Vulture Culture
“If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves. ”
It's hard to imagine making friends with a vulture, let alone with vultures as a species. Yet, that's exactly what it seems I'm being asked to do. It's happened twice now that vultures have appeared when I'm ill. The first time was in 2023 while I was recovering from Covid. The acute phase was over but I wasn't bouncing back. I'd been dragging myself around for more than a month when two vultures appeared on the railing of my deck. We stared at each other for a long time, and still I didn't see them as messengers of healing. I sent a photo to a friend who joked that the vultures seemed to be sizing me up for dinner. That was when I realized the obvious - it was a warning. If I didn't rest, immediately and deeply, I might end up as a vulture snack.
The second time Vulture appeared was about a month ago when this recent bout of intestinal parasites and pathogens had pushed me to the edge once again. Again, a vulture landed on the railing, in a different spot than the first one. A short time later, medical tests revealed that I was getting close to irreparable, life-threatening damage to my gut.
Pestilence is Nature's cleanup crew. When natural systems fall or are pushed out of balance, what we call pestilence clears the way for regeneration to follow. In that way, pestilence becomes the blessing. Pandemics, locusts, floods and fires are calamities that result from drastic imbalance as Nature seeks to quickly bring things back into equilibrium. Blessing and pestilence are not merely paired, they are twinned, inextricably dependent on each other.
If you're a vulture, deadly toxins are your home turf, a natural mode of communication. The mutuality of pestilence and blessing is the love language of vultures. How else would they get my attention? Belatedly, I realized that Vulture was once again trying to help me. That realization helped me see something else. Vulture was, is, in as much need of help as I am and we are. We need vultures and vultures need us. We have something to offer to each other for mutual healing. Because we depend on vultures and humans are responsible for their peril, our futures are more intertwined than ever.
Vultures are ancient. In Egypt, vultures were revered. They were the spirits associated with motherhood and compassion. The goddess Nekhbet took the form of a vulture. Royal wives, priestesses and female pharaohs wore vulture crowns that were designed so the body of the vulture draped over the head. The head and beak pointed forward. The wings draped down over the ears.
Vultures mate for life. Males and females take turns tending the nest. Their diet is 85% bones. If they're unable to break the bones open with their very strong beaks to get at the marrow, they drop them from high up, several hundred feet in the air. There are twenty-three species of vultures; many are critically endangered, especially in India, where the medication given to cows to increase milk production has killed off more than 90% of three species of vultures. When vultures eat dead cows who have been treated with Diclofenac the medication acts as a neurotoxin. After the drug came into widespread use, vultures began dying in large numbers. At first, no one seemed to notice or care, until humans recognized that the decimation of India's once-ubiquitous scavengers has led to more than half a million human deaths as a result. Without the vultures, deadly microbes from rotting carcasses seep into waterways; feral dogs who compete for carrion carry rabies.
To speak of vultures, we have a basket of savory words: groups of vultures are called a committee, a venue or a volt. When flying, they're known as a kettle - maybe because they ride warm thermal currents to rise into the sky where they glide for long distances, searching for food. They can detect a dead animal from a mile away. When vultures congregate to feast on a carcass, they're known as a wake.
My alliance with Vulture is still new. I am just learning to discern all the tendrils of the story now unfolding, and to distinguish the personal from the collective, and where they overlap. We are just beginning to weave our unlikely encounter through three key aspects of healing: Story, Alliance and Invitation. Story and healing are old friends. They have been traveling together since the beginning. When I received the scary diagnosis of intestinal parasites, my dear friend, Deena Metzger, reached out to a colleague who shares her profound understanding of the role of Story in healing illness. His response, in part, was this:
When I read the email about Cynthia, I first thought of our forest we have in our gut. The flora and fauna that make up the gut are ancient - those microbes have been on this earth billions of years before we arrived, and they adopted us to help us survive and thrive on this land. How interesting is it to hear her story of a forest, an ecosystem, being so damaged that it’s on the brink of collapse... Her story is our collective story. How do we tend to a forest? How do we restore a forest? How do we get into the right relationship with our forest?
What elegant questions in response to affliction! If my forest is our forest is all forests, then restoration includes all the trees that we are, from our microbes, lungs, bellies and veins to the microbes, rivers and forests of Earth.
The urgent message of Vulture is also an invitation to consider some uncomfortable things. Vulture seeks alliance. The purpose of alliance is mutual benefit and support. If we look at the mess that Earth has become at human hands, the alliance comes into focus more clearly. Our behavior must reflect the understanding that humans and vultures are in trouble. First, we must stop the harm we are causing to the ones we rely on to keep Earth in balance, especially the balance between Pestilence and Blessing.
How do we change our response to pestilence to recognize its greater promise? Who or what feeds on hatred and discord in ways that transform them to love and compassion and what does that transformation require? Disintegration is the genesis of transformation. It's the living, breathing wisdom of the breakdown. Humans are in desperate need of connection, but we struggle to bridge the chasm between the labels that distract us. How do we cook up abhorrence to make it something delicious? There's a banquet of mutual revulsion to feast on. Maybe we can gnaw away together at the bones of our shared dilemma to reveal the poisonous thinking that has brought us to this edge. Now is the time to savor the blessings of unexpectedly delicious distasteful alliance.
