The Firebird

 

A friend of mine went to the ballet last weekend in NYC and saw The Firebird (French: L’Oiseau de Feu.)  I didn’t recall the story and didn’t know that the music for this ballet was composed and orchestrated by Igor Stravinsky, so I did a little research and watched an exquisite production from 2016 online, Return of the Firebird, by Andris Liepa performed and filmed in Russia’s Mosfilm Studios. When the ballet originally premiered in June 1910 with the Ballet Russes company in Paris the production met with much acclaim and today it is still considered a masterpiece of music, dance and storyline. What struck me most upon reading about the ballet is the way Prince Ivan rises above challenges and the gifts of support that come when he connected to nature, where in the enchanted forest he meets the supernatural Firebird. 

Based on Russian folk tales, the concept was proposed by the poet and ballet lover, Pyotr Petrovich Potyonkin. Inspired by the 1844 poem, by Yakov Polonsky, A Winter’s Journey: 

And in my dreams I see myself on a wolf’s back

Riding along a forest path

To do battle with a sorcerer-tsar

In that land where a princess sits under lock and key,

Pining behind massive walls.

There gardens surround a palace all of glass;

There Firebirds sing by night

And peck at golden fruit. 

While the motif of the Phoenix, a Greek and Egyptian symbol of resurrection that burns and rises from its ashes is similar, the Firebird differs somewhat. She too rises and overcomes challenges but it is through her support of another, Prince Ivan, who spares her life upon meeting her, that the Firebird represents treasure and the magical aspects of renewal through relationship to nature and other. The idea of helping spirits always intrigues me and especially in the realms of birds. 

From a shamanic perspective, everything is alive. The feathered, the furred, the scaled  ones; the seawaters swelling with the moon’s phases; the wind passing through autumn’s yellow cottonwood leaves; snowfall in the mountains, All That Is has its own natural frequency or state of resonance with everything else. From the perspective of physics, we exist in a vast electromagnetic field, and through that expanse, so too our individual hearts are linked. Some call this the web of life. 

When Will Taegel, who wrote the book, Walking with Bears, lost his bearings in a small canyon, somewhere in northern New Mexico along a dirt road on route back to Albuquerque, he stopped and took a moment to take in his surroundings.  Off to his left in a pinyon pine, a bright blue bird appeared. It flew off to another tree, inviting him to follow along:  This elusive guidance was not from the invisible world but the very visible. Such a fusion of the invisible and the visible seemed to be a hallmark of primal wisdom. 

Astonishingly, the blue bird led me directly to a numbered highway, …I mused that I now had powers beyond common sense, reason, and even imagination in connecting with a natural order underneath the disorder of my ordinary life.

Guidance is always available when we align to it, powers great and small can be helping spirits to us all. The tale of The Firebird is that kind of magical encounter: found treasure, ally, support in Mother Nature, guiding us underneath the seeming disorder of ordinary life.