This vision came upon me unsought, while seeking a moment of silent yoga stretches during some evening television commercials.
I began with the thought of a spiritual friend out in California, wondering if he'd had a chance to read my last email message. I thought idly of trying to send him a message astrally. As soon as the thought crossed my mind, I began to see one of his spirit guides, in for form of a large cat, as though summoned. His spirit animal smiled at me and began circling a vision of my friend who was looking away, distracted. I tried to speak with the spirit guide to ask him to pass a message to my friend, but the large cat kept turning his head away as though he didn't recognize that I was speaking to him. He pushed against my friend a few times as he circled, but my friend just put his hand on his spirit guide’s head as though to steady him.
Next, Crow and Hawk came to visit me. Crow landed on the ground by my feet and struck a pose, so I was forced to admire his handsome profile (he seemed to like that moment of preening.) Then my gaze turned up and I saw Hawk circling overhead looking classically beautiful in her floating orbit. She dropped herself lower until she was just skimming over us. Suddenly, Crow leaped into the sky and gave chase. They flew straight up for a fair distance in aerial battle, and I finally understood that they were answering my call to try to communicate with my distant friend, and were acting like avian signal flares. After a few moments, they swooped down out of the sky, circled once tightly around me, and then we three swirled up into the sky together, feather and skin merging into one grand, soaring creature, a merging of all our spirits.
We soared up into the sky, and wings beating powerfully, headed west to the Pacific coast. We found the great cat again, and he seemed both pleased and amused by what greeted him. (He seemed more amused by Crow and Hawk than me. I think he was laughing at our merged plumage. We rather looked like an oversized crow with a red-tail Hawk's head and tail.) We brought him our greetings, and asked him to share our greetings with my friend. The cat made no promises, just grinned his toothy grin again. At least he understood this time.
We headed back east, but I was immediately pulled like a magnet to a large thunderstorm somewhere in the mid-west. The whole sky was seething and roiling, and I both saw and felt the point of the storm where a funnel cloud was forming. As I flew in closer, I saw the whole center of the sky begin to drop down toward earth. It felt like a forming tornado, but without a thought, I placed myself directly below where the clouds were reaching down for the earth. Like some weird avian form of Atlas, I braced the sagging sky upon my shoulders, and expanding my form, lifted the storm up upon my back and away from earth below.
Drawing myself up into the storm which was pressed against my wings, I merged with this powerful storm system and became Thunderbird, a hundred miles wide, bristling with electrical energy and grumbling with thunder as I moved slowly east. I reveled in the sensation of being a thunderstorm for a good while, raking myself across a few hundred miles of farmland. Electricity collected in my wings as I beat them across the sky, and lightning shot from my pinion feathers as I flew. The release of lightning was almost orgasmic, an intense release that suffused my entire being with a surging cleansing. With each bolt of lightning released, I groaned with the pleasure of it, and thunder rumbled from my throat.
As I got closer to the east coast, I began to slow down. I realized how little self-control I had in my ecstasy of flying with Thunderbird. But I knew that areas near me have had devastating floods already this summer, and didn't need the kind of soaking rain I was wringing from my feathers. My own town has hardly seen any rain however, so I found a perch in the Worldtree overlooking my region, and began to preen and shake out my feathers, releasing a gentle rain. I made a satisfied sound, and a low grumble of thunder purred through my throat. Roosting with Thunderbird, the journey ended.
A few hours later, rain came for the first time in a few weeks. It was a gentle, steady rain with low grumbles of thunder echoing from the nearby mountains.
~Flame RavenHawk
August 12, 2005