RAVEN MACK is a mystic poet-philosopher-artist of the Greater Appalachian unorthodox tradition. He does have an amazing PATREON, but also *normal* ARTIST WEBSITE too.

Friday, November 22

SONG OF THE DAY: Rush


Heard a squeal on the back porch today, and I figured one of the cats had caught a field mouse, but when I went back there, the big cat had a pileated woodpecker in her mouth. I shoo'd the cats away and ushered the bird out the back door, where it just chilled on the steps. I didn't wanna leave it for the cats to get again so I scooped it up. No notable wounds anywhere, but I'm guessing maybe its wing was hurt. I took it back into the woods where there's a birch tree I kinda of look up to as the elder, and put the woodpecker there in its roots. It immediately scampered off, not flying, but it worked its way up a nearby tree and was gone from my reach completely. Just felt like the best place to take it.
I guess there's wildlife centers you can take hurt wild animals, and I also I guess some folks are like, "Don't let your cats roam outdoors" because of this exact thing. But maybe it was a mistake domesticating cats, and just having these wild beasts trapped in the house doesn't seem like a good cure. Also, I honestly didn't have the time to find out where these wildlife places are, and whether they took pileated woodpeckers, and whether I could even get the bird there or not. Sometimes in our quest for utopian reactions, we assume too much infrastructure of privilege and entitlement for it to be an actual reaction for most folks.
But going back to the birch tree back there, that felt like the right thing to do, and the woodpecker definitely pepped up when I put her down there. We, as humans, have obviously over-complicated life on Earth. But unfortunately, a lot of times, the solutions to fix these inherent issues with the existence we've created are also overly-complicated, which just compounds the problems. I'm too fuckin' simple half the time for all that.

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