Originally published 37 years ago in 1988, this wonderful book is both an exquisite invitation and an activation. The birds in my very own back yard the other day encouraged the posting of it here now, chapter by chapter…
The Bird Tribes
I remember the day when I walked across the open prairie with my head held high and my feathers blowing in the wind. The soldiers saw only my silhouette against the sky. I walked slowly toward them, arms extended from my side, palms facing them in a gesture of peace. I watched the waves of love emanate forth from my hands, as powerful as the love I expressed before and after Golgotha.
The soldiers shot me dead. I knew they would. But their children have been brought up on my teachings, have loved my spirit and have understood enough of my creative principles to sail to the moon. Could I have taught them in another way, when their bullets flew and my feathers blew in the breeze that day? Could I have spoken more plainly than through the example of my deeds?
I have died a million deaths and lived as many lives to teach the warrior tribes what they would not learn in any other way. In the end, I am the victor, because the warrior tribes are changing, fundamentally, while I am rising again and again, leading them and their kind ever onward toward their destiny among the midnight stars.
I live everywhere, all over the earth. I have memories to draw upon wherever there were gentle people through whose lives I knew the land. If I try, I can remember their place names, their faces, the streets of their villages, their dances around autumn fires when the forest floor smelled of dry leaves and moonlight filtered shadows through the naked trees. But other things, I do not have to try to remember, because those things I can never forget. I am those things.
I am often the mountain lakes, because these were the last places my people lived before they flew, before they left their human forms and took to the airs of spirit or realms of nature to wait for cycles and changing seasons to bring their time to the world again.
I could show you where five hundred people lived on the shores of one such lake. Yet you might glimpse a human only occasionally. As you might see an otter, beaver or raccoon, so blended were their ways and so in harmony with earth and sun their living. But the time of which I speak was long before the recent European migrations, long even before civilizational influence touched Olmec or Mayan heart.
Our cultures were pacific then in this undiscovered world between troubled Asians and warring European tribes. Your records speak little of the Americas, because until recently our cultures here did not create history. Our ways were simple. Our troubles—until about twenty-five hundred years ago—were few.
Only a few of our consciousness have dressed in human form these twenty-five centuries now past. Yet when we did, you could not distinguish us from the others. We did not fight. When I put on my headdress and rode my horse across the prairies, I was teaching. I was not fighting.
I taught with feather-shafted arrows and landscapes that cradled the sunlight in a thousand sacred meanings. I drew the cavalry to the prettiest valleys to drink from the streams most likely to give them the truth, so that their children would grow up in the hills near those streams and eat the corn and summer squash that would teach them the wisdom their tribe had forgotten.
So I do not mind the time my hands were spread to the side, the soldiers fired and a body died. Lying there beneath the open sky, with the high prairie grass waving around me as they rode off in dust and disarray, I drew those bullets into something deeper than a body of soil and stream. I drew them into my soul. And my spirit flew to their source.
I understood then what kind of factories made those bullets. What kind of women and children worked in those factories. I understood how they felt about their families as they were pouring the lead. How they regarded their land. What they thought of their fathers. Their mothers. Their grandmothers. And tumbling and billowing, rolling with them in their jumbled tribal consciousness like the towering thunderheads that massed over the prairie, I, too, dreamed their dreams, found in them what was true, and made it my own.
By digesting their metal words, I learned further of the teachings that would speak to the warrior heart. I taught them of electronics, of radio waves whispering wonders on the wind, of metal wings and material things that would lead them down the slow but certain path to wisdom.
Again/as time after time before, I strengthened the educational influence that I have been weaving in, around and among their societies, while I drew them gently, ever onward, to their destiny.
You thought that you could shoot the dwellers of the prairies and forests and they would somehow disappear like a troublesome dream. You did not realize that they are my own, just as you are, that they would reappear in your children and in your children’s children and, as your own people, live again. For like you, the native Americans of recent centuries have also been of warrior descent, with lessons to learn not unlike your own.
But this was not always so.
Once, we expressed through an American people whose societies saw our creations flower and flow like living brush strokes across the river valleys, lakes and forested mountains of two continents.
Listen and I will tell you of my kind, of the few who have remained to teach and guide you throughout your twilight age. I will tell you of our patient work as century by century, we brought the fearful ones closer and closer to the time of their deliverance and the time of the earth’s salvation.
I will tell you also of the gentle tribes from which we come, the tribes whom some now call angels, but who in simpler days were known by another name. For thousands of gentle circlings of this earth around her star, the peoples of the Americas, the highlanders of Asia, the natives of central Africa and earth people the world over have known us as The Bird Tribes.
Except for a few of us. who remained to guide and influence the course of your histories, the better part of the Bird Tribes have not been incarnate in human form during historical times, though always we were there in nature and, in the spirit worlds around you. Some twenty-five centuries ago most of us departed, to wait for the return of your intelligence and the slow turning of the sacred cycles that would favor your awakening.
We are returning now, appearing like the first stars at the predawn clearing of a storm. Into your consciousness we come, appearing subtly at first, a whisper among your dreams. But steadily our presence grows, soon to shine as distinctly as the sun of morning. We come now with a message that will prove vital to you in these last years of history’s night.
