Turkey Energy
About 10 years ago on a backpacking trip to Pico Blanco, California, Tiffany, two old friends, and I were making our way to the summit in a cold, windy fog with hardly any visibility and not much chance of seeing any kind of view from the top. Backpacking trips always have some moments where I wonder if I actually like backpacking. I had mostly been looking at my feet and thinking about things I’d rather be doing when a vibrant, smiling woman in leopard-print tights emerged from the fog, heading towards us. She looked like she was having the time of her life and she looked strong enough to sling me over her shoulder and run back up to the top. She introduced herself as Jennifer and after a short conversation headed down the trail, disappearing back into the fog. Later that night, after some burritos and some rest, Tiffany said, “I think Jennifer is my spirit animal”. This has turned into an occasional mantra in our family when the going gets tough.
Spirit animals are something I think about a lot. At our psychiatric practice we focus on nature connection as a source of healing and usually invite clients to pick from a deck of animal spirit tarot cards before sessions. Finding kinship with our animal brethren is a nice way to connect to the natural world and to shed some of the imaginary differences between humans and the rest of the earth’s inhabitants. As a biologist, I was trained to avoid anthropomorphism, but as an emergency room doctor I’ve learned that lots of humans behave like animals, so I’m pretty sure the similarities go both ways. Anthropomorphism may be a tool that we have to use carefully but, ultimately, it is a form of empathy that can drive understanding.
One of Jude’s recent spirit animal art projects
This past spring, I was driving the hilly farmland near the western base of Mount Mitchell. The redbuds were just fading and the azaleas had yet to start blooming, but everywhere was the impossibly verdant green of new growth intermittently punctuated by white dogwood blossoms. High up a hill, I saw a large tom turkey and had a devastating thought; “What if the turkey is my spirit animal?” I say devastating because I think I knew the answer. I have had some encounters with mountain lions, river otters, and even luna moths that make for much more flattering and interesting spirit animals, but some part of me realized that brother turkey was a neglected relationship that needed some attention.
April Azaleas behind our house
Continuing along the winding roads with barns and pickup trucks, I wondered what “turkey energy” would represent. Certainly it is a big energy, occasionally loud and frequently ostentatious. I also thought some about how no one really takes turkeys as seriously as they take themselves. I comforted myself slightly with the thought that they are a the center of a holiday dedicated to gratitude, but the involuntarily sacrificial nature of their participation wasn’t that soothing. I tried thinking about what “turkey magic” would be like, but it just sounded like a condiment.
To compound matters, as I rounded a curve while passing an open grassy field, I saw not one, but three toms with their tail feathers fanned and their bodies plumped and fluffed, perfect caricatures of self-important males. All of them were strutting around a solitary female who appeared to be silently suffering another year amidst the turkey patriarchy and wishing she had a taser and 2 glasses of wine. Turkey energy indeed, I thought. Maybe not the most flattering spirit animal, but hard lessons can make for an efficient education sometimes.
Asheville spring
Shortly after this afternoon spent wondering about my inner turkey, my wife had a birthday and was given a new set of animal spirit cards and a book on how to interpret them. This deck was different from the one we typically use at work and included a lot more of the animals common to our area. Having grown up here and spent a lot of time watching local animals, I feel a much greater kinship with them than say a cheetah or narwhal. Not that I can’t be speedy or horny, I just know a heck of lot more about the habits of squirrels and white tailed deer.
The book’s take on turkey energy was more encouraging than my previous explorations of the idea. Reportedly, indigenous peoples referred to the Turkey as the “The give-away eagle” as a symbol of giving for potlatch ceremonies wherein members of a community or tribe would give possessions away, as a way to keep material acquisition in check and make sure that everyone has enough. Contrast this with American Thanksgiving and black Friday sales with their frenzied gluttony.
The Turkey page continued, “You act and react on the behalf of others. You aspire to help those who need help. This is not out of some sense of self righteous moralism or religious guilt. Help and sustenance are given by turkey out of the realization that all life is sacred. It is knowing that the Great Spirit resides in all people.” As an emergency room doctor, this is a sentiment I can resonate with, although a decent salary and free coffee in the doctor’s lounge have a significant impact on my level of altruism.
What felt most relevant to my current position in life as a father, husband, and doctor was the following passage, “Remember, never give to receive. That is manipulation. Giving is without regret and with a joyful heart, or the give-away has lost its true meaning.” This past couple of years I have found myself occasionally slipping into the selfish notion that I ought to be getting more back from the people that I help and support. I can get frustrated with finding all of my time absorbed by others and I can end up resentful. I’m not proud of this but I’ve had to learn to see it in myself because it can keep me from enjoying the things I care the most about. In our rushed, transactional culture where it’s difficult to know who your community is, it can be tricky to not feel isolated and unappreciated sometimes despite the best of intentions.
