Volume Two: Moon of the Mockingbird's Song

Where the River Forks

Every one of you is an operant magician.

Your thoughts, desires, emotions, gestures, habits, prayers, sacrifices — all materially shape the fabric of our shared existence towards the version you create in the imaginal.

Some of you have abstracted your understanding of this to the point that you no longer recognize your power, your agency. And with that, you forget your responsibility.

Grindl told me, when she and I had made the symbol of the Riverkeeper’s Hand on the creek-mud with the mussels, she’d noticed snakes coming out of their winter dens, approaching us.

She didn’t understand what she had seen. She hadn’t said anything then, but something told her to tell me now.

I hadn’t been surprised. I knew the mark we were building together. I knew the snakes were coming toward us.

I’d drawn the symbol many times myself before I’d ever met the bird.

My hand holds my vision, my ability to perceive the song as its sung to me. The serpent is the river. The serpent is time. The serpent winds back on itself, caressing the eyelid and worshipping the strength of my hand. Her movements follow the ellipsis of the moon.

When you recognize the world has agency and awareness, and is singing to you, you learn you need to sing the song back.

You’ve seen birds do it. We call them check calls. The birds utter a single note.

Question, are you still there?

A response. Yes. I am here with you and that’s significant.

That’s enough. Can you do that? Can you respond?

Activist Donna Haraway calls this our response-ability.

When I recognized my response-ability, I had to come up with a name for it. Naming gives power. So I called my role the Riverkeeper.

The Riverkeeper’s job is custodial. I attend the balance, sing my river towards health and wholeness. The boundaries of a Riverkeeper’s territory are constantly renegotiated but anchored by places of power. And my ability to see and respond to harm comes from knowing the landscape through time.

Circle magic.

But I’ve noticed something about the distance the Riverkeeper maintains. He stays above the water so he is balanced, able to keep redirecting the current where he wants it to flow. Not much is risked here. It is a regenerative and sustaining role, but stationary. It’s the role someone plays who cannot imagine an ending.

Grindl helped me notice what the owl offered. And I understood why it scared her.

Riverkeeper magic is about increasing odds, not rigging outcomes. You’re in chorus with the universe, not in control of it. You accept what washes up on the bank of the river, accept what washes away.

But what happens when you are smiling with desire at the universe’s kaleidoscope of pain and beauty flowing with the current, and suddenly see something you want so badly you would drag the sun to hell to get it?

What if you saw a golden path? What if you could point desire toward a future that left no room for a miss. You sacrifice yourself towards choosing an ending, focusing the entirety of your will. You could train yourself to do this with intention. But the knowledge itself is dangerous because the world will call towards its use.

Grindl told me then about her dream.

In it, I was dead. I’d been hung on a bier in the top of a tulip poplar called the Communion Tree, just downriver of where the Reedy Fork joined the Haw. She’d been tasked to feed on me, to carry parts of my body up and down the length of the watershed after I’d died. It was a Riverkeeper’s version of a sky burial.

Love is strange for ravens, and this is about as close as she’d gotten to admitting it. She worried my even looking at the path offered by the owl would risk that vision not coming true.

What she imagined for us sounded beautiful, so I promised her, no matter what I learned from the owl, we’d find that future together (at a point I hoped was far off).

We should enjoy our time together now while I was alive!

But I needed to see what the owl was offering. The eye on the Riverkeeper’s hand was open to perceive.