Spirits on the Land

Spirits on the Land

There have always been spirits that live on the land where I grew up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. My four siblings and I always knew our house was haunted when we were little, and not a single one of us escaped our childhood without at least one, and in some cases, many, ghostly encounters.

It wasn't until adulthood, after a divorce that caused me to move back home, that I realized it wasn’t just the houses on the land that were haunted. Whatever it was about where we lived, it had been on the land first, and whatever was on the land was what made it a kind of intersection for supernatural energies.

Once I had been back home for a while, I began to hear stories from our next-door neighbor. I had lived next to her my whole life and never knew that she, too was sensitive to spirits and she had stories about the land as well. Those are stories I will share at another time...

My little sister, possibly the most physically sensitive of the four siblings, never left the land. She moved to a small cottage on the edge of the wood, near the creek and a large blackberry field at the edge of the property. We had both noticed a somewhat darker shift on the land over the past two years.

We had both been experiencing it for a while before we spoke about it one night. It was like the balance was somehow off.

I had a strong sense one afternoon while tending to her dogs while she was at work, that it was time for us to do something about the darker energy on the land. I could feel that the time was ripe to draw the energy towards something more harmonious, but it would take something special, something intentional.

Due to our upbringing, we have both developed our practice of what I would call a land-based, folk spiritualism. It combines an array of other, more traditional spiritual practices and beliefs with our own particular twists.

We planned out a ritual ceremony for the Full Moon.

We both felt the energy was centered somewhere out in the blackberry field beyond my sister's cottage. Neither of us felt comfortable going out there at night, so we decided to do it at dawn. It’s always good to do these things in a liminal space like dawn or dusk.

We did some divination and both felt into what we wanted to bring.

We wanted to offer the restless spirits on the land a place to finally rest and make a statement of our intent to hold a space of harmony and stewardship of the land and the people here.

The morning of the ritual, I gathered all of my implements, put on my ceremonial clothes, and headed out towards the open field. It’s an odd and flat clearing in an otherwise dense wood, nestled against the southern edge of a heavily forested ridge. The clearing exists because ranchers used to raise cattle on our land back in the 1940’s and 50’s. Before that, it’s pretty clear that Indigenous Native Americans lived here.

The land is teeming with wildlife. We have bears, raccoons, that’s right, Vince, raccoons :)… Skunks, mountain lions, bobcats, snakes, and all kinds of birds live here. There are large families of Ravens, and wild turkeys that make their rounds on our land pretty much every day, all year round.

I had noticed the large group of Turkeys gobbling their way up from where they nested each night in the towering dead ponderosa pines that ran along the creek. This year, they were about twenty strong.

I remember the frosty cold that morning as I made my first stop at the edge of the field. We had done a winter burn pile there only a few days earlier. I had felt compelled at the time to bless the fire, wanting to emphasize leaving behind the old and ushering in the new.

I had planned to use some of the ash from the blessed fire to add more potency to our eandervor. I bent over to gather the ash in a jar, and when I stood back up and turned around, what I saw was a little bit more than strange.

The flock of Turkeys had approached me quietly and stood maybe fifteen feet away from me. This was highly unusual for the birds as they tend to be skittish and easily frightened, scattering at the slightest sound or movement.

The birds all stared at me, as if they were waiting for something.

Wild birds can act like this if you feed them regularly and they recognise you, but I had never once fed these turkeys.

I had a funny kind of creeping feeling as I stepped forward slowly, that the ritual had begun the moment I had set foot outside that morning.

The turkeys lined up behind me in a group and followed me slowly, like a strange procession. I kept looking back to see if it was actually happening. It was. And, they followed me closely for the entire length of the field, which ended at my sister's small cottage.

Now, I’ve done enough of this kind of thing in the past to realize that when you are listening to the energy of the land, if you are sensitive to it, it will let you know when you are doing what it wants.

I feel like this kind of thing goes way back, and sets deep in our bones, that we aren’t always meant to move the land. More often than not, the land moves us.

When we learn to move with the land, we can connect to something deep, instinctive, and primal.

I also think that if you grow up in a specific place that still has enough wildness to it, where the nature around you is still the dominant force, the land can more easily speak to you and even protect you at times. It knows you, just like the animals that live on the land come to know you, too.

This was what went through my mind as I stopped at the path to my sister's house. The turkeys slowly dispersed, and as I walked away,y I felt a sense, like the spirit of the land was telling me it was watching me.

I had only wished that my sister had been watching and had gotten a photo of the turkey procession, so you would know I’m not making this up.

Our ritual went beautifully, even though we shivered through the whole thing. We both felt we had accomplished the first half of our intentions.

Any good ritual takes time to marinate, or germinate, especially if it’s land-based. The first ritual on the Full Moon was about opening a line of communication or a door, if you will. The last ritual on the New Moon would be sealing and ending the conversation.

The last ritual did take place at dusk and into the night, out in the berry field. What happened there was another story. And, it’s best not to discuss the workings of any ritual.

What we expressed was our understanding that life is a balance of both light and dark, and that we wanted to help hold the line that kept the darkness in its proper place, not able to run rampant. We knew this required something of us, and we expressed our willingness to give what was necessary, and we invited the spirits of the land to show us.

The sense of foreboding fear we had both felt for so long quickly dissolved within and around us over the next day. And, it has continued to do so.

However, we did not escape this process without something truly disturbing happening, oddly, also involving birds.

The second morning after the ritual, my mother came in from her usual morning chores, and her face was white, and she looked upset, as if in a daze.

Some time in the night, ten of our thirteen chickens had been killed. Something had dug a small hole in the cup in order to get to them.

The disturbing part about the deaths is that only one chicken had been ‘mostly’ eaten. The rest had had their necks broken and only one single bite mark on their body, as if they had been drained of their blood.

To make it even more strange, almost all of the dead birds had been buried to the point we couldn’t see them, in a perfect straight line that led towards the hole in the coup.

I pondered all of this deeply while I unearthed each of our birds and put them in a wheelbarrow. There was a sinking feeling in my stomach like a rock, and I was afraid that I had somehow caused this.

Now, it’s not actually unheard of for this kind of thing to happen. Bobcats, for instance, will do things like this if they have a bigger kill than they can eat, but we had kept chickens for about fifteen years, and nothing like that had ever happened. So, it was hard for me not to think it strange that this had begun with very strange behavior from the wild birds, and seemed to have ended with the death of ten domestic birds.

I said goodbye to each bird and then wheeled them out into the woods, wanting to draw the predator away from the coup, as it would clearly return the next night for more.

I took them to the old tree we call ‘Mama Tree', an old cedar that is prolific in producing saplings, and I laid the chickens out, offering them back to the land, so that their deaths would feed life.

I couldn’t help but feel the deeper mystery of what it actually is to live in harmony with the land, and what that actually means that I didn’t understand.

One thing is for sure, I believe, then and believe even more now, the land is always willing to teach us, but it’s not always neat and tidy. Death is always tied to life, and maybe that was part of the lesson.

The dark feeling continued to dissipate, even in the wake of the chicken massacre. Luckily, the land spared three of our precious chickens, and we take great care to lock them in their laying box each night, protecting them from the wildness of where we live.

I look forward to a summer of fearless interactions with our beautiful land. Hopefully, there will be many more strange stories to come.

Thank you for receiving my story.