Jude on harmonica, blowing the slow traffic blues
The week after Tiffany’s birthday, our family attended Rendezvous, a week-long earth skills camping festival. In its 38th year, it is a longstanding biannual opportunity to celebrate connecting to nature and with other people. Everyone camps around a large field near a lake. There is a central fire with a morning gathering and everyone eats dinner together each night. There's a variety of classes offered each day; plant identification, black smithing, pottery, wet felting, herbology, and many more.
I’ve been to a lot of festivals and each has its own curated sense of community values or common assumptions. I haven’t spent enough time with the earth skills community to say that I know deeply what it stands for, but I saw a real reverence for nature, an openness to connecting deeply with others, and an enjoyable amount of curiosity and eagerness to learn. There is also an apparent communal fetish for buckskin pants and elaborate handmade knives as well as a secret festival-wide agreement to carry anything and everything in baskets instead of backpacks. Having shown up in a fancy camper van with some big speakers and Blinky lights, I felt a little like Luke Skywalker crashing his X-wing into Yoda’s home planet. I was clearly going to have to learn some new things.
Things you might find on a nature walk
When I arrived, I sought out a friend who was involved in organizing the event and teaching classes and asked his advice about how best to use my time there. I told him that I felt like I had learned some important life lessons lately but that I was struggling with how to put them into practice and make some actual changes in my life. He gave me two very good pieces of advice. “First,” he said, “find a class where you do something really repetitive with your hands and let yourself just space out a little bit. Sometime thats the best way to let your thoughts settle. Second, find one of the community elders here and just sit down next to them and listen.”
Honestly one of my favorite initial experiences at the festival was what I referred to as the “wild baby preserve.” The event organizers had put up several traffic cones with streamers on one section of the campground road near our campsite to warn drivers of a large deep mud puddle and each day I watched as groups of mud-splattered naked babies and toddlers played there with feral delight.
van times at the festival
The first day I signed up to learn how to make blowdart guns out of bamboo with my son from a man named White Eagle who also sold hot dogs and hamburgers out of his trailer. We used flame to straighten the bamboo and long metal rods to break up the septations, creating a straight empty tube. At least with respect to the casual use of blowtorches and projectiles, this festival shares quite a bit with burning man, an environment I am much more familiar with.
My daughter and her teenage friends made wet felted pouches, tanned hides, swam in the lake and got in tiny amounts of age-appropriate trouble. Tiffany and my son made flutes of river cane, and Tiffany and I made clay pottery. I did find quite a bit of enjoyment in having a task to do with my hands. So often, at festivals or on vacations, there is an odd emphasis on “just doing nothing” which often turns into “just have another beer” in my brain, and I do much prefer having something to which I can apply my mind and hands. And I definitely felt the value of working on something which tied up enough of my attention that the remainder of my brain could settle down a little bit. For me, having my attention lightly occupied is more meditative than trying to sit completely still with an empty mind. It’s much like the way they always give children crayons at restaurants. My inner toddler needs a distraction if the adults are gonna have any chance at a meaningful conversation.
No one has a very clear memory of this moment, but we assume it was great.
With regards to sitting with an elder, I signed myself up for a nature connection class with Snowbear, one of the event founders. His classes were always held at the Elder Fire, a small bamboo enclosed area with a small fire, an alter table, and a variety of types of drums. It was a pleasantly zen lesson in using all of our senses to connect with our surroundings. We studied individual blades of grass, tasted the air, counted sounds in the forest, and did a slow short barefoot walk looking for feathers that Snowbear had hidden along a trail.
Several days later, thanks to a confluence of medical and festival related events, I again ended up at Snowbear’s fire with an old friend, who is also an ER doctor, and we sat late into the night passing a pipe around and hearing some details of Snowbear’s life. I’m reluctant to share details that were told in the intimacy of a campfire, but at he end of a story about the difficulties and inevitable tragedies of family life, Snowbear looked at me and said, “And this is how my daughter taught me that love means giving without any thought of receiving. You just put it out there.”
It was such an echo of what I felt like I was trying to learn from the turkeys, that I had to laugh to myself. I am convinced that the universe does want us to learn lessons now and again but that we do have to be willing to be a student. Symbols are powerful things. They are the the only way we have of making sense of the universe around us. The nice thing about nature symbols is that they are not concrete. Meanings can evolve and change and often have more exceptions than rules. But maybe it’s time to get to know my inner turkey a little better. I’ve got until November, anyway.
