Birds, Women, and Science/Augury this snowy December

 

Preston county, WV.  Picture by author.

It is a snowy December here in the Alleghenies. The skies are sighing in relief:  2020 has been a year, no?  So snowy days and the woods filled with comfort and light are a welcome respite from elections and pandemics.  My year has included a parent with terminal cancer, leaving a beloved kid at a new college in what was at that point the worst COVID transmission rate in the WORLD, and finally using quarantine to build my raised bed garden.  Despite not supporting current President-elect Biden, I worked on his campaign for a lot of the fall, making calls to Georgia, and writing letters to the editor in five states. So....   December. Snow.  

The earth calls us to rest.

Driving down the mountains yesterday I saw geese flying.  I still follow ornithomancy, bird augury, the prediction of future by observing birds - though in general my relationship with birds is to watch and enjoy my neighborhood birds as I walk dogs every day.   These geese flying south speak to me of motivation, fire, emotions, family relationships, and the spark of new beginnings.  Tomorrow's Solstice brings the great Jupiter/Saturn conjunction, with Saturn already passing into Aquarius last week.  New beginnings, emotions, fire, and motivation all connect with the geese.

My youngest daughter and I are looking to take some online kid computer coding lessons together - just for fun.  For the past years working as an official home-based teacher I have loved teaching my high school kids fun science - mentos in Diet Coke, exploding film canisters, food colors exploding in milk.  I work with kids on the spectrum who have experienced abuse, and often live with grief and depression.  Exploding stuff is great for those kids.  My supervisors in schools, however, dislike my focus on fun.  US public schools still delight in boring children to death.  However, I remain disgusted by our societal maiming of children - especially girls of all colors and abilities, boys of color, and boys with disabilities of all colors.  It is amazing that schools still think kids on the autism spectrum shouldn't learn science.

Science, however, comes from augury, from magic.  We are built on the work of women gathering seeds and berries and feeding their children, on the observations of women who followed game and hunted across the herd paths of all continents, on the children who helped their mothers move from hunter/gathering societies to agricultural by planting and tending and harvesting.  Recent research in anthropology shows that hunter gathering groups and agricultural groups lived side by side for centuries, as well.  The scientist/mothers/children of both groups surely shared to the benefit of all.  Watching birds, watching clouds, watching herds, watching seeds.  Science comes from women and children.

Yet our schools see science as the prerogative of white, straight men.  

I actually searched for a class in fun engineering for my daughter and me.  I read awesome articles about women engineering students inventing solar tents for the homeless, concrete fabric for refugees, high school girls in Kenya inventing batteries that run on urine.  My facebook page Solarpunk Revolution exists to honor these women and girls.  No such online fun class or cool engineering kit exists, however, that teaches science as solving the fun stuff of women's lives.  My daughter and I looked online at over 100 different car kits for teenage engineers.  Not one solar tent for the homeless kit.  There were build your own light sensor kits, but no urine-based batteries.  

I am left with the thought that US schools and racist heteropatriarchy have so constrained science into a tool of capitalism, that even the mentos in Diet Coke explosions I share with students is not enough to open our eyes to what we could be exploring and inventing.  I am sad and angry to try and even imagine all we are missing, and all we have lost.  I try to think what science kits I would create, but I am boggled and baffled by barriers of patriarchy.  I hate this maiming.

So about augury.  Most pagan texts online or published focus on classic augury:  Greeks reading chicken entrails; Celts watching battle crows; Anglo Saxons burning magpie feathers.  Augury, according to all these patriarchal cultures, is about battles, and kingdoms, and men.  It is meant to create nation-states, barriers, stratified societies, and war.  In my work I still struggle to teach West Virginia parents not to put Mountain Dew in infant's bottles, trying to explain that evidence shows soda harms infants.  But the words research and evidence have no meaning to people in dire poverty, with little healthcare, and an education system that still allows physical violence.  I go back to baking soda and vinegar reactions, something the majority of my parents have never seen.  I am showing trick magpie feathers, the very beginning requirements of science.  

Then I go home and watch my neighborhood murder.

These crows love our ridge top, with tall oak trees, and plenty of room to cavort and caw.  Three crows mischievously spent the summer swooping onto my neighbors balcony to steal dog food.  I set a large birdbath in my garden to keep them hydrated through the hot summer, andspent humid evenings watching sparrows, starlings, and cardinals flit to the bath when the crows flew away.  The three crows often watched me in the garden, waiting until I carried tomatoes inside, before swooping down to the birdbath.  I watched them, trying to tell them apart, but never succeeded.  They are the dogfood thieves of the neighborhood, a Morrigan of mischief instead of battlefields.  I see their bigger murder  when I walk, swooping from parks to trees on our ridge top.  

