Chapter 7 The Blue Hummingbird Man

Chapter Seven

The Blue Hummingbird Man

      In the spring of 2001, I awoke with the dreamworld hanging heavy upon me.  Such vivid imagery that brought me back into myself with the realization, this is a big dream!   

The Dream:  I was in a market in the near east, walking through the hubbub of the bazaar.  As I turned left around a brick wall, a barber had strung lines from the corners of the brick walls making a triangular space for himself.  He wore a short pale green tunic, which ended at mid-thigh.  As I passed by he stretched out his leg and touched me, saying, "Sometimes we need to go fishing."  When I looked back, I noticed his leg appeared to be twelve feet long.  It looked like a long bamboo pole with an almost human foot at the end of it.  Intrigued by this character, who, at some deeper intuitive level within the dream, I knew to be the heron, I put my blue-gray plaid blanket on the ground to talk to him. 

As soon as the heron/barber started to talk to me, another man and his companion approached us.  This new person was dressed in a navy blue shirt and jeans, very American, with white hair and a little pointed goatee beard.  His friend was silent.  The American immediately began to talk very loudly over the hubbub of the market and the words of the barber.  I was thinking, "how rude and disrespectful this guy is, he's going to be heard over everyone".  What he said was this:  "When we gave the peyote to the people it was for medicine, for healing.  Now it is time for the people to give the medicine back to the land."  Then he changed into a brilliant blue humming bird and flew up and away from me about twenty feet above the ground, stopping in mid air.  He then morphed into human shape, and hovering there, reached out, and extended his arm toward me with fingers out stretched.  A bird appeared out of nowhere on my right shoulder next to my ear.  I reached up and touched it.  I could feel its shape and feathers.  Then it flew up into the trees.

      As I looked for "my bird", I noticed the scene had changed to a streambed with water and Aspen trees, reminding me of my boyhood home in Idaho.  My bird was sitting with other birds in the trees.  I said to the bird, "well if you are mine, you will return to me because you want to, so I don't need to be concerned about losing you so soon after meeting you."  The dream continued with images of my biological children and their relationship with me.

For me the heron symbolizes the new day, because the Water Bird Spirit, like the heron, when it takes flight, looks down at itself in the morning water and sees itself reflected there.  

      That morning, when I awoke from the dream, I had an appointment at the dentist’s. After he worked on me, I was feeling numb and spontaneously decided to take the afternoon off work.  I was sipping soup in the local bakery when a young man and his brother walked in.  He was carrying a flight bag with a bright orange tag labeled SFO, San Francisco International Airport. He went to the counter, asked about a job, turned, and headed for the door.  I recognized him. He was the skilled Capoeirista whom I had met only once (about nine months before) at a Roda demonstration of the Afro-Brazilian martial art of Capoeira, which I had been learning.  Then it hit me.  This guy is the fifty-year-old dream image dressed in navy blue and his companion!  There was no mistake; the twenty-one-year-old had the same hair and goatee as the Hummingbird Spirit.  I was astounded.  I took a huge risk and invited these relative strangers to my table and told them the dream.  Just like the conversation in the dream market, the younger brother never said a word.  They listened attentively to the dream, very politely.  These men seemed a little shocked by the encounter but nonetheless were respectful of their elder, a quality I appreciate in younger men. 

      Before going to the bakery, I had walked by the Mind-Body Center where I had studied psychic abilities and noticed there were going to be free readings by students later in the evening.  I had decided to treat myself to another reading.  After telling my dream to these young men, they told me that they were going to get their older brother and get a psychic reading at the same Center I was headed to.  I offered to collect all three brothers later and we would drive there together.  We agreed to meet later.

      While I finished my coffee, I was wondering about the dream and the strange synchronicity. “How is it possible that this flesh and blood man is blond and in his twenties, while the wizard Hummingbird Spirit was in his fifties or sixties?”  The inner, analytical logician was trying to puzzle it out, but linear thinking was not working.  What came to mind were the words “Merlin ages backwards”; the dreamworld is often paradoxical.  Perhaps I was envisioning a future shaman interacting with me in the twenty-first century, communicating over time trails not yet traveled. Synchronicity is so interesting that way.  The image was unmistakably the aged version of the man sitting across the table from me.  The way the two brothers acted was the same as in the dream.  The parallels were astounding; they got my attention.  If I had dismissed the dream as meaningless, the future would have been quite different.

