Bird-o-mancy with Magical Madia - a bonus episode

The conversation was so incredible that none of us had the heart to press the <Stop Recording> button.

In this segment, we talk about how Madia learned about bird-o-mancy (thank you Sam the Sky Guy for that moniker) and she took us through the history of this magic. Next we dwelled in the knowledge of Native American practices and asked if there's any such thing as a bad message when it comes to divination? Or are they cautions? 

We learned about The Emerald podcast and soared at cloud level, thinking of the broader perspective birds offer. Then Madia taught us to aura-dust, and before we wrapped, Jesse asked her if there was any spiritual rule she heard about or read about that just doesn't feel apt!

Please have a listen to all of the episodes. Madia is something special.

Special Guest Links

Madia on Substack

Madia's book, The Impractical Guide to Keeping Geese: How & why to raise the world's most underrated and unfairly criticized domestic bird

Madia on Instagram

The Emerald podcast

Animal Speak: The Spiritual and Magical Powers of Creatures Great and Small, Ted Andrews

If you are searching for a fresh, binge-able podcast, this might be the one for you!

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:18

That's what our bonus uh episode is going to be about, is birdomancy.

SPEAKER_02 0:23

Birdomancy.

SPEAKER_03 0:25

So when did when did you um was it the moment with the after you were like, okay, husband, that's an egg, whatever we're gonna do. I love you. I guess we're buying an incubator. Was it then that you started that journey with um divination with birds, or what?

SPEAKER_00 0:45

No, uh I I got into the more mystical spiritual aspect of birds pretty much after I ended up running out of material to write about with the practical aspect of birds because I wrote all this stuff about geese, um, about how to care for them, my experience raising them, my insights. And then that got published into a book with uh my co-author uh Aaron von Frank. He did all the most of the editing, and he actually is responsible for getting the book to publish or for publishing it, self-publishing it on Amazon. But um anyway, I I just simply run out of materials to write about. And I thought, what else is interesting to me about birds like other than and I started kind of going back a little bit and remembering all the magic and mythology and things that I loved when I was younger, that I'd kind of I don't know, gotten too practical to care about so much anymore. And so I started that kind of started that process. And then I had a conversation with Rachel White, uh, and she had me on her podcast last, I think it was last year, to talk about Ornithomancy and birds as well. And when I told her the egg story, her first comment was like, that's fairy stuff. And I hadn't really thought about it that way ever. I mean, it had been years since I'd found that we'd found that egg. I I say, I say we, my husband found the egg on the floor. Yeah. And and I hadn't really made the connection. And she said that, and I kind of this light bulb kind of turned on, and I went, oh wow, that really did start everything. And I never thought of it as a fairy gift. And I don't know that I still think of it, or even now if I think of it that way, but it was certainly a gift. I don't know who or what from, but it started something for sure. Um, so once that light bulb went off, and I was already kind of interested, I thought, okay, there's something more here I need to get into. And so it was just sort of a natural progression of as you explore birds through myth, you realize that birds have been an immensely important spiritual aspect for all cultures all over the world. So this is really time immemorial. Birds are associated with the creation of the universe, they're associated with um bringing messages from the earth to the heavens. I mean, they they are literally liminal creatures, right? They they can go through all elements and especially water birds, right? They also have the added superpower of being able to swim in water. They master all elements. Um and then it was just kind of paying attention, I think, as so many things are in this sort of world of woo, right? It's really more of an an attention thing. Are you paying attention? Because you don't have to do anything special to get messages, you just have to pay attention and be open to receiving. Yeah. So with ornithomancy, ornithomancy is considered sort of a Roman practice. Um, but there's uh it was believed that it actually started in um why am I blinking? It's modern day Turkey, but um Anatolia. Anatolia is the um thing. I was like, it's the name of a dog, Anatolian Shepherd. It's not Final Jeopardy. I didn't know.

