Burning Birth 5/29/09

Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix.

Christina Baldwin
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Come in and bring your brain.
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The Legend of the Phoenix exists in some version the world over. It can be found in the ancient texts of China, India, Persia, Arabia, Egypt, and Europe. In Russia it's known as the Firebird. It tells of rebirth, regeneration, resurrection.

Briefly the legend is that the phoenix is a very large bird with many colorful feathers. There is only one phoenix. It lives for 500 to 1,000 years. When the time comes it builds a nest in a palm tree. It then sets the nest on fire which burns up both the nest and the bird. But out of the flames comes another phoenix who constructs an egg out of myrrh, frankincense, and other spices, some say cinnamon. Gathering the bones of the parent phoenix it puts them in the egg then flies to Egypt where it leaves the egg on the alter of Ra, the sun god, in the temple of Heliopolis.

One interesting Biblical reference reads: "I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days as the sand." (Job 29:18)

Some day I'd like to write about Heliopolis, an ancient Egyptian city of great leaning, visited by Herodotus, Plato and others, possibly Jesus, the place where monotheism was born and where Nebuchadnezer threatened to smash its obelisks but never did (one of which now resides behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC and the other in London, mistakenly called Cleopatra's Needles). The city was also known as On, whose high priest Potaphera's daughter married the patriarch Joseph and bore him two sons.

By placing its egg on the alter to Ra, the phoenix is celebrating the fiery rising of the sun again, the rebirth into existence from a nest of darkness, the continual change that signals the "always" of life.

In the tree across the street from me the bird who lives there has again built her nest and will soon have eggs to care for. Down below I hear the yammering of a class of young school children on their way to the library. Those things please me very much. They tell me that the sun will rise again tomorrow, that the eggs will hatch into baby birds, that the children will learn and grow and that life itself is immortal.

DB Vagabond Journeys
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Smile at me.
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