      When I picked up the three brothers later that evening, I discovered the Hummingbird Man had also studied Psychic Abilities for Healers with the same psychics.  One of the directors of the center, our teacher there, was a Coyote brother.  He was delighted to see me appear with yet another of his students.  He was surprised; he said he could feel the brothers’ energy approaching, but he didn’t detect mine.   After the reading, while walking beside the Hummingbird Man, I offered to teach Mikey, as he preferred to be called, whatever I knew.  I realized that if, in thirty years, the young man were to be a powerful healer/wizard, he needed skilled, well intentioned teachers.  It took four weeks of silence before Mickey called asking to visit and talk. 

      I had invited Mikey to my brother’s Native American Church (Peyote) Ceremony, which I was going to attend two days after the dream occurred.  Mikey, who was raised as a Roman Catholic, wanted to meditate about the invitation since it would raise a lot of issues for his family.  He decided to stay home.  I wasn’t really surprised with his decision; I doubt I could have done otherwise when I was his age.  In the meantime, my spirit brother’s students had gone collecting wood with a member of the Red Road community, a man of mysterious character, who certainly was acting like Coyote.  He helped them select wood for the meeting.  Although much of the wood was dry madrone, which burns bright and hot, most of it was green bay wood, which burns reluctantly and smokes profusely. The strong, acrid smell produces tears and coughing.  This was all happening without my knowledge at the time, but it played a significant part during the meeting. 

      The day after the Hummingbird Spirit dream and the day before the Peyote Ceremony, I was driving to the central valley of California to spend the day with my student and my beloved friend Wolf.  My spirit son Josh had introduced us, saying, “You are going to love this guy!”  Now Josh is an Eagle, and members of that clan are noted for their ability to see far.  They can see far into the future and they can see deep into the structure of the soul. During the first three years of our relationship, Josh and I had worked a lot on honing Josh’s psychic abilities and interpreting his dreams.  During that process, he discovered his Cherokee ancestry and the eeriness of his prophetic dreams.  I suppose that, if I had come into my eagle self in those days, my story would have evolved quite differently, but at that time I was definitely and happily known as Coyote.  The Eagle introduced me to Wolf, the Greek-American with Irish roots.  Ironically, he had the same genetic background as my biological son, the Wolf.  

      Recognizing my Trickster nature and trying to support the transformation of my psyche, my biological son gifted me Glen A. Mazis’ book, (1993) The Trickster, Magician, & Grieving Man: Reconnecting Men with Earth.  Within its pages I found more Coyote medicine and a magic mirror where I saw myself reflected.  Consciously I wanted to identify with the Magician and deny the fact that I was grieving the end of a thirty-year-old marriage and the end of a happily ever after fantasy.  Mazis provides several images of the masculine.  Similar to the connection between the Greek god Hermes (Roman Mercury) and the Trickster Coyote discussed in Allan Combs and Mark Holland’s book (1996) Synchronicity: Science, Myth and the Trickster, Mazis takes the model of mercuric masculinity a step toward my experience of it in the Native American Trickster figure of the Winnebago people.  Their tales show it is important to live with a variety of people and animals. This is the trickster spirit’s forte, making community out of disparate energies.  Like Coyote, the Winnebago shapeshifter can live in many worlds and goes through many changes.  I was experiencing life that way.  I was, like the trickster, “moving through identities and worlds, taking up with people as leader, son, bride, father, mother, and with all sorts of creatures—all in rapidly shifting identities” (Mazis, 1993, p. 192). During the time leading up to my participation in the Peyote Ceremony, and especially afterwards, I have gone through a wide variety of roles and relationships learning how to be human, learning as the Peyote teaches, through experience in living.

      Bright Star Talking Swan described me as “the man with the most highly developed feminine I have ever known.”  Her mom, an elder in her seventies, made me a mala, a string of prayer beads, with pink rose quartz crystals to honor the feminine.  I was beginning to discover that being a Coyote means being able to fluidly shift in and out of the roles played by the Coyote Spirit.  And yes, Mazis knew what he was talking about; those roles twist the normal gender roles like a pretzel!   Before that smoke filled, rain drenched Meeting started after the Hummingbird Spirit appeared, as I was saying, I drove to the central valley to teach two Greek-American men how to make baklava.  My mother-in-law and my ex-wife made “killer” baklava and I intended to share a batch at the meeting.

