05 Sep The Bird-Snake Goddess
I began praying the rosary daily with the Way of the Rose at the beginning of 2020, just two months before the start of the pandemic. When I discovered the practice in January I had no idea that an experimental spiritual pastime would very soon become a lifeline. In March I found myself at home alone indefinitely with my baby and toddler. There was nowhere for us to go, but into nature.
Every day my kids and I would embark on long morning walks. We followed the path that leads from our front door (on Rosewood Street, incidentally) into the vast Rocky Mountain foothills open space. I would bring rosary beads, my umbilical to the more-than-human world. My children were as happy as ever experiencing the harbingers of spring: the first croci and tulips, the return of meadow larks, and rivulets of snowmelt. During the lockdown there were observations from around the globe of the marvelous rewilding of the human-colonized world. Pollution receded and wildlife returned to urban spaces. A mother great horned owl nested with her three owlets in a planter on our neighbor’s balcony.
When the drone of zombie capitalism went silent, I began to hear the soft voice of the Mother whispering on the breezes, and to feel her steady presence underfoot. I began to dream deeper and to wake with divine directives. Synchronicities aroused my intuition. As I passed the rosary beads though my fingers I found myself tugging on a web that interlaced ancestral and collective deep-time mysteries.
As spring gave way to summer, Our Lady’s urgent public messages about the unraveling of the world-as-we-now-it became further evidenced when the typically deep blue skies of Colorado turned gray, choked with wildfire smoke for months. Prayer, and the Way of the Rose fellowship, were my refuges from existential anxiety and eco-grief. The shady stream near my home became my sanctuary, where I brought my prayers and petitions and where I left offerings.
Then the river reciprocated. In August, as I was walking the dry dirt path to the creek, I found, coiled in the tall golden grass like a rattlesnake, a rosary made of plain wood beads. I gathered its slinky body into my palm and took it to the water. When I left, I placed the beads on a large boulder where, I hoped, they would be found by the original owner or someone in need of a sign that their prayers, too, would be answered.
The next month, meeting a local prayer-friend for a glass of wine at the trattoria below my apartment, we sat outdoors in the small plaza under a tree. When I looked up from our conversation, I discovered a white and yellow plastic rosary woven into the tree’s branches, perched above us like a bird. I left the rosary in the “rosary tree” to pass the prayers forward.
Finding two rosaries in the summer of 2020 drew me deeper into the Mysteries. The places where I found the rosaries seemed significant: up in a tree and down in the dirt. Archeologist Marija Gimbutas uncovered numerous neolithic figurines of bird-and-snake goddess who were depicted with beaked bird faces and snakes for legs. She believed the chthonic-ouranic hybrid bird-snake goddess was representative of the cycle of life and ancient devotion to the Great Goddess who had authority over birth, death, and resurrection.
Searching further for meaning in these miracles, I discovered that the exact dates of my findings lined up with personal ancestral days of significance. 18 August was the birth and death day of my older brother who died in childbirth two years before I was born. 16 September was the 49th day after my mother’s death day (three years prior), signifying her exit from bardo. Were these miraculous findings messages from the bird-and snake goddess, or perhaps my beloved dead, sent through the transmundus cord of the rosary? Our Lady of Woodstock’s words from the day I found the second rosary provide a mysterious answer.
Our Lady of Woodstock Speaks: September 16, 2020
“There is a world behind the world you see, although it lies revealed and open right before you. The world you see is like the reflection on the inside of a bubble that shows you nothing but yourself. It reveals to you what you think, what you value, what you believe to be true.
But just beyond that world is My world—the world that sustains you, the world that birthed you, the world that you return to, and the world that you can never leave. That world is the real world….”