One of these little guys has been stalking me for the past few days. The photo is from Wikipedia, not my own, because he's extremely camera shy. It's an appropriate photo anyway because it shows him the way I usually see him: running off with a look on his face that says,
Oh, no! He's seen me again!
When I open the front door, I see him flying off. When I get on my motorcycle, he pops out from behind the front wheel and runs for it until he's clear to start flapping.. While I'm on the road, he'll swoop down and cross my path once or twice, all casual-like, but mostly stays out of sight. He stakes out the school all day while I'm there and is usually loitering nearby when I get off. I may be exaggerating slightly, but only slightly. This bird is suddenly everywhere. I've never fed him or done anything else to attract him, so I'm really not sure what his game is.
I can't really be sure it's the same bird every time, of course. Back in America, I used to recognize individual Carolina mourning doves by slight differences in their wing markings, but red turtles lack any obvious distinguishing characteristics. (I guess the black "collar" mark would be my best bet?) So it's possible that it's a different dove every time, and that I've attracted the attention of the whole species. Which would be weirder?
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Birds generally mean something, of course, and I've naturally been wondering what this one means. Today my student's English magazine offered this interpretation.
"Doves are usually connected with peace." Yes, usually. Those are white doves, though, and red is universally the color of war. What could a
red dove mean? Then I suddenly remembered that I had written about the red dove before, in my (very long) 2018 post "
The Rider-Waite Magician," because a small red dove appears on the Magician's table on that card.
The front edge of the Magician’s table features a series of three carvings. The first appears to be ocean waves, the second is unrecognizable, and the third is a bird in flight. Comparing it with the bird on the Ace of Cups, which clearly represents the dove of the Holy Spirit, we see that they are almost identical in shape. The cup-shaped capital of the table leg just below the Magician’s bird reinforces the connection. While the dove on the Ace of Cups is white and flies downward, the Magician’s dove is red and flies upward.
This reminded me of something Valentin Tomberg had written in Meditations on the Tarot about the symbolism of prayers going up to God and blessings coming down. Not remembering that I had quoted that very passage in my 2018 post and just had to scroll down to find it, I instead brought up the Kindle app on my phone and searched for meditations. This is what came up.
Unsurprisingly, my Tomberg books came up as the first results -- but look what else it recommended: an edition of Marcus Aurelius with a
red bird on the cover. Not a dove (it looks more like a
red crow), but still!
I'm obviously being reminded of the need to pray -- I just went two days without praying the Rosary, the first such lapse since I began the habit, and this red dove -- who, besides having been identified in my own writings as a symbol of prayer back in 2018, also suggests the Rosary by his color -- is here to get me back on track. I open and close my prayer sessions with the Prayer to St. Michael, and that martial archangel is also well represented by the red dove. I suppose Marcus Aurelius, philosopher and commander-in-chief, who jotted down his Meditations in his spare moments at camp during a military campaign, is also a "red dove" kind of guy.
My reference above to "my" dove as simply a "red turtle" made me think of the famous line in the Song of Solomon about how "the voice of the turtle" (meaning the turtle dove) "is heard in our land" (2:12). (I've been reading the King James Bible since I was little, and it has never said anything other than "the voice of the turtle"; don't let those Mandela Effect people tell you any different.) Looking it up just now, I find that the chapter begins with "I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys" (2:1) -- in the Vulgate, "Ego flos campi, et lilium convallium." I quoted this, too, in my "Rider-Waite Magician" post, because Waite himself references it in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot, saying that the roses and lilies on the Magician card are "the flos campi and lilium convallium, changed into garden flowers, to shew the culture of aspiration." Commenting on this, I had written:
What did the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valleys mean to Waite? I could have sworn that they appeared in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin as symbolical titles of that personage, but that turns out to have been a hallucination of memory.
So there's another link to praying to Mary -- Mary as a rose no less -- and thus to the Rosary.
An even weirder sync came when I read the "voice of the turtle" verse itself and found what comes immediately after:
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs . . . (2:12-13).
This is the only reference to "green figs" in the entire Bible. I recently had my own experience with green figs behind the Green Door, as recorded in "
Owl time, and cold noodles":
I saw that the wall was covered not only with leaves but with hundreds and hundreds of what were unmistakably figs -- still green, but quite large.
Well, it's . . .
. . . for me to wrap this post up and go pray the Rosary already. Since lilies have come up, too, why not give this a listen?
