Working for the Health of Animals, https://lafeber.com/pet-birds/birdbehavior/#:~:text=If%20a%20bird%20has%20his,is%20trying%20to%20keep%20warm.&text=Shivering%20Birds%20shiver%20and%20shake,when%20he%20is%20very%20excited. Accessed 26 April 2021.
Simms, Mary Lou. “8 Things You Didn’t Know About Swans.” HuffPost, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/8-things-you-didnt-know-a_1_b_9114168#:~:text=Swans%20are%20not%20aggressive.,(by%20nature)%20aggressive.%E2%80%9D. Accessed 6 Jan 2021.
Williams, Terry Tempest. When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations On Voice. New York: Picador, 2012.
“The Red Birds” is part of a larger body of work called The Red Collection, which I’ve created a space for since many of the beautiful journals that have published my lyrical essays so far are no longer in publication, and as a multimedia project, a website is the best place to share it. This essay was going to be published in the Transformative Power of Art Journal before it went out of funding. It is such an integral part of my project, I have posted it here to get it out in the world.