When I think of entrails, I think of the wrens calling year round in the trees.  Wrens, the loudest birds, abandoned my back porch this summer when we finally got an old grill working.  Before that, the wrens had hunted insects in its shady interior.  The entrails we fixed to get some summer kebabs, sadly meant less food for my birth bird.  I watched the wrens in our chestnut, in the neighbor's bushes, but they only rarely returned to our porch railing. Now the wrens only come if I put out mealy bugs.  But the loudest bird is never missing from hearing.  The loud wren "cheer, cheer" starts around 4:30 a.m. in summer, 5:45 now at Solstice.  In the midst of pandemics and coups, wrens tell us to cheer up all day long.

So my own augury has more to do with the mother scientists of old, following herds, observing seedlings, listening to birds.  I am and have always been part of the science of relationship:  observing those I love, from children to crows, while altering my. behavior to adjust outcomes for my loved ones.  This is true for my work in behaviorism, which I maintain is deeply feminist:  behaviorism in general, and Applied Behavior Analysis more specifically, are observational sciences of watching and caring deeply.  My clients endured violence in schools, typically from teachers, and my job is to observe them and alter the environment so that they can start learning again, safely, and with love.  Indeed, more and more I define love as actions that result in positive outcomes, outcomes chosen by the loved one, outcomes based in objective measurements supplied by the one being given care.  

Incredible art by Be En Foret

The ancient pathways in Wales, when I lived there, were trodden across hilltops and valleys by our foremothers, all scientists.  Here in the Alleghenies, old paths follow wild game and deer tracks, this land tended and nurtured by Shoshone, Haudenosaunee, and Delaware nations before being stolen and mined and logged.  I believe our returning to science and recognizing our work as science, is deeply important.  It will be a huge part of this new era starting this solstice and the great Saturn/Jupiter conjunction.

Women as scientist mothers, ornithomancy witches, feminist engineers, we must return all lands and build new tents of inclusiveness in land where we have landed.  The beauty and majesty of these mountains that stretch from Georgia to Scotland are mountains tended by foremothers.  We are the daughters of these great inventors and keen observers.  Our foremothers hunted the hillsides and planted the valleys.  Before the wheel, they invented string.  Their knots were the written language of the Incas.  Every food we eat started in their hands.

Their science has been kept from us, but this snowy December, I want it back.  I want it back for my daughters, my son, my clients, my students, for humanity.  The cardinals who peck on the patio door when the feeders are empty are an augury of sharing and caring and anti-racist feminism and  empowerment.  

It's not Birds, Women, Science/Augury.  Its:  Bird Woman Science/Augury.  It is our heritage.

Bridget the Abbey Maker and Warrior Policy: Lughnasadh 2020

Well.  These are the times, no?

photo courtesy pexels.com

It is Lughnasadh, 2020, and I am making beer bread and celebrating Lugh, the great warrior and sun god/deva/patron saint.  It is a day for grains and harvest, sunflowers, and the middle of summer.  In the great Celtic wheel of the year, we are half way through the summer months as we turn towards the equinox and the end of the growing season.

This midsummer harvest is one of pandemics and failed public health, a rising up of white people - finally - to join Blacks in questioning police and military policies in our neighborhoods and budget priorities, and a questioning time of whether or not children can safely return to school - center of the school to prison pipeline.  Which is where I work.  What does warrior Lugh and Bridget the Abbess have to do with the crises surrounding our lives?

Here in Appalachia, my deeply Republican state has seen its first ever Black Lives Matter Protests, the sale of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline  - which was destroying WV mountains and streams along with the water supply of the Eastern Seaboard, and a GOP governor breaking with the president to issue mask mandates and school closing long before his other conservative brethren.  West Virginia has had surprisingly peaceful BLM protests.  Just north of here in Pennsylvania, a BLM protest was attended by an armed militia.  West Virginia protests benefited from lack of internet in rural and armed parts of the state, keeping militia types away.

All these events were determined by policy.

"So who cares?" you say.

Well.  Saint Bridget, the historical Christian saint who founded a monastery in Kildare, Ireland, around 480 common era, was a policy maker.  She broke with some Christian sects and set up her monastery as coed, a hall for women and a hall for men.  She hired the first male religious leader, Conleth, to lead the men's monastic life, and she led the women.  She determined canonical jurisdiction, setting up Kildare (Cill Dara, church of the oak) as the center of central Irish church life.  Kildare and the abbot and abbesses there were the heads of the early Irish church, because Bridget declared them so.  Bridget in all Christian depictions carries a Bishops's staff, and all of her female successors were Bishops in their own right until the Roman church arrival in the 12th century.  That is 600 years of Irish women Bishops.

