Missing Witches - April 04, 2022


You Are Acanthis Kin Meditation

WF - Judy Grahn： Our Bonding Is What Makes A Revolution Happen WF - Monefa Walker： In The Next 10 Years Everything Will Change

Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

114.02

Word count

1,528

Sentence count

69

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

23

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The Missing Witches podcast is entirely listener-funded.
00:00:04.960 If you want to support the project, join us and our coven at patreon.com slash missingwitches. 1.00
00:00:12.560 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00
00:00:19.120 You must be a witch. 1.00
00:00:30.000 Three new birds. 0.97
00:01:00.000 tiny, tiny birds
00:01:03.180 smaller even than the nut hatches
00:01:05.900 appeared outside the windows this March
00:01:08.760 they are grey with pandemic
00:01:11.900 bruised by Putin's war
00:01:14.140 heavy with sorrow
00:01:16.640 and then, there they are 1.00
00:01:19.160 red poles
00:01:20.900 playing in the ice edge, rain edge of winter 0.99
00:01:25.020 travelers, migrants 1.00
00:01:27.940 red like dried blood on their hearts and foreheads 1.00
00:01:33.680 long thin swallowtails arced like hearts
00:01:37.000 a promise of something but it might not be spring
00:01:41.640 and then more come
00:01:44.380 dozens they are here from their breeding grounds in the tundra
00:01:48.780 they are an eruptive species which means sometimes they just burst out of their usual great northern swaths of wild home
00:01:56.560 and come down as far as here
00:01:58.260 and further deep into the southern states
00:02:00.160 following the food, the wind, the year
00:02:02.480 collapsing ecosystems
00:02:04.800 the river of time itself
00:02:07.280 we don't see them
00:02:08.920 and then suddenly they are here
00:02:10.980 they are here
00:02:14.860 and suddenly you are here 0.99
00:02:17.520 you are a canthus kin
00:02:21.120 unseen maybe for a while
00:02:24.220 but you are eruptive
00:02:26.220 You surge forth and are many.
00:02:30.560 You are those who travel, those who deserve welcome.
00:02:35.680 You are a chorus singing to the neighbors suddenly before they know what happened.
00:02:40.700 Suddenly we are all out celebrating, offering seeds.
00:02:45.060 You surge past borders.
00:02:48.660 You are suddenly surging.
00:02:51.380 We are suddenly singing together.
00:02:54.560 Our song is an offering.
00:02:56.220 You are a canthus kin, and your ancestors are songbirds, and you've always been singing.
00:03:04.020 You have always been exceeding these illusions, these borders.
00:03:08.060 You have always been singing.
00:03:12.000 Humans and birds share 55 genes between brain regions important for vocal learning, genes
00:03:17.680 which do the work of tracing connections between neurons, our way of weaving meaning from the
00:03:24.300 outside of the world on in comes through our songbird kin you sang the world on in
00:03:34.060 the last common ancestor of birds and mammals lived about 310 to 330 million years ago
00:03:41.580 you are literally songbird kin your genes come here from deep time and they sing of strange
00:03:49.500 ancestry. Your genes know some very old songs. The red poles are genus acanthus. Those who are wise
00:04:00.560 in the ways of birds have given them the name of a mythological bird, a missing bird. Acanthus appear
00:04:08.420 in ancient literature, but we don't know exactly what bird they referred to. Some birds escape the
00:04:15.460 archives. But we carry forth their names. You are kin with those who exist beyond the
00:04:25.460 archives. You cannot be contained. In your genes you carry ancient missing traits and
00:04:33.940 names. The story goes like this according to Eboeus' origin of birds. Autonus had sons
00:04:45.080 Arrhodius, Anthus,
00:04:48.680 Shonius, and Acanthus,
00:04:50.920 with a daughter, Acanthus,
00:04:52.200 to whom the gods granted great beauty.
00:04:56.840 Otanus acquired many herds of horses,
00:05:00.100 and because he neglected husbandry,
00:05:01.960 no crops were produced,
00:05:03.400 only rushes and thistles.
00:05:06.120 For this reason, he named his children
00:05:07.700 after such plants,
00:05:08.860 and his oldest son, Arrhodius,
00:05:10.340 because his lands had been eroded.
00:05:12.040 erodius was extremely fond of these herds of horses which he pastured in the meadows but
00:05:18.860 anthus drove the mares out of the meadows they were infuriated and set upon anthus
00:05:25.400 they began to devour him as he cried to the gods to save him now his father panic-stricken falter
00:05:34.020 and failed to drive off the mares the mother went on battling with the mares but was unable to do
00:05:40.340 anything to avert the slaughter. While the family wept, Zeus and Apollo felt pity for them and
00:05:47.520 turned them all into birds. Otanus was made a quail because he had quailed at driving off the
00:05:54.120 horses. The mother was turned into a lark with a crested head because she had headed for the mares 0.57
00:05:59.180 to fight for her son against them. They turned Anthus himself, as well as Erodius, Shonius, 0.87
00:06:05.220 acanthus and acanthus into birds
00:06:07.820 called by the same names
00:06:09.840 as they had had before they metamorphosed.
00:06:14.560 The family who loved the wild horses
00:06:16.780 and wild meadows and wild plants
00:06:19.100 were turned into wild birds.
00:06:23.200 Neglect the care of plants and animals
00:06:25.360 and even your most loyal companions
00:06:27.280 will turn against you
00:06:28.380 and all that will save you
