The Psychic Mockingbird Outside My Window Monday Morning Check-In Post Plus Another Video Excerpt

How Are You??!!

Mockingbird and Red-Tailed Hawk

Kee-eeeee-arr!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I first heard it while in the yard with Jon and the dogs last week. It’s been on and off warm enough to sit out with them during the early evening hours.

I looked around for the hawk and instead saw a mockingbird perched atop the space between the roof and the top of the brick of our building. It was making a home inside and warning off anyone else including the dogs and us.

When we lived in Ojai, we lived with the hawks. Most evenings, we’d sit in the yard with the pack while the birdlife soared above us: hawks, jays, sparrows, hummingbirds, and many others whose names I do not know.

I have been missing the regularity of the hawks since returning to Chicago, excitedly pointing them out on the rare instance I see one while out of the city in the Forest Preserves, hawks are less available here in our urban home.

All day Thursday, the mockingbird treated me to the sounds of the hawks, many other birds, and other sounds right outside my window. I was delighted by the magic of it, the callback to a home just one year ago that I had still been living within, knowing then that we’d be leaving and yet still living our lives there as we whittled away our belongings, giving away and selling so much of what we’d cherished, recycling and finally discarding those beyond cherishable by anyone else.

The year before that the house next door to us sold, and the new owners decided to remove the giant oak in between our homes that sat on their side of the fence, the oak that shaded us from the brutal summer sun and heat of the Ojai Valley, the tree that gave home to hawklings each year as again and again the adult hawks nested there, generations laid and brooded and hatched. We watched their flying lessons with awe as the dogs, Jon, and I sat beneath their soaring adventures.

The crew showed up early that morning to begin work on removing the great oak as Jon and I began to grieve its loss. The tree was perilously close to our neighbor’s home, and while the first arborist had said it was healthy and sturdy, the next one they brought in diagnosed it as diseased and agreed to remove it. Already that year, numerous oaks had fallen, taking out cars and electrical wires and corners of people’s homes. The drought was taking another toll.

The crew completed their work at 5:30pm, packed it up, and left for the day, leaving the giant trunk, cascading into the sky like a wounded beacon. It was denuded of its canopy with all its leaves and branches gone, stripped bare, just a skeleton of what it once had been.

Thirty minutes later, the great oak directly west and across the street from it, on the same latitude line, toppled. It crushed our neighbor’s fence and landed on the garage and the corner of the house next door. We all commiserated with them in the street, shocked at the compounded loss of two trees from our block in one afternoon.

Jon and I returned to our home, and a few minutes later I heard a whoosh and then a thud. I knew immediately what had happened, thinking, “That should have been a much louder sound if it was what I think it was.”

I picked my way through and over the many belongings of our landlord in the back of the property, where his studio unit was attached. I smelled it before I saw it, earth and roots, freshly exposed to the night air. There it lay, the third oak of the three on that latitude line, this one directly east of the sole trunk in the middle now crookedly standing naked. This third one to fall fell east, away from our home, taking out the fence at the back of our property, the fence of the new neighbors next door, and into the abandoned and uncared-for pool in the yard of the house behind us.

When I’d been informed that the tree next door was being removed, I felt my sadness and anger about it and then employed the magic pivot. The hawks would just nest in the tree behind it, in the back of our property, and I’d still be able to commune with them there. It would not be quite the same and our tree canopy would be dramatically altered, but I’d get over it. We’d all adjust, the birds as well.

But this loss, all three giant oaks gone within a matter of ninety minutes, there was no pivoting from this one, not in that house. I knew what it meant, we’d be leaving. Eight months later our landlord would give us notice that he needed us out.

As to the why of it, why the other two great oaks died after the first was mostly removed, no one will ever be able to convince me that it was anything other than this - The middle tree was killed, the root system disrupted, the many decades of weathering storms together, their canopies communicating with one another, breaking up the winds, their system of support stripped away, the center gone. The two left on the edges could not manage the winds alone. They were too physically far from one another to help each other without the assistance of the anchor in the middle. Weakened by its death, they succumbed to deaths of their own.

There were no nesting hawks that summer, our last summer there. There were no crows’ nests either, no teenage crows receiving flying lessons over our house while their parents watched from the power lines strung along the street. There were still plenty of birds as always, even plenty of crows and other hawks flying much higher above, and the jays, sparrows, hummingbirds, and bats that would come at dusk, and the night owls deeper into the darkness, but a cycle a life had been irrevocably altered on our property and would not be returning.

Last fall I saw a hawk land in the tree across the street from our building, the building we’ve returned to on Oakley Avenue, as I’ve said before, Jon and I have a long history with oaks. A few weeks ago, I noticed a giant nest in the tree where I’d seen that hawk. I don’t know if it’s a hawk’s nest, but its size tells me it’s meant to house some big birds. I look for signs of life there every time I come in and out of the building.