unknown 4:39

You know I guess.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Um anyway, what they were more concerned with actually less the type of bird. They often used um hawks, vultures, eagles in their divination, mostly because they were more rare to see than songbirds. Um, so seeing them was sort of a special thing, right? And also they're just a lot more visible, even in a distance. Um much more visible to see, um, much more deliberate in their flights. And for them, it was really more the direction of the bird. Um, a bird flying from right to left is considered auspicious and from left to right inauspicious, or something happening on the right side of you is auspicious, left side inauspicious. So in that way, they kind of use birds as this um almost like you'd use a pendulum or something, right? Like swinging which direction? Yes or no, right? Um, and same they use that a lot in um Kabbalah as well, uh, in Kabbalistic literature. The direction of the flight of the bird is considered important. Also listening to their cries, their tonality, the number of cries, um, where they're perched, you can take note of where they're perched. Um, and in Kabbalah as well, it was again right side um considered uh auspicious, left side more of a sort of bad omen or inauspicious. And then in bird medicine, which is when I say bird medicine, I'm referring to more of a Native American uh spirituality around birds. Uh there's the you know, there's uh the the medicine wheel concept, and there's a medicine wheel concept specifically for birds, so it's a directional uh compass, right, for birds. So that's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_03 6:46

I never heard about yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:50

So the north, and it's my understanding is that the directions are so the directions are governed by specific birds. So you got the north is governed by the eagle, the east is governed by the hawk, the uh crow or the raven is at the south, and the west is the owl. And then when you understand sort of what those birds represent within that culture, um, that kind of give you gives you an idea of what the message of a bird might be, especially so the way I use it, right? And I'm not I'm not indigenous at all. I'm not not Native American, so this is not my tradition. But the way I've kind of used it for myself in conjunction with this idea of right to left or left to right flight, is okay, if I see the flight of a bird coming from the east, you know, what in the east is governed by the hawk, right? Then what does that can I take the combination of that, the type of bird, the direction it's coming from, and the meaning or symbology of the bird that governs that direction? And is it coming from my right or my left? And how can I kind of filter, filter all that information through the lens of something more on my right side, maybe more of a positive reading, so to speak, and something happening on my left side or coming from my left side is maybe more of a, I don't know, I don't like to use the word like I don't, I don't know that I actually believe I'm gonna be honest, I don't know that I actually believe in bad omens or negative messages. It's just information. It's just information, but maybe more cautionary, right? Similar in the way you I'm not great at tarot, but from what I understand, the way people interpret tarot a lot, right? There's you any of the cards, it seems like you can interpret in a positive or negative kind of absolutely. And it's up to the person that's receiving the message to decide how that kind of to kind of use their intuition, decide is applying to their life, like what's going on in my life where this makes sense. Because I think a lot going back to the subconscious, a lot of what all this symbology is doing, getting us to get some information out of our own subconscious, getting us to get own our own information out of ourselves.

SPEAKER_02 9:28

I was sparkling, you're you're sparking thoughts. You are, you know.

