Coyote, Mercury, and Omen Logic

on roadkill and underworld journeys

Perhaps the racoon was the first omen. The price of entry into this portal of deathwalking. It was late at night and the fog was stretched out thick over the estuary as I approached the turn off towards the winding road through the forest. In the beam of the headlights ahead, I noticed a bright smear of red and a small body lying in the road. I pulled over and got out, leaving the car running and the headlights on so I could see through the moonless night. 

I have a practice of moving any roadkill I find off the road. Sometimes the animals ask to come with me, like the young deer I found just after Summer Solstice whose velvet antlers were still as soft and tender as his spirit. Other times I just show them the respect of not being driven over repeatedly and smashed into pavement, and allow for the other creatures of the ecosystem to safely consume and feed on their bodies. 

As I got closer to the small raccoon in front of me, I saw their lungs expand with shaky breath and realized they were still alive. I laid a hand on their belly and felt their very spirit tremble. Without thinking, I began to sing, in the wordless way that I’ve come to let move through me when my throat inexplicably opens before my mind has the chance to catch up. We stayed there, cloaked in mist and night, my hand resting gently, listening to their heartbeat slow as the sound of my voice wrapped around us. I closed my eyes and let the song massage around their spirit, releasing them from the grasp of bone and fur. I sang us to a wide meadow, where on the other side lay a thick hedge and Hawthorn, naked except for blood red fruit and thorns. Racoon waited in the meadow for a while, before walking through a small hole in the hedge, and the breath exited their lungs for the last time. 

It was the first time an animal had died in my arms. 

Three days later, Coyote came to walk beside me next. Humble me, open me, like the Hanged One I swing, swing, swing against a backdrop of blooming daturas and howls. I haven’t been the same since Coyote entered my life. Those echoing howls. I could feel it as it was happening, my knuckles pushing through fascia with eyes closed, lost in a sort of time travel that tethered me to the nowness of the present while the movement of my hands, so familiar to my ancestral DNA, spun me to a place outside of time as I pulled their hide from their body. How little I know, I think as I unravel like a ball of string across the floor. I scrape the membrane and with each stroke, everything becomes a question and I am spinning plates. Later I dream of the coyote pup and Owl sitting in a tree, the howl and hoot rolling together to form one call, paw and claw wrapped around the finished hide, the skin dyed red from alder bark and wake up in my bed with an owl outside my window. 

The owl was the third. Staring right at me with an intensity that sent a chill down my spine. I didn’t have to wonder if this was an omen. I simply felt it course through the animal of my body in a recognition that superseded my mind. I had crossed a threshold, I had opened a door, earnestly and honestly, and in return spirits of all kinds were making their way to me like moths to a flame. 

---

A few weeks later, it’s October and the sky is starling blue. The moon is a halved shadow in the sky. The groves of alabaster alders lining the Quinault river shimmer in a hue somewhere between green and gold. It is the big leaf maples that sing the loudest. 

It’s October and my stomach is bare, the faintest hint of chill in the air as it blows off the river bringing goosebumps every so often, but more so it is gloriously warm. I bask like a coiled serpent on the stones, that in autumn lay wide and barren, the river has not risen to greet them in many moons. Come afternoon, the stones will radiate and pulse with stored sunlight. 

I’m laying on a sheepskin, near the stone cairn where I buried the owl. I still smell the musk of their wings as the crisp, fall air rushed through them, feathers dancing above me as I held them to the sky like a prayer and I felt their spirit rest on my shoulder. Stone by stone I buried their body in a cairn grave at the fork of a river, a crossroads - a place fitting for Ereshkigal's messenger, the myth of her descent playing through the speakers in my truck when I found the Owl’s body lying smack in the center of the road. I gathered water from the river, cupped hands dripping as I walked to pour the water over the grave in offering.

How far do owls travel, I wonder? Was this so far from their home, or sacred ground they remembered? Was it them that brought me here, our wyrd weaving together, two destinies charged and vibrating towards one another in a magnetic attraction that once begun, is impossible to stop? 