      What I neglected to tell myself about the history of baklava, or perhaps I remembered this subliminally, is that it is connected to the death and rebirth myths of ancient Greece.  Since the coming meeting was a memorial for a medicine woman who had passed into the Spirit World, it seems apparent in retrospect that some underworld doings were at work in the story.  Hermes is the psychopomp, the guide of souls into the underworld, and the only god given free access to all realms of being.  Hermes also has an eye for beautiful young men and my friend Wolf was a charismatic, musician who loved to dance like Dionysus.  Perhaps my attraction to Wolf had something to do with the fact that he was a “dead ringer” for my dad in this twenties.  My dad was exactly Wolf’s age when I was born.  The unfinished business of remembering the traumas and affections of early childhood were pulling me unconsciously toward relationship with Wolf.  I discussed this with my psychotherapist throughout the process of getting entangled and extricating myself from the Wolf/Coyote dynamic.  During those three years after Josh introduced me to the Wolf, much of my family of origin’s situations and patterns were acted out over and over again between Wolf and Coyote.  The Meeting was no exception.

      With the baklava baked and in the back of the car, I arrived at the Tipi Site early.  Since it was sprinkling, I left my car running while I went around to the back, opened the station wagon’s hatch and sat putting on my rubber boots.  My spirit brother, the Sponsor of the meeting, came and greeted me.  I asked what I could do and he said, “Move your car away from the Tipi.”  “OK,” I responded. I got up, closed the hatch and went to get into the driver’s seat.  Within seconds Coyote had played another trick on me; the doors automatically locked!  It took forty-five minutes of trying to squeeze a metal coat hanger through the window before it dawned on me that I could depress the window button with the hanger.  Wah la, the window opened, I thanked the other Coyote who was trying to help me and parked my car, completely humiliated in the process.  But that was only the beginning.

      As soon as my daughter arrived so did the family pattern.  Wolf and his lover were fighting. Wolf’s abusive and rejecting Don Juan personality wanted me to choose him and exclude his lover from the Ceremony.  My daughter had given Wolf’s lover a ride and the two women had aligned with each other.  Both women were feeling rejected by their younger, less mature, male lovers.  (My mother was six years older than my father.)  I was disgusted with Wolf, but I kept my promise and let him sit beside me.  The young women sat on the opposite side of the fire from us, next to my lion brother the Fireman.  Because of Coyote’s wood gathering expedition, the meeting was dark and gloomy.  The green bay began smoking and was trapped inside because there was no wind, just a downpour of sky tears. During much of the meeting the participants were vomiting, coughing, crying, moaning, and trying to breathe.  The rain outside was intense. Throughout the night, Bear, my nephew, who was the Doorman, collected more and more mud on his boots as he cleaned up all the wellness and deposited it in a pit outside.  I kept thinking “lucky my nephew was in the Coast Guard; he looks well prepared in that rubber parka.  Odd to have a Bear wearing a yellow coat though!”   

      As the Meeting went on and I ate Medicine, the feelings churning inside of me manifested somatically.  I am a very affectionate, loving man and I have always enjoyed a hug, caress, or touch of the hand.  But not that night!  The minute that Wolf touched me, I wanted to vomit!  Getting well by vomiting is a common experience with Peyote Medicine, but it was very unusual for me.  It never happened.  Well that’s not true.  The only time I got well was the year before when I was fed a Medicine Ball during a doctoring meeting to cure me of the vampire bite I had received from my father.  During that Meeting, I did spit up foam and roared like a pterodactyl. The only person who heard the screams was Bright Star Singing Swan, who was sitting beside me, but she’s a medicine woman whose ears and eyes are specially attuned to the psychic dimension.  What I learned in that doctoring Meeting was that the Medicine (the Peyote) loves me and although I might feel nauseated for a time, I was not likely to get well (vomit) at Meetings. 

      Back in that tear filled, smoky Meeting on the Reservation in Northern California, I felt the unconscious masculine energy of my father sitting beside me.  The second time that Wolf touched me, I understood what was happening.   Wolf’s touch was nauseating me: he was making me sick.  The Medicine was speaking loud and clear, “this abuse has got to stop!” I told Wolf to stay in his place and not touch me again, all night long.  I was defining my energy boundary, my sacred space. 

      Both Wolf and I had been molested in childhood.  Intuitively I knew that letting my dad inside my sacred space had to stop.  Once a pattern is set up in childhood, we tend to repeat it. Sometimes we are the victim and sometimes the abuser.  Freud called this the “repetition compulsion”.  It is like snuggling up to the traumatic event, which is always present in the timeless time of the unconscious.  My pattern of the past was to dissociate the experience, to shunt it off-line in a part of my brain where it could not be felt.  Often that is my first reaction to all anxiety.  With the help of the Medicine, which kept me conscious, I articulated a boundary and enforced it.  Sitting with the experience of enjoying my private space, in spite of other emotionally stressful events in the Peyote Ceremony, I had a feeling of power and integrity, which lasted throughout the night and into the morning. 