SPEAKER_03 9:32

Well, but also it's not like um I I just literally read something the other day that kind of blew my mind because I've never really I've I've always loved to have a tarot reading done for me, but I've never felt like, well, who needs to come forward to give me the right cards and how do I read them? And then I read somewhere, it's just asking your higher self for guidance. And we do it in a myriad of ways. And for some people, pulling a card, that's your higher self saying, you need guidance for the day, for this answer, for this prognosis, for whatever the thing is. And so saying, I'm going to look at the birds and have them give me some guidance. And it's my higher self. It's it's my higher self and me that are communicating through this, however, the medium is like with the birds. My dad came to me before he had even passed away. He was very ill, but he was talkative. He's lighting up my text thread still a bit, you know. He was in the ICU. And I was like, I need a message from the universe to know that my dad's gonna be okay. And I'm like sobbing and I'm having this moment in my kitchen, and literally a hummingbird is just tap, tap, tapping on the glass in my kitchen. And so I was like, Oh, oh, he's gonna be just fine. So then I went down and I was with him during the last days of his life and the moment that he passed, and I come home, and there was um, there were two dead um hummingbirds to my shock. So that's what reminded me of you telling your story of the nuthatch. But these two dead hummingbirds on my patio, right where that original hummingbird had been, tapping for me. And I'm like, oh my god, dad, are you okay? And then I just was like, what is this? Then I did research, and with um the Tibetan Book of the Dead, there's a certain number of days that the soul needs in order to actually cross over to the new place. Well, sure enough, put a put a pin in that because exactly that day, two hummingbirds came to my kitchen window, the same kitchen window. So I had my confirmation that oh, he had gone through the process that had worked for him, and there were two hummingbirds. So he had lots of company over there, which my dad is very social person. So I think that you know, it takes the mysticism out of it in a way to say, whatever your medium is, it could be I'm looking for signs in the weather or with birds or with this or with that. And all of those things are true and real, but it's really the communication is between your higher self and you. So I don't know, it took away all the mysticism of the whole thing with me of like, am I worthy? Am I gonna miss the signs? It's like, yeah, yeah, I'd probably miss the signs nine times out of 10. But then the 10th time my higher self's like, here, you can't miss this, and I get it.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

Kind of going off of that too, you know, I think we can get a little wrapped up in, oh, what does this symbolize? What does this symbolize? What does it symbolize? Rather than really learning from our environment and learning from, I mean, so much of learning about what a bird might mean, right, is really to me almost less about symbolism, but like so back up. So birds are not symbols, right? They are living, breathing, autonomous creatures. They're they're um and and one challenge with using birds as sort of divinatory um mediums is that they come and go when they want to. They're not a decotaro cards.

SPEAKER_03 13:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Um, and with declining bird populations, they're seeing birds is more and more rare, right? The question for me with birds in particular, and I think this can maybe be applied to a lot of things, is the question's not what does this bird represent? Um, because I think that actually we lose kind of the wonder with that question. Um, and I kind of wrote about this in one of my Substack articles also, um, which I'll I'll link below. But um I'm gonna pull up this quote because I just I love it so, so much. I don't know. Are you familiar with the podcast The Emerald? No. Oh my gosh, you gotta you gotta listen to the Emerald. Um, Josh Reed. I'm writing it down now. Yeah, he's an animist, he's a mythic, he's an expert on myth. Like he's a storyteller. He's this phenomenal storyteller. The podcast is less a podcast than it is just this phenomenal work of art. It's a production, like it's gorgeous. Wow. But he has an episode on the Emerald about birds, about birds in flight. And he has this quote um that I really love. It I I highly recommend it. Uh, maybe we can even pink it here. I will. I'll link it in the show notes for sure. It's like meditative, it's such a great episode. But um he has this quote within that episode, and he says, in relation to this question of like not treating birds as just symbols, as like symbology and what they represent in my life, but to rather have this perspective. Okay, he says to sing of the falcon is not to sing about something, it is to invoke the falcon, to feel the falcon, to become the falcon. The question is not what the eagle in the story represents. The question is as the storyteller sang of the eagle, did the hair on your skin start to rise? Did you feel feathers poke through your skin? Did you bristle with new white down? Did you grow wings? As the storyteller sings, do you grow wings? And wow. To me, that just like, whoo that's what I think of that quote. I mean, God, I love Josh so much. Just everything he does is magical. But that is really that quote is just the spirit that I try to invoke whenever I'm considering bird showing up in my life, or any animal, really, or anything in nature is like not what does this symbolize? What's the symbol of this? But how can I almost embody this? How do I feel it? How do I become like a bird? How do I become like a tree? What do I change about myself to learn from this tree, from this bird, from this deer? How do I change myself to become? What does it feel like?