We call to you, human ones, beings of light. Rise up from your tradition-bound past and become our creative partners in the continuing unfoldment of wonder. Rise from your cultures to remember your origins and your nature: light bodies, like stars, agreeing to stay in specified
temperature ranges for certain periods of time, creating time and space, distances between you, painting spatial landscapes on the screen of time, drawing stardust into the dancing fields of your light.
Today you express in tongues and tanks and desert irrigation projects, in urban parks and towers of glass and steel, in ideas that people have arid in”ways that people live. Yet your past is no indication of your potential Compared to an artist full-bloom in the flower of her time, history’s accomplishments are but those of a child groping blindly in a darkened room.
When you, incarnate man, know that behind you is the same brilliance, light and warmth that expresses so passionately in the nuclear release of stars; and when you, incarnate woman, know that behind you is the power of the creative, the power of the new, the balance, the synthesis,
the power of truth, then you will know that there is no threat to your life, to your existence. You will know that there is nothing to fear, for the immense powers of mother and father aspects of God have joined together in the creation of a material universe designed for your support and
nourishment.
For three and one-half billion years on this earth, we of the angelic realms have fine-tuned and sustained the precise planetary temperatures most conducive to your growth and development. You have nothing to fear as you move into this cycle of cooperation with us and with your Creator. You are in good hands; and well loved.
Until recently, you were not in a position to understand these things. For so long as you opened your heart to the frequencies of fear, you used your power to give credibility to fear’s illusion. We will help you now tune to the frequencies that will heal your world and draw you toward your future in the stars. Listen and sense behind these words the frequencies of love, where an eternal
Creator’s designs are ever unfolding in time.
We are the Winged Ones of heaven, your reflections in perfect love, the missing dimension needed for your wholeness. We are the spiritual guardians of the earth. Welcome us into your consciousness. Blend with us. Remember. Know yourself as fully, truly human.
The true human can tune to the voice of the river and give it expression. The true human can tune to the voice of the wind and speak the words that the wind cannot speak without human tongue. The true human can blend with the essences of the forest, the spirits of the rain, the spirits of every creeping, crawling, living thing and can represent them fairly and evoke from them the best that they can be.
Each form of created life is energy manifesting in matter, ever-changing, ever-flowing into something always capable of more expression, more unfoldment, more revelation of spirit world potential. The true human is designed to aid the development of all life forms, drawing out their
ever-expanding capacities to provide always fuller revelations of that which lies in the heart of God.
The true human gives voice to the essences of all created things, but the first and central voice of the true human is the voice of the Great Spirit, the voice that says:
I appear in sea, in wind, in soil, in starlight. In the sun I appear. I appear in mountains and desert rain. I am the star and I am the stone. I am bird and fish, sky and sea. One and whole eternally, I come, differentiating, multiplying, refracting like a ray of light through ten thousand water-droplet prism pearls suspended in earth’s highest sphere. Shining I come, to touch the surface of this matter world in a splashing, multicolored chorus of light men and light women, created to bring beauty, love, order and grace to this sacred dance of atomic form.
Stardust. Frozen starlight. You call it matter. It is an art form with which we have worked for twenty billion years. We have sculpted it into star systems, galaxies and a universe of rainbow-spectrum worlds. We are the children of light. We have been given the task of creating dimensional reality. We draw order, structure and beauty out of the vibrating music of starlight.
From the redwood forests to the microbes, from the gentlest feathered bird to the most substantial ocean whale, pure spirits manifest the Creator’s designs in all the biological life on this planet. Yet only human circuitry has the capacity to embody the full reality of who we are, of who that Creator is—of who, in truth, you are.
Come, human children, the truth has always been here. Your prophets have ever made it plain. Wherever you have let us land, wherever you have let our consciousness settle upon the waters of your awareness, the open waters of your human hearts, ever we have come to inhabit your shores.
We are the superior intelligence that you are looking for in the galaxies. We have been in your parks, in your treetops, in your gardens, in cages in your living rooms. We are the Bird Tribes. And we are returning. We are here to teach you how to fly. Take us out of your cages of concept and archaic definition. Come, join us in the living treetops, where the winds of spirit blow wild and free.
We are the Bird Tribes. And we love the flowing, fluid, gentle waters of our Mother’s eternal truths, as we love the stars that nourish and support these biological robes of dancing light. We will never be far from water or land, from light or sound, from the Father’s fire or the Mother’s gentle wisdom.
For we are the Bird Tribes, entering this earth to swim beneath her waters as fishes of the sea, to walk on her land as the mammals and the humans of this age and to fly through her heavens on the wings of the Love that created us and creates us anew in each moment. Because we love these oceans. We love these lands.
We love this planet with an eternal fire that takes all the myriad stars to reveal in the fullness of time, but only one star to say to one world, “I love you this much, that I would give you all that I am; my fire, even to your ages of ice; all that I am, until we grow the children, until we conceive the offspring who will be equally a child of starlight’s fiery love and an ocean world’s gentle truth.”
Awaken, humankind. The teachers of love circle round the morning star. Spiraling down. Coming to rest. They land. At the edge of your history’s shore. Fluttering into consciousness. The Bird Tribes return.