Bridget with her Bishop's staff:  Stained Glass of Saint Bridget from Saint Bridget Catholic Church, Seattle, Washington

Saint Bridget set up schools in Kildare.  Like the Goddess/deva before her, Great Goddess Bridget of Celtic contract and myth, Bridget the Abbess decreed Kildare a center for creativity, arts, metalwork, monastic illumination, blacksmithing.  Beyond the mythical stories about Saint Bridget defeating her pagan father with her magical cloak and miraculous healings, the historical Bridget was renowned for her oratory, her teaching and preaching, her work as a dairy woman and brewer. It was said that she could turn water into the best beer in Ireland.  Pilgrims to Kildare began during Saint Bridget's time, drawn to her teachings (and maybe the beer).  The pilgrims continued until Elizabeth I, a full millennium later.

You can't run a double monastery without policies:  policies as to who feeds the visiting pilgrims, who cares for the sick coming for miracle cures, who feeds the men and women in their work and ministry, who takes out the trash.  As the Abbess for all of Ireland, Bridget was the ultimate voice and ultimate decision maker.  She established the customs of an open door to all, of welcoming women and men to monastic life, of creating wards for healing and places for pilgrims to rest.  Without Bridget's decrees, there would have been no Kildare, no pilgrims, no illuminations, no school of art, no millennium of fire, no centuries of women in Christian church leadership.

Policies are central to every crisis we face as a nation, as a world.  Tax policies benefit oil companies and harm poor families.  Policing policies disproportionately target men and women of color and men and women with disabilities.  School policies mimic policing policies exactly.  We as individuals can protest all we want, demanding change, but until policies change, nothing has been accomplished.  Ibram X. Kendi, one of my favorite radical writers, pushes this view in all of his writings and workshops:  it's not enough to "be anti-racist."  Anti-racism requires changing racist policies.

And while many of my friends are now reading books on white fragility and anti-racist theory, I am instead calling on us to be anti-racist policy makers.  Which indeed sounds so boring.  Friends call me to write signs for protests.  Meh.  I am busy trying to change school policies, which is anti-racism work, but not in front of crowds, not with adrenaline and great friends and great speakers.

So how about on this Lughnasadh we name anti-racism (and anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-ableism, anti-ageism, anti-militarism, anti-imperialism) policy making as warrior work?  Changing policy means leaving my Facebook political bubble, working with Republicans, working with people who routinely tell me that children with autism deserve to go to jail at the age of 5, or 7, or 11.  Nothing I can do for any student matters more than getting policies like routine suspensions stopped, and implementing policies of student choice and parent/school communication.  Walking into an Individualized Education Plan meeting for special education, I am absolutely a warrior.

And policy isn't all dry and boring.  Challenge oppressive policies, and watch people who think in their hearts they aren't racist or ableist lose their tempers.  Changing policies means facing intense anger.  The fury BLM protesters are encountering around the country seems overwhelming, but it is the anger of every teacher I encounter who wants to arrest a child more than learn how to actually teach them.  It is the anger from probation officers, police, school cops, principals, special ed. directors - all people who claim to care about children.  It is hard to see every day.  I continue as a "foster mother" to my clients, who like the pilgrims in early Ireland, need miracles.  Stopping school cops from handcuffing a child is the miracle I can offer.

I think it is so easy to view religion as a beautiful Abbey, as religious music, as spiritual connection to, well, Bridget, or Lugh, or Jesus, or Muhammad, or Buddha, or the deva in a creek or a mountain. I love those connections as well.  I write about them.

Celto-Roman Bridget, 1st Century, Common Era.
By Moreau.henri - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11568655

But some of our religious sensibility has to go to the warrior side of religion.  Bridget defied her pagan father and tricked him into land for her monastery; Bridget defying Celtic chiefs who demanded she marry, and hiring her own monks to run her abbey; Bridget rescuing the sick and poor, especially women fleeing violence and poverty.  That warrior spirit is best served, though, by establishing the capacity to actually help others.  Without an abbey, without her schools, without her kitchen hearth she left open to all, there would have been no flaming shrine, no metalworking schools, no illuminated manuscripts, no beer to share.

I work in schools, so I know the policies I need to change:  suspension policies. special education policies, individualized instructional policies, child choice policies.  Wherever you are in your journey, there are other policies that need to change.  It is deeply important to go out and start changing those policies

Pull on your cloak, grab a beer, and get to work.  You are following sacred footsteps.