I miss my Southern California small-town life, stepping out into the inky blackness of the night and being greeted by The Pleiades, Orion, The Big Dipper, The Milky Way, and all of the other celestial wonders visible in our skies unimpeded by city or suburban lights. I miss strolling over to the mulberry bushes Jon planted and pulling off their delicious treats. I miss the scent of jasmine and orange blossoms in the twilight air. I miss wandering down to The Farmer and The Cook. I miss much of my community there.

And…

I love being in Chicago, the energy and spark, the culture and arts, the food (so much delicious food from every corner of the world), the diversity (our neighborhood is one of the most diverse in the city), and the constant activity with always something to do and somewhere to be whenever we desire. Most of all, I love the people here, loved ones and strangers alike who are always willing to help. Reconnecting with true friends from my younger years is bringing me life.

I sat outside in the warm spring air at Charmers Cafe on Friday for a few hours with my college friend, Jane, not to be confused with my high school friend Jane who I’d seen the week before. It had been thirty years since this Jane and I saw one another and again, like the other Jane, it was as if no time had passed at all, she and I falling into the rhythm of our friendship as we caught each other up, she and I who now live just a few blocks from one another.

I first met Jane in my fourth year of college. She’d just arrived and was cast alongside my roommate Sharyl and me in Lysistrata. I played Lampito and they were my sidekicks as we traveled from Sparta to Athens to support Lysistrata in her sex strike, a bid to end the war waged by the men.

I wore a close-fitting long skirt as part of my costume that I had to hitch up to my thighs before jumping up on my dance partner, throwing my legs around his waist in the final scene when peace was declared and the women allowed the men back in. In the second to last performance, I did not hitch up my skirt enough and it split down the back. My dance partner shifted his hands to hold my skirt together on my body as he and I tried to hide our peals of laughter from the audience. I will never forget the look on his face when he instantly realized what had happened, his eyes initially grew huge as he quickly saved my almost exposed ass, and the laughing began, burying our faces into each other’s necks to muffle it. Backstage, he duct-taped me back into it for our final performance that night.

After coffee with Jane, I returned home to walk the pack with Jon. We took a longer-than-usual walk in the summery weather, and as we returned home, headed down Bell Avenue, I noticed a car slow down so the woman driving could get a better look at the pack. She then looked at me and shouted, “Nora!?”

It was Maureen, Lysistrata herself from our college production, someone else I had not seen in over thirty years. She and I caught up on the street as I marveled at the timing of running into her after just talking with Jane about the play a few hours earlier and the magic of Mercury retrograde’s shadow.

Later that evening I attended the grand opening of Roots and Rituals. It’s one of the metaphysical/occult/magic shops in the city that I’ve been touring. No one in these locations knows who I am or is familiar with my work. I just keep showing up in them as a customer, chatting with the owners when I can, and sharing about myself while not pushing anything anywhere.

I feel like I am new again, starting over, when this is far from the truth. I am simply taking my time here, sussing it all out, but it does trigger the common theme of not being recognized and feeling like no one knows who I am despite my decades of work in this field and my internet presence.

Chicago spirituality/magic/new age/occult/metaphysics/etc is very different from the Los Angeles/Ojai version. As usual, I am an outlier, never fully fitting into any of the environments I find myself in. I wore my brightly colored clothing to that event on Friday populated by people wearing mostly blacks and muted tones, the cold climate urban energy so different from the warmer small-town one. I am somewhere in the middle of it all.

The eclipse that had occurred the night before with Mercury going retrograde on its heels the next, joining Venus in retrograde as well, brought my attention back to all of this and to family matters less enchanting, perhaps even cursed, another reminder of partly why we’d returned here. The rest is all still unfolding on the path in front of us as the mockingbird above continues to let me know that whether or not the hawks are here on this street physically with me, their spirit certainly is.

I wrote this piece the last time Venus was retrograde, on July 2023, shortly after launching this Substack and in between the oaks falling and our former landlord giving us notice. Rereading it today reminds me of the importance of making self-care a primary need, especially in these times, along with listening to my knowing.

I Don't Know Who I Am Right Now

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Venus Retrograde and the Class War - Me & The Pleiadians
Video Excerpt from our February 20, 2025 Transmission
My gratitude and love to Shannon for creating this video for us all. Thank you, Shannon!

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The full audio recording from our February 20th Transmission is available here: https://www.sendowl.com/s/self-help/new-age/february-20-2025-audio-channeled-lecture-and-group-session-with-nora-by-nora-herold

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Register here: https://noraherold.as.me/vernalequinox2025

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