Rooster Crows

I just realised I lied. In my last post, I said that the Kites were the only animals that I met in the D. O. Looking through the remaing 7 cards, I find 2 more beasties. One to come maybe tomorrow and the other to speak today – The Cockrel.

The day he arrived was a strange one… Journeying that day had not been as previous experiences where we very distinctly left behind this world to enter another… This journey hung itself between two worlds… A foot in each camp, a little headache inducing at times as torn between pulls from both directions, but tuning into the earth we sat on, grounded, the overlap of worlds was manageable. It became a calm space…

We sat in the interstice of the cosmic Venn diagram… Visions from other worlds coupling with sounds from this one… Football chants carried on wind as Vikings rowed boats… Clanking of chains… Tethered horses in a neighbouring field echoing our sensation of bodies earthbound…

The Rooster Crows was born a card with layered meanings applicable across mundane and magical…

Well let’s blow this one out of the system right now! Roosters cocks crack of Dawn… That’s a fielday of puns and I’m sure you can riff your own double Nintendos! A very easy game to play to escape the boredom of cockdown oops lickdown oops lockdown! Lockdown! Just kill me now.

I went the best part of 50 years managing to avoid daybreak. Sunsets! Yes! Those aplenty but sunrises? Wft? Surely sunrises are something only meant to be seen on the way to bed? Smiling down on those out returning home on walks of shame, barefoot swinging shoes in hand, wry smiling at memories of the fading night… In the last couple of years I’ve had to learn to love sunrise. My splitshift workpattern spanning the dusks and dawns. At first to emerge into sunrise was a bone shuddering shiver into sensory overload as explosions of colour left me blind… I’m not sure if I can do this everyday? Oh… But then it dawned on me… Ah… Get up before sunrise… Give yourself an hour to thousand yard stare and let your eyes acclimatise with the changes in light. Surely it’s no brighter than sun set? That light at the end of the day is much easier on the eyes to hold on to. So I started rising earlier and the transition from sleep into work became much smoother and slightly quicker each day and now I leap into the light like the Rooster and the natural born lark Mr S, still expresses surprise that this Owlish girl lasted more than a week in the new time zones.

This morning, I wonder what story will re-emerge. The first conversation I had, I won’t repeat as my night-shift pickup started to answer the question on the radio about what would be your lockdown job. That was a TMI soliloquy about making it rain via webcam…

My next passenger… Oh my! BM! (not actual initials). She slunk silently into the rear of my car. She never sits up front… Everyone has a BM story. I have several. BM is a noisy bird. Every sentence starts with a screeching Arrrrr! She auto flies into attack mode whenever anyone asks her to do anything. A game she plays… Dodging work by being so unapproachable that people avoid you rather than risk listening to the sqwark.

I’ve sqwarked back a couple of times – STFU or walk home! That usually makes her more noisy. Thank god for steering wheel thumb controls raising radio volumes… Zoning out… Zoning out… I’m somewhere else…

Until the one day I didn’t zone out. That day there had been a particularly splendid sunrise… I’d surfed the vibes and was merrily blissed out… BM lands in my car… I don’t care! I’m too blissed to worry about her… I get to carpark, she starts screaming at me. I can’t really piece together what she’s ranting about. I say to her “You know the rules, no shouting in my car”. She kisses her teeth at me. Another of her games that she uses to push people’s buttons… I channel my inner RuPaul and drag queen back a mouth pop! That befuddles her… She regroups and starts to shout again and I tell her simply to get out.

She leaves the door open. I call after her “BM, can you close the door please?”

Tooth kiss

“Door please… Close it…”

“Arrrrr! Jeeeesuzzzz chriiiiist!”

“BM! Door! NOW!”

Tooth kiss

By now my next passenger has appeared and offers to close the door. I glance BM waddling off like a wonky chicken in my rear view mirror and I tell next passenger. “Don’t you fucking dare!”

Before I know it, I’m out of the car and I’ve sprinted the length of the carpark. I’m on her heels with expletives flowing… She turns, goes to run at me. I full on rooster waltz chicken jerking my head and raising my invisible wings “C’mon! BRING IT!”

She makes a little step forward, I take a leap… Her eyes pop in terror and she turns tail and runs…

Thinking I might get fired, I ring my manger to ‘fess up that I’ve just lost my rag and just shredded BM. She asks what happened, I tell her I’ve reached my limit. She asks when it started, I tell her about 14m ago. She tells me to leave it with her and BM gets banished from transport. She’s only recently back on and bound over not to piss off Karen.

So, I guess the Rooster is somewhat of a totem animal for me in reinforcing boundaries.

That’s crowing on the mundane level…

On magical levels, this card presented as an embodiment of the Hanged Man… C saw him first, I smelt him once she signposted me… At first I thought of this HM as a Prometheus type figure… Each new sunrise an Eagle to peck at the liver and start the cycle of pain again… (This was when I was sunrise intolerant and prisoner in my own body with back pain). I moved on to thinking about HM as Odin hung on The Tree of Life (I’m not sure if I can remember how to spell yggdrasil?) The sacrifice before receiving enlightenment… I thought about how sunrises used to blind me… To be in that bright dawning but not able to see anything…

But this card was about layers of meanings… I thought back to being sat in the field… The Norn rooster crowing in the end of the world, the commencement of battle, the war between gods… The end of the world literally? Or the end of the world as we know it… The end of a world to be replaced by a new enlightened world?

Yes/No? All words existing simultaneously? I laughed as I remembered joking with C and the conversation about isn’t it funny that whenever you lose your pen, you always find it under your bum? You’ve been sitting on what you were looking for all along. I guess waking up is not in about travelling to another world nor creating a new world… It’s about being present right here, right now and seeing through your backside where you’re sat… Maybe I’m over thinking… Looking at the image again maybe he’s just crowing ”Hey! Chickens lay eggs! Get me! I’m a skull laying Rooster! “