Hummingbird Medicine

Never underestimate the tremendous shamanic power vested in even the tiniest and most delicate-seeming of animal spirits.

It was around ten o’clock in the morning. I was sitting at the breakfast table gazing out at my container garden on the deck, when the tall vines and large leaves of Scarlet Runner beans, now dressed in riots of brilliant orange-red blossoms, began doing a very strange dance. There was no wind to account for their peculiar movements, so I watched them intently in an attempt to discern what was happening.

I soon discovered that a group of large, plump wrens were hopping about among the Runners, plucking and eating parts of blossoms, before discarding them and going back for more, something I had never witnessed before.

Just then, a single, tiny hummingbird appeared for its usual morning feast of Scarlet Runner nectar, and discovered the invaders. Within moments, making it clear that those blossoms belonged to it and to nobody else, the hummingbird had driven off the entire group of wrens, which were more than twice its size. It had accomplished this feat by diving at them from all directions at high speed in flight patterns that at first appeared to be randomly zigzagging, but upon close observation proved to follow a pattern of from above, from below, and from all four directions. Having asserted its territorial rights over the blossoms by means of persistence and confounding flight patterns, the little Hummer went on to happily drink its fill of nectar while the wrens watched forlornly from the branches of a nearby chokecherry tree.

Watching this startling confrontation, I recalled my first close encounter with Hummingbird. I had just moved into my new home, which was to become a teaching center for my first shamanic teacher…under desperate circumstances. I had had to break with her due to her abusive behavior towards me, and was under serious shamanic attack from her and other members of the shamanic women’s circle I had helped her to create. The contractor she had recommended I hire to build the teaching center had walked off the job after spending all of the construction money, leaving me with a very unfinished building (there were no kitchen counters, only raw sub-flooring, bare sheetrock in most rooms, and an unfinished bath with no lighting and only insulation for walls).

I was on my own, and I was physically, shamanically, emotionally and financially exhausted. Every cent I had left from the settlement I had received following the fire in which I had been initiated into a shamanic path, had been invested in a large piece of land and the construction of the teaching center on that land. I was being shunned by the women in our shamanic circle, one of whom had been my closest friend, and my former teacher and some of the women in the circle were spreading very damaging rumors about me. I was faced with two options: I could move into the house/teaching center as it was and try to figure out how to hold onto the property, or I could turn it over to the bank and walk away, losing everything. I was deeply depressed, and seriously questioning my shamanic calling, which appeared to have led me into these straits.

I moved into the house as it was, not knowing how I was going to recover or how I was going to hold onto my property. One morning shortly after moving in, around ten o’clock in the morning, I realized that somehow or other, a hummingbird had become trapped inside the house. I opened all of the windows, hoping it would find its way out. After a while, I saw it no more, so assumed it had managed to escape.

That evening as I was going upstairs, I was shocked to discover the tiny creature lying on its belly on the landing at the top of the stairs, its delicate wings spread out to its sides. I feared it was dead, but upon close examination, realized that it was still alive, although desperately exhausted, like I was, and in need of assistance. I picked it up. Its little body was soft and warm, but its heart was fluttering wildly and it was shaking all over. My identification with its plight was visceral.

I carefully placed it upon a soft towel in a small box,  covering the box with another towel, thinking the darkness might calm it while I prepared some nourishment for it. A few minutes later, I returned with a small bowl of sugar water, having no idea how I would feed it to my little patient. I stuck my finger into the sweet water, and tentatively touched the tip of its beak. At first it didn’t respond, but after a bit of persistence on my part, it must have tasted the nourishment on my fingertip, for suddenly its long thread-thin tongue zipped out and it greedily licked the sugary water off my finger. I repeated this process for several minutes, and again several times during the night. In the morning, I fed it again, then carefully picked it up, and carried it out onto the unfinished deck…the same deck where I had recently witnessed the hummingbird’s fight for its sustenance and territory. I held it in the palm of my hand, and sure enough, after a few seconds, it began to flutter its wings. Within moments it had flown free.

Ever since then, Hummer often follows me around when I’m working with plants on the deck or in the gardens around the house.  Sometimes I catch glimpses of her, but more often than not, I only hear her buzzing flight as she zooms around me faster than my eyes can focus on her zigzagging flight. And from time to time she asks to be included in a painting, adding her beauty and medicine ways to the imagery.

The shamanic lesson in this story? Never underestimate the tremendous shamanic power vested in even the tiniest and most delicate-seeming of animal spirits.

Hummingbird medicine is not only about joy, happiness and flitting about sampling one thing after another in life, as many books on shamanic animal medicines describe it. Like every other creature on earth, Hummingbird has very effective ways of asserting itself and is quite capable of defending its territorial rights – and very aggressively when necessary, in spite of its delicate beauty and diminutive size — by using strategies suited to its particular energetic vibration.

Hummingbird is still around me, and two decades later, so is my now nearly-finished home/teaching center/gallery. Although I was not always conscious of it, many of the strategies I used to overcome the challenges I was facing when Hummingbird first visited me were her gift to me, transmitted during that long night when her life depended upon my nurturance and protection. Her appearance at the Scarlet Runners the other morning made me aware of that in a way I hadn’t been before, and her behavior told me that my own fight for survival had finally been won.  The teaching she gave me that morning was an affirmation of the tremendous shamanic power that  the tiniest and seemingly most helpless of creatures carry and can teach us how to use ourselves.