What do you think about this?
Long before hospice nurses and heart monitors, the peoples native to this continent had their own understanding of what happens when a life ends. These were not one belief but many, spread across hundreds of distinct nations, yet some threads appear again and again, and they are strikingly beautiful.
Many traditions speak of the spirit not ending, but traveling. Among various peoples, the band of the Milky Way overhead was seen as a road, a path of souls that the dead walk on their way to the next world. Some held that a relative or a guide comes to meet the newly departed and lead them along it, so that no one makes the journey alone.
There are the messengers, too. In many Native cultures the appearance of a certain bird, an owl, a crow, a hawk, at the moment of a passing was understood as a sign, a soul carried or a message delivered between worlds. Smoke rising, a sudden wind, an animal that lingers and meets your eyes. The veil between here and there was not a wall but a thin and crossable thing.
Makes you wonder whether people who lived so close to the land understood something about death that our modern world has talked itself out of believing.
Is it all just old comfort dressed up as cosmology, or a kind of knowledge we have lost? What do you think these traditions were really describing?
What do you think about this? On May 20, 1967, a prospector in Manitoba walked up to a landed craft near Falcon Lake. It blasted him with hot gas and left a grid of burns on his chest matching its vents. Three governments investigated. Canada put it on a coin. Hoax, or the real thing?
What do you think about this? Serpent Mound in Ohio is a 1,348 foot snake of earth, its head aimed at the summer solstice sunset, its body built on the rim of an ancient meteor crater. One dating puts it right after Halley’s Comet in 1066. Sacred art, or a message for the sky?
What do you think about this? Since the early 1990s about two percent of people in Taos, New Mexico, hear a low hum like a distant diesel that never shuts off. In 1993 Los Alamos and Sandia scientists came to find it. Their instruments found nothing. Trick of the ear, or a hidden signal?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a retired air traffic controller cast footprints in Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp: three webbed toes, a foot long. He had reported a seven foot gray haired creature with yellow eyes standing over a dead boar in 1963. Hoax, or the Letiche?
What do you think about this? For nearly three years beginning April 2, 1968, a glowing figure of a woman appeared on the roof of a church in Cairo, seen by crowds of tens of thousands, Christians and Muslims together, and caught in press photographs. Mass illusion, or a visitation?
What do you think about this? A 2,200 year old wooden bird dug up at Saqqara in 1898 has no legs, no feathers, straight wings and a tail that stands upright like the fin of an airplane. Some replicas glide. A child’s toy that looks like a plane, or a memory of something that flew?
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