SPEAKER_03 16:50

And how does the perspective shift on what I am dealing with right now and struggling to have answers to? I mean, I think about, you know, the way that I clung to the owls, the horned owls that helped us this fall and into the winter. And they were just, I would, they're like, they had no idea what was happening. Right in the I get so emotional right in that tree right there. They had no idea what was happening in this room right here, and how much we needed just the universe to come together for some healing. And they sat steadfast and true, and they looked through the windows, and they didn't move away or stir when two cats jumped up on the perch right there to look at them, and they were just steadfast and true, and that it gave us the strength to stand firm and let miracles take place and uh let us be of service. So it's like you were mentioning the hawk. You can have a simple meditation where you're like, life is shit right now. This is awful, this is hard. I'm stuck in it. And you can take a moment and really try to come out of yourself and into the hawk that's soaring in the sky, looking for a mouse or rabbit to eat. And what would that feel like? And it just unburdens you for just a moment from the ties and tethers and the things that you're really desperately trying to create and do on the earth, and that perspective of like, it's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay, and you get to fly free for a moment in your mind at least. So they come with those gifts, and they're it's such unconditional love, that gift that they give us, and you know, that passage that Josh wrote for the Emerald Podcast, it it is, it's like that is maybe the most respectful way to be among nature is to try to have the perspective of the things that we are so lucky to get to behold.

SPEAKER_00 19:14

So yeah, I totally agree. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, that's um if you're talking about the hawk, so um hawk feather. Um and interesting, I probably should have tied this into the nuthatch, but so hawks and hawk feathers are often symbols that you're going to receive a message. They can, I just talked about not calling them symbols, but the language. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we we get it. We get it. We do, we totally do. Yeah, so uh they they can often bring other messages other than just uh expect a message, but often um, especially in Native American traditions, um the hawk is not just a bringer of messages, but also like heads up, you're going to receive an important message.

SPEAKER_03 20:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:07

Be paying attention. So right before the nuthatch, I've been finding hawk feathers. And we have haw, I mean, hawks are not uncommon here. Um but this is my first year ever finding hawk feathers just laying on the ground. Um and so when you can consider things like that too, where you find a hawk feather, but then you have this experience with this other animal or this other bird. And for me, at least in that specific um example, um it was almost a confirmation, right? I'd been finding hawk feathers, and then I had this experience with this nuthatch, which sort of made me think I need to pay attention to what the nuthatch is as a bird and what it can teach me. What's the message from the nuthatch? Um, and in this case, it wasn't so much a message from hawk as hawk being like, pay attention, pay attention, pay attention, here's your flag, here's your checkered flag.

SPEAKER_03 21:09

And and what's so striking is the hawk's feather is bigger than the nuthatch itself. But it took the hawk feather to be the big flag of like, this seems like a tiny thing, but it's everything sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So much to so much to think about. Yeah. Um also if you find a feather, sorry to kind of jump around, but my brain is my brain kind of, I don't know, gets sparked by things. And um but there's this um thing you can do with feathers. It's called aura dusting. You literally just use a feather, you don't touch your body, but you kind of imagine sweeping your aura.

unknown 21:59

Um

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Like literally getting the dunks out of it. And you kind of just work your way through the whole body. And it's sort of a nice, it's a very calming practice. I don't know. It is. Yeah. Um, you can also use it with uh um kind of more of like a a wand, you know, uh um all the feathers together. Uh and um, but yeah, you can do it with a single feather. Hawk cellar circle.

SPEAKER_03 22:26

We've literally come full circle because it reminds me of the energy of the woodpecker where the tap tap tap tap tap tap tapping kind of like shakes things loose, shakes things off of you that maybe aren't serving you anymore.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

Oh, that's a great that's a thought for me too, because that's a connection I hadn't really made of things kind of coming off of yes, just sloughing off, shaking loose.

SPEAKER_03 22:54

Well, that was pretty amazing. I just feel I feel all happy, goosebumpy, and now I want to go out and just like lay in the grass and let throw my seeds out. See, Jesse, didn't that cheat?

SPEAKER_02 23:07

I told you you would be all into birds after we did this. I love birds, I do.