      When I had the opportunity to speak while morning water was being passed around the Tipi, I retold my dream with the message the Humming Bird Spirit gave of giving the Medicine back to the land.  I also told the relatives of my experience with Wolf’s touching me, that I felt it was connected to the emotional abuse of our women by insensitive men like my father and me.  I had learned that pattern as a child at my father’s knee and had replicated it in my marriage. Consciousness of those patterns has come with a price.  I have spent a lot of time feeling rejected and shut out of my children’s lives because of my insensitive actions.  But an old dog can learn new tricks, given enough pain to see the old tricks don’t work.  I told everyone in the Meeting that I was sick of treating our wives, mothers, and sisters so disrespectfully; I wanted it to stop.  As feminine containers like Mother Earth, the Medicine needed to be given back to the women, as they bring life into the world.  We need to treat them with respect.  We need to heal their wounding.  My daughter and Wolf’s companion were crying throughout my self-expression. I felt empowered by empowering my daughter and the other women.  When I was finished speaking, Wolf leaned over and embraced me; his touch did not sicken me.  I felt like his father. He was himself and no longer holding space as my father.  Perhaps  during the night I had empathized so much that I merged feelings with my daughter and Wolf’s companion.  In any case, I felt the Peyote facilitated a major change in my ability to be aware of my body and thus not dissociate, as well as enabling me to articulate my personal boundary to both abuser and victim. 

     This sounds very paradoxical.  

We play both the roles. As the child we wanted to please our caregivers.  They were our survival.  Without them no food, no love, no life.  Or so it seems to the child.  That's how we become the victim. We cooperate.  We don't know any other way than the way we were taught. But as adults we must create a safe space for our inner child who wants to please the parental figure.  Imagining ourselves as the abuser, we must be conscious of how our needs can be fulfilled without damage and that means honoring the other's boundary.  Wolf as the child respects the alpha wolf's discipline.  He wanted to please the father energy, so he respected my boundary. (This is much easier to facilitate in a public ceremony where people are watching.)  In the magical moment of the eternal present, the child self doesn't realize the father figure was once a child like himself.  The feelings Wolf was evoking in me were the ones I had not felt, since childhood, they were literally put in the freezer, or to us a more modern expression, "off line" in the neurological net.  The peyote helped me to feel those repressed images of how nauseated I felt being treated like an object by my parents.  Telling the stand-in father not to touch me, and getting the respect I deserved, brought the child out of the closet and into the light.  It was safe now that my real daddy, Michael Melville, was protecting his inner child, little Mikey!

      The Tipi was dripping onto the inhabitants by morning, many looked like the wet creatures during the great flood time in the Karuk story about the first rainbow.  In that story, old man Coyote suggests the humans (the two-leggeds) join with the other creatures by shooting an arrow bearing the spider brothers high above Mount Shasta to the sky cloud home of old man above.   After telling the Creator/Great Mystery what was happening below him, the spider brothers and their kin were rewarded with rainbows in their webs, to remind them of Creator’s promise never to turn his back on his creatures again.  The Rainbow is the symbol of that promise.  And in the morning after the Ceremony, we stood outside the Tipi enjoying the mist and the rainbows in the dew of the spider webs.

      When I got back to town after the Ceremony, I started to do the research on the Hummingbird Spirit.  I knew that the temptation is always to literalize images from the dreamworld.  There was the literal image of Mikey, the Hummingbird Man, whom I met in the flesh.  He was definitely real.  I decided to call my friend Bright Star Talking Swan.  After telling her the dream and how I met Mikey in the Bakery, she told me to look within myself and find the qualities of the hummingbird there. I went to the bookshelf and opened Ted Andrews’ book  Animal-Speak: The Spiritual & Magical Powers of Creatures Great and Small. There he says, “the hummingbird has the ability to move its wings in a figure 8 pattern---a symbol for infinity and links to the past and future and the laws of cause and effect” (1998, p. 157).  He also discusses agility in flying, endurance, joy, playfulness, fierce independence.  Next I checked out Jamie Sams’ book, Medicine Cards, where she adds love, an open heart, love of life.  Hummingbird people “join people together in relationships which bring out the best in them.  You know instinctively where beauty abides and, near or far, you journey to your ideal” (Sams, 1988, p. 213).