The days before were spent walking. I move through the forest at a botanizing pace with my vision softened and widened. Each day I move steadily, I have many miles to move before sunset, but cast my gaze out so as to take in my surroundings.  So often I see people plunging through the forest, oblivious of what’s happening around them in a race to get there and back, scarcely taking in the moments between. How else would I notice the young black bear crossing the river in the distant canyon below me? Or hear the softest swoop of an owl's wings overhead, lift my head to find them perched above me, head cocked, beckoning. I lower my head in acknowledgment and they hoot in return. We stare at each other for a moment and then they take flight to another towering Hemlock. I follow and below them I find the mushrooms I’ve been looking for. 

I do not think these experiences are uncommon, or at least once upon a time they were not. 

---

What is and is not an omen? What does it mean to move through life under the tutelage of omen logic? 

I’ve seen others disappear down slippery slopes of narcissistic self delusion. Humans are by nature meaning making creatures, designed to see patterns and perceive between the natural chaos of the world. But what happens when the toxic individualism of the west meets ancient traditions of intuitive wisdom? Without a tether, it is easy to begin to perceive that everything is about you and for you. 

I believe omen logic is specific to land. There is no untangling the two. Thus to receive an omen requires a certain level of intimacy with place. 

If you enter on to land you are not in relationship with, how are you to know what is common or uncommon? 

A rabbit crosses your path. A heron flies overhead. Are they an omen? Or are they creatures of an ecosystem, following the patterns and routines of their lives. An omen is not always an omen simply because it is uncommon to you if it is, in fact, common to the ecosystem. 

Being in relationship with land is the original divination. Being so intimate with a place and the creatures that inhabit it gives you information that to our modern minds would seem like a form of magic, but underneath is pattern recognition and place based relating. Noting the behavior of animals, the shifting wind, where the moon lies in the sky, can all lead to ‘prophetic’ knowledge that for our ancestors, was simply practical wisdom. 

Omens are most often repetitive. They grab your attention. Perhaps the first or second you barely noticed, but by the third nudge, your body wakes up. Omens speak loudly when they need to, especially when you start to pay attention.  

Omens occur on multiple planes; they visit you in the physical world, in dreams or memory, and take form in various shapes, like letters on a page or smells in the air. Omens register deep in the animal body long before the intellectual mind catches up.

There is no unequivocal definition of what an omen does or does not mean. Like dreams, omens are unique to each of us, each with their own message and purpose for entering our lives. 

Omens are quintessentially Mercurial. Messages from beyond cloaked in meaning that requires our minds to shapeshift and bend? Omens are a trickster's language. 

Mercury has been tragically devolved in modern conversation as a being of logic, tech, and the rational mind. This says a lot about the culture we live in. Mercury rules the mind and perception, yes, but we perceive beyond what the left brain shows us and what linear reasoning can conclude. We perceive through dreams, the heart, intuition, omens and divination. 

Mercury is the most multidimensional of all the planets; a raucous cacophony and chaotic splendor. Mercury defies gender, refuses to stay in one place, and has infinite sides that stretch out backwards and forwards like a fun house mirror. Mercury is never either/or, and always both/and. 

I feel it’s forgotten, or maybe just less acknowledged, that Mercury is a God of Death.

It’s Mercury I call to while ushering a spirit out of their physical vessel onward and outward; the winged foot psychopomp, so fluid, malleable and comfortable between each veiled layer of the world. This work of deathwalking that seems to permeate my days this season.

Mercury rules the crossroads, all things liminal, and threshold states of being. Mercury rows the boat that carries souls from one world to the next. Mercury is the Great Translator, carrying messages back and forth. Mercury rules communication in all the myriad ways that the body can come to Know. 

Mercury is a Roman name. You might know them as Hermes or Hermanubis, but I’ve come to know Mercury as Odin, accompanied by his two ravens, Thought and Memory. Odin the one-eyed magician, master of disguise, the mythology of Odin retains Mercury’s complexity and the Ravens hold the duality of reason and passion, logic and emotion.

Thought and Memory

every day fly over the earth.

I fear for Thought,

that he may not return

Yet still more I fear

the loss of Memory.

Mercury is the trickster, friend of storytellers, travelers, clowns, and thieves. Mercury orbits earth closely, every year falling in and out of the shadows. Like Coyote, Mercury skirts around the edges, traveling quickly, showing up in unexpected places and playing tricks on anyone who finds themselves too dug in to one side or the other. 

Coyote asks me, 

What identities am I attached to? 

Who would I be if I wasn’t?

Who would I become?

Or rather

Who am I?