SPEAKER_03 23:11

Like a year ago, almost exactly, I was sitting watching the birds, and um, I used to be really afraid of the birds. I think I bought into Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds a little too much as a little girl. And my mother's from Chicago and hates all animals. So I was like, that's not me. I love animals. But I was sitting at my um back table and I was drinking coffee and I went, what is that? That's a new bird for me. It's not a hawk, that's a falcon. And I got the binoculars out because my husband had put them on the dining room table and I'm looking at and I'm drawing it and I went, This is unique. And I looked it up, it's like a peregrine falcon. And I'm like, am I crazy? Because they had been obliterated in a lot of Colorado because of all the chemicals that people were spraying their crops with. So it softens the outside of the egg so that the egg can egg cannot go to maturity, right? And I'm like, am I going crazy? This was a peregrine falcon that I saw. Sure enough, like a week later, I'm on Twitter and uh Jefferson County was saying, we have had sightings of peregrine falcons. They're back, baby. They're back.

SPEAKER_02 24:26

Jen, you need to you need to watch this documentary called Jurassic Park and you'll learn all about that.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

You know, Jen, that story reminds me of just like to say, if you want to honor the birds, yeah, the best way, hands down, the best way you can do it is simply by taking care of the environment. Like truly, I know it doesn't sound mystical, it's not ritualistic, but it's literally like clean up your fishing crap. The birds are strangled by fishing wire and like have their limbs amputated because they get fishing wire or they get their the hooks stuck in their bills or whatever. You've got um yeah, don't use pesticides. Um keep the waterways clean. Um, don't feed the duck, the birds at the park bread. It's not good for them. They develop wing deformities, you know. Like do these small things, like the best way we can honor animals and nature and earth and like your spiritual practice means nothing if you're not uh doing the real work in the material world to caretake creatures, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_03 25:39

I mean my guides uh my guide said very early on, they said, Yeah, you can you all can do parlor tricks. Do you want to do parlor tricks? You all can do that shit, but it's the magic in the mundane, and that means if you're on like um, as Mahdia is saying, it's so profound, it's everything. It's like the nuthatch and the giant hawk feather. It's the big look at me, look at me. I seem small, but I'm everything. You're on a hiking trail. Sure, you didn't put that plastic bag with dog poop in it. But if you have a space in your backpack, pick it up and put it in there because we are all stewards of the planet. All of us. They're relying on us. I mean, yeah, it's magic in the mundane.

SPEAKER_02 26:27

Real quick, when you got into the woo stuff, what was something that uh what was uh what was a woo rule that like uh you heard that uh you found not to resonate with you?

SPEAKER_00 26:42

Oh gosh, say that a few times fast.

SPEAKER_02 26:44

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 26:46

Woo rule.

SPEAKER_02 26:48

I'm gonna drool if I say woo rule too much.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

Oh, that is a good question.

SPEAKER_02 26:55

Um, let me think. Like uh Jen, what was the one that we uh what was the one that we were talking about last week?

SPEAKER_03 27:02

Like you can't buy your well, one I I unearthed today was you can't buy your own tarot deck. Like I had heard that rule and I went, oh, really? They have to be gifted to you. You can't buy your own tarot deck. And I'm like, break that rule. That isn't a rule, it's not real.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 27:22

You know, it I mean, anything like that where like people are like, you know, like uh, you know, you light a candle and all your problems go away, you know, stuff like that, you know.

SPEAKER_00 27:33

Um I mean, I think a lot of stuff like that. I never really took that seriously to begin with. Good. And honestly, you know, I don't know that I'm even aware of a lot of the that's good too.

SPEAKER_02 27:50

Um I think that's really healthy. Well, we didn't we're we're kind of making a list of like things that like uh people talk about online and stuff all the time that they that they like if you they throw out as gospel, but it it but like okay, but we have to look at it and go, why?

SPEAKER_03 28:07

It's like you know, something if something bad or dark happens to you, you brought you like attracted it to yourself.

SPEAKER_00 28:15

It's like what that's not real, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, that's a great question. And I don't I'll have to think on it because I don't have an immediate answer. If I think of it, I'll shoot you guys a message. Yeah, that'd be great.