      Training in Capoeira for a year and a half, culminated in a Batizado in 2000.  I was the oldest person initiated into community that day, and my god-father, the mestre who played with me, was very fun indeed.  As he kicked me ever so lightly on my chest, I threw my hands back as though I had received a terrible blow.  That response delighted my god-father and afterward he embraced me, rather than “taking me down” to the floor, which is the usual procedure.   Looking back upon the Capoeira experience, I have attained a sense of playfulness, endurance, and joy, not to mention the self-confidence of knowing I can defend myself if and when needed.  My therapist noticed that my masculine self-assuredness had increased and the initial split in my eye focus, which indicated a lack of neural integration between the lobes of the brain, had resolved itself.  She had been sitting with me since the fall of 1997, and had noticed the changes taking place over a period of years.  The love of others and the open heartedness of the hummingbird were characteristics I could more easily identify with, they came spilling out of me at my first Peyote Ceremony.  

      The Peyote Way teaches us that what we see in others is also within us.  This is another way of saying we project our unconscious feelings or aspects onto others who probably share them to some extent.  In my dreams I was frequently in the house of my Aunt Maude, whose picture I remember sitting on the mantle above the fireplace.  Although I was in her home, she was always too busy to see me personally.  As the spiritual leader of my family, Aunt Maude, had a lot of power in my life.  Imagine my shock when I saw her photo in the real world.  She was sitting in her chair, just like the dream photograph.  The photo was a picture of the author of the book , which I held in my hands.  It was of Carl Jung's student and collaborator, the aged Marie-Louise Von Franz.  I have long loved Von Franz’ work.  I have most of her books which have been translated into English.  Another surprise was discovering we shared the same birthday, January 4, a day sacred to Hermes.   In her book Psychotherapy, Von Franz discusses the effects of projection.  The unconscious process requires two people.  The originator of the projection she called the sender.  Of course the sender isn't aware she is projecting, just that she is experiencing the other person in a numinous, magical way, as if they emitted those qualities. Von Franz says that the effect of this process on the sender could be called a loss of soul .  The carrier of the projection Von Franz called the receiver, who is hit by the  invisible, psychic arrow of projection.  She said that the sender has unconsciously diminished himself, which “makes one apathetic, depressive, or susceptible to the compulsive thrall of people outside one” (p. 262).  Trying to see the repetition compulsion as a dynamic projection involving two people helped me understand what was happening.  I was trying to master my father’s wounding of me during childhood by projecting my shadow onto Wolf.  At the time I could certainly be described as "being enthralled" with Wolf.  I had unconsciously given away my power to him. According to von Franz, if the receiver of the projection has a “weak ego consciousness (as children do, for example), he will be easily influenced to act out what has been projected onto him.  In the primitive view, this means that he is possessed” (pp. 262-263).  Wolf was continually relating to my infatuation toward him by acting out what I expected to happpen.  He behaved like my dad did. You could say it was a cosmic setup, because Wolf wanted and needed attention from an adult male.  His companion, a battered woman in a previous relationship, was willing to take emotional abuse from him, because she felt it was better than physical abuse.  In order to deal with this constellation of my family of origin’s triangular, incestuous emotional atmosphere, I decided to create a fan as a symbolic reminder of the dream, the Meeting, and the Ho-Key-O.

      The top half of the fan, which holds the wild turkey feathers, the sacred bird of Wolf’s Cherokee ancestors, is symbolic of the masculine inheritance from my dad; it screws into the handle.  The Peyote stitch beadwork around the handle, the feminine container, was put on, one bead at a time, in a continuing spiral around and around like the days of our lives, strung together into a design.  All the colors and images have symbolic meaning.  They are images from a series of dreams, culminating in the Humming Bird Spirit dream.  Every time I used the fan or let someone borrow it in a Meeting, there was potentially a story waiting to be told about the fan’s origin.  I could talk about love addiction, magic, spirit animal totems, or how I met Mikey, whenever I shared my fan.  It has the stories woven into it.  The fan is a tool which can be used to re-tell my story.  It is a way of bringing the dreamworld “into flesh-and-blood reality, in this world, in this time” as my mentor Russ Lockhart, said in Psyche Speaks (1987 p.10).  Another aspect of that incarnation of the Great Mystery, what Carl G. Jung called the Self, is making relations, of creating family relationships based upon spontaneous affection.