I’ve been listening to the podcast called the Moth lately, which is a series of real stories told by regular folks on stage. Although I’m not a big public speaker, I have really enjoyed these stories and realized that everyone’s got a few. So here is one that I’ve wanted to share for a long time and I’m still trying to make sense of it and what it means for my life.

When my daughter was six months old we took her on her first camping trip near Cave of the Mounds in Wisconsin. We went with several good friends and formed a horseshoe of tents. As usual we had a memorable time staying up too late by the camp fire, although it was a little different for me, having a nursing infant. My chance to stay up as late and drink lots of beer was curtailed by my mothering side which bid me to go curl up in the sleeping bag next to my baby relatively early. I can’t recall but I might have been feeling a little left out that night as I drifted off to sleep listening to my best friends by the fire.

The next morning while my husband and daughter slept, I had a dream that I was a woodpecker. I don’t remember much of the dream, except that instead of looking like an actual woodpecker, or Woody the woodpecker, I was a sort of Pacific Southwest woodpecker totem of a woodpecker done up in thick black lines with lots of red and white interspersed like a Haida piece. Still, it was very clear to me that I wasn’t just looking at a static picture of a bird. I was this bird, hopping from tree to tree and chopping away.

As I woke up

I realized that the image of the woodpecker totem was still visible on my retina, even with my eyes wide open. I could see the outlines and details of this bird floating in midair wherever I looked. At the same time I realized that there was an incessant knocking sound in the tree right over our tent. It was familiar…it was beak on wood. It was an actual woodpecker giving us our wake up call as he scrounged for his buggy breakfast. The practical side of me sighed and thought, well no wonder I was dreaming of being a woodpecker, there is one banging away 10 feet above me. Another part of me was a bit weirded out by the image emblazoned on my eyeballs, so I crept out of the tent and got out my notebook and pens from the car and drew an exact replica of the bird I could still see. Every so often I looked up at the real bird, who afforded me a view only of a dash of red.

As I drew the camp began to stir. Soon I had an audience. So I told them about my dream and showed them the picture I had drawn of a woodpecker in red and black. The image projected in front of my eyes had faded to nothing and I was glad I had my sketch now. No one seemed taken aback. They nodded sagely and set the coffee perculator on the fire grill as if they were well accustomed to my little visions.

Right then I announced it. I told everyone present that this was a potential tattoo for me. You see, this was the 90’s and every friend I had was tattooed in several places, but Ken and I had so far had little inclination to do the same. Its not that we didn’t admire the medium, its just that we could never think of a symbol that would have as much meaning for us at age 70 as it would at 25. That and we never seemed to have an extra two hundred dollars left over after paying the bills. Still, we would lay in bed at night tossing out the images…Calvin & Hobbes? Nah, we’ll get senile and forget. A lion? Too macho. Embrace our love of Dada with a melting clock by Dali? Permanent time pieces on your flesh just seem creepy. Maybe something vague like a Celtic symbol or a Hebrew letter? That just smacked of culture robbing. Our names? Too Popeye. Something sci-fi, like a UPC code, or artsy like a pencil sketch of Henry Miller? That sort of thing just would seem sad  and overarching in 20 years. So, lamely having found no symbol of everlasting merit to us, we decided to abstain.

Until the woodpecker. Even though it would clearly be a bit culture robbing, some hippy sector of my brain wanted to believe that this bird had come to announce my totem animal self. Although I didn’t know it at the time, nor until just now when I googled it, those who follow Native American mythology consider folks with the astrological woodpecker sign to be empathetic, good listeners, and wonderful parents and friends. There is some other stuff about frugality and organization that really doesn’t apply, but hey, we’re looking to support my theory here so we can ignore that other stuff.

Naturally, having the bird image on my retina and in my dream and over my head and then in my notebook all led to one blessed moment of epiphany in which I would get this lovely bird tattooed on my arm or leg to forever remind me of my transition from wild twenty-something to responsible, loving  parent, right? Thus also renewing my still hip enough to get a tattoo youth while also validating my new role?

Nope. I lost the notebook somewhere between the Cave of the Mounds and home. For 4 or 5 years I pined for it, for the desire to just see my sketch, if not for the actual tattoo itself. I continued to tell myself that if the sketch turned up I’d be sure to get the tattoo immediately, but as the years pecked on as relentlessly as hard beak on wood the thought became less distinct.  I began to wonder why the woodpecker appeared to me anyway, except for its subliminal presence, because although I’d always admired birds this was not a frequent visitor in my youth. I had learned to imitate the bob white and the whippoorwill growing up, but seldom had I spotted a woodpecker. I had rescued the infant robins and bluejays and cardinaIs from the neighborhood cats. I didn’t grow up in the Pacific northwest but rather in the Atlantic northeast and although I had really enjoyed native American art at various junctures in life, the distinctive red and black art had no particular hold on me, except maybe that they were the colors I sheepishly named when asked what my two favorite colors were.  I guess I always felt that they were a bit too dramatic for me, colorwise. Like vampirish, or a bit 80’s French clown.

Honestly, I could make no sense of the incident but in spite of that I could not dismiss its value to me overall. I know a tattoo is just a symbol we put on the flesh to reassure us that we embody some of its meaning. But when an image burns itself on your retina for several  minutes your brain sort of gets the point and doesn’t really need any more proof, right? What I’m driving at here is that if there was a divine purpose of some sort, or a natural order to things which was trying to convey something to me, it would probably consider its work done after that. It might assume there was no way I could misundestand such a thing. Though I long for some resolution to this day I think what I really want is to be able to say, yup, the woodpecker, that’s my bird. My spirit is like that bird. Looking for the truth in the natural world, pecking away at time, empathetic, good parent, great friend, colorful and vampiry yet clownish. I feel like if I could just see that red and black woodpecker image one more time I’d know it.