SPEAKER_02 28:29

Um it's not a pop quiz. We're just we're we're just we're just kind of polling everybody at the end of the podcast and going, like, hey, like is there anything that you want to unbreak a rule that is something that just you you were just like always that like everybody is like, oh yeah, do this, you know, this is a thing, and you're like, I don't think that's a thing. I mean, I almost want to say there's so many things like that that I just kind of I'm like, no, I don't that seems I think it I th I think you're I I I like the way you comment things though because I feel like you you you took the experiences uh in like the like the like finding the egg and stuff, and like you built what you are what you believe, you know, we got into the bird omancy and everything off of that, you know. So I don't know if you if yours is in tune with all the noise I think that gets pushed around.

SPEAKER_03 29:27

And that's a good thing. Yeah, it's a great thing.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Yeah, um I don't know, you know, you were talking about the magic and the mundane, and I just I really resonate with that. I I think that it's just the small things we do every day that's so important to the spiritual life. And so to me, it's not so much about rituals or superstitions or like doing this or doing that or having rules about what to do. It's simply being so present in your in your life that everything you do can be ritual. Like it's it's so much the intention, right? It's the intention with which I do things, it's where I focus my my um where do I focus my attention, right? And yeah, I don't I don't know. Um I will and I I do tend to get turned off very quickly with things that start to become start to put people in the boxes, right? Same. And you know, I mentioned I was into human design for a while and I even did some coaching around it, but you know, I kind of let it go because in that world people just get so attached to their archetypes, and the whole point of human design was differentiation and like not being defined, you know? And and then also like the founder of it. I I always have there's something about him that that intuitively I don't like, and it reminds me a little bit of Bikram, Bikram Yoga. Um, that there's nothing out there that says he's a bad person. And I'll say that like I'm not accusing him of anything, but there's something about the fact that he took this name, Ra Urhu, where his, you know, like I always get a little suspicious when someone takes makes their own name up, um, following like a spiritual like channel awakening session thing. And there's so much that's useful in human design.

SPEAKER_02 31:33

Like when you give yourself yourself that don't be like uh like yeah, yeah, everybody referred to me as this, you know, it's like uh you you can't give yourself your own nickname, bro. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 31:48

And it never has, and I kind of overlooked it for a while because there was so much usefulness I found within the human design system, and I kind of understood how it worked. And um, but after a while, I was just like, you know what? Like, it's just it feels the same as like I can never do big crime yoga again. I loved that, it's a great class.

SPEAKER_02 32:09

Yeah, and I don't do human thing because I don't resonate with any any of either one of those things, but like that's when in my brain, that's when it starts to like, is this a cult?

SPEAKER_03 32:22

You know, that's where my boundaries go up too.

SPEAKER_02 32:24

Yeah, is this a Reneri thing? Yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 32:28

And maybe it's less nefarious than that. I feel like with human human design or bikram yoga, I feel like somebody decided there's profit in it. So all of a sudden it was dollar signs. And and it to me, it's like, so let's make it overly complicated so that you can package it up and sell it versus it's a gift for everybody to level up.

SPEAKER_02 32:49

And I think it's more that it's the it's the it's the uh it's the monetization of a thing that I think ultimately corrupts a thing like that, you know.

SPEAKER_03 33:00

Exactly. We have to let Mahdia go, Jesse. I know that's how I feel too, but I'm like, oh, we have to be respectful. You'll just have to come back.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

Oh well, I would love to anytime we can do birds part two or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 33:17

I know we with Jen, we learned so much today.

SPEAKER_03 33:20

No, I'm so excited to commute with nature right now. I actually want to go out and try to find some garbage on the trail. Just don't call this part one, or there won't be a part two.

SPEAKER_01 33:29

That's right. Exactly. This is uh we we did this our new rule.

SPEAKER_03 33:36

Never happening ever again. So well, we love you and thank you for coming by for a really long form visit. And really, we cannot wait to have you back already. Yeah, this was awesome.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

You too, thank you. Love you so much.

SPEAKER_03 33:55

Bye.