00:06:29.800 will be a turning back
00:06:30.940 to the wild.
00:06:32.500 in this myth
00:06:35.260 you are the origin of birds
00:06:37.900 Terry Tempest Williams wrote 1.00
00:06:41.500 once upon a time when women were birds 1.00
00:06:43.920 there was the simple understanding 1.00
00:06:45.440 that to sing at dawn and to sing at dust
00:06:47.740 was to heal the world through joy
00:06:50.020 the birds still remember
00:06:51.920 what we have forgotten
00:06:52.900 that the world is meant to be celebrated
00:06:56.320 there is missing memory
00:07:00.340 and you fill it with a sketch
00:07:01.720 a flight, a song, a celebration that is in itself a metamorphosis
00:07:07.040 to a time when we are birds.
00:07:11.500 You are the origin of birds, and you know the absence of birds.
00:07:16.340 You are in the age of collapse.
00:07:18.940 You are staying right here in the heart of the trouble,
00:07:21.420 choosing to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk
00:07:24.640 as to make the flying leap across that void.
00:07:27.440 there is accumulating evidence that the red poles are all one species
00:07:33.760 though they are still often divided into common red poles and cabaret red poles and others all
00:07:39.900 around the northern world the difference between the common and the cabaret among us isn't so
00:07:45.640 fundamental the plumage varies but genetically we might be the same and there's evidence that
00:07:52.780 redpolls, like many birds, are collaboratively polyamorous. They care for each other outside
00:07:58.600 of parenting. They feed each other's babies, bring feathers to other nests, travel and
00:08:04.780 care for children with one mate and then another. We look at animals in delight when they are
00:08:10.720 like us a little bit. For a long time, animal behaviorists seem to have only looked for
00:08:15.920 ways of confirming how they are like us but not quite not quite as alive not as
00:08:22.520 conscious or communicative or caring not quite across the threshold that would
00:08:28.180 change everything you are at a threshold that changes everything you are a
00:08:36.860 threshold that changes everything you change everything 0.96
00:08:44.260 You must be a witch. 0.98
00:08:49.340 You are a campus kin. 0.97
00:08:51.620 You love them not just as mirrors of yourself,
00:08:54.800 but when you see in their very strangeness
00:08:57.440 the outline of something more than human, not less.
00:09:01.940 An other so dear they could teach us to fly.
00:09:06.880 A singing lesson about care
00:09:08.540 that calls out to our kinship beyond nuclear families, 0.81
00:09:12.240 makes maps in the air for how we could unburden ourselves a little 0.91
00:09:16.040 of all this isolation and accumulation
00:09:18.160 and instead tend lovingly to each other's nests
00:09:23.280 be better at being flocks, families, community
00:09:28.760 acanthus kin are gathering
00:09:32.140 we shake our small heads, stretch our wings
00:09:35.880 and anticipate our next joyful, irresistible eruption
00:09:42.240 All the love we have, all its soaring flight and sweet practicality,
00:09:47.040 exceed the boundaries of this hungry, tired, lonely, dehumanizing way of being human.
00:09:54.340 You are a new way of being.
00:09:58.440 You exceed. 1.00
00:10:01.740 In 2014, a naturalist named Bernd Heinrich observed a flock of 100 to 150 redpulls 0.92
00:10:09.040 playing in the snow in western Maine.
00:10:12.240 Over the course of five days, as temperatures ranged from minus 26 to minus 14,
00:10:17.040 they made 252 cavities in short tunnels.
00:10:20.720 They weren't looking for food.
00:10:22.380 They were eating happily elsewhere.
00:10:24.140 To burn it looked like they were just playing.
00:10:28.860 Or playing at.
00:10:31.360 Teaching each other techniques in the fluffy snow that they might need when they return to the tundra.
00:10:37.840 We watched the birds learn from each other here, too.
00:10:40.600 all the birds ignore one feeder for days until a pair of woodpeckers find it
00:10:45.820 the little red poles watch with their sideways glances they're upside down peeking and then
00:10:53.360 when the woodpeckers leave suddenly they all know how to do it the feeder is a known entity 0.99
00:10:57.560 the other birds have shown them the trick to land and swing and eat
00:11:01.900 evolution isn't marked by a signpost
00:11:07.000 it's a river of small lessons
00:11:09.780 tiny changes happening moment to moment
00:11:13.380 gouging out huge changes
00:11:17.380 in deep time
00:11:18.500 you are watching birds and they are changing each other
00:11:23.680 and they are changing you
00:11:26.600 the birds are changing you
00:11:30.060 You are playing at a new kind of kinship, and the play is the thing.
00:11:38.640 You care for them and hope to eke out a small space for them that is marked as safe.
00:11:45.220 You weave love, a little love, and seed into their spaces.
00:11:51.760 You are collaboratively polyamorous in your own interspecies way, too, aren't you?
00:11:57.860 You are listening to your ancestors singing across the rushing, trickling changes of deep time.
00:12:05.180 You are erupting into song, into community, into new shapes of love and care and family.
00:12:15.380 You are playing at something new.
00:12:20.680 You are at a threshold that changes everything.
00:12:24.120 you are a threshold that changes everything
00:12:28.820 you remember what has been forgotten
00:12:33.000 and you celebrate
00:12:34.520 you make a leap across the void
00:12:37.880 you exceed 0.92
00:12:39.840 you are a canvas kid 0.63
00:12:54.120 Transcription by CastingWords 0.94