Welcome to the July 2025 Newsletter - welcome to new subscribers and thank those of you who have become paid subscribers or have donated tea via the Ko-fi site - which you can do here.
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Please note - I, and, Shamanic Sundays takes a break in August and will return in September, when I hope to have some other offerings available. There may or may not be a newsletter in August.
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The Red Start
In the last news letter, The Red Kite Angel, I spoke of how Red Kite had been my guide towards a realisation in my astrological natal chart, as if Red Kite had an angelic or divine connection with me at that time. This month I have had a series of encounters with Redstart, the bird you see in the photo at the head of this newsletter. Both birds share the word ‘red’ in their name and Redstart has also given me, or asked me to take notice of, a new start this past month. There’s quite a bit of red action in the garden too - a feast of flowers for you.
It all begins the day before the last newsletter was sent out so there is an overlap too. Again, it is as I walk out into nature but this time there is a feeling of expectation or excitement that I will experience an encounter . . . I’m not sure what sort of encounter but I am aware that I’m excited which isn’t normal simply because I’m taking a walk.
The weather is breezy and with a gentle heat, making walking a pleasure. There are cloud ships sailing on their flat grey bottoms with great white bulbous sails layered across the sky. I’m going steadily uphill, to a limited horizon with a vast view. Before long I look up to see a Weasel looping across the road from an un-mown meadow area into a wide verge which has a ditch and thick hedge. This is a joy in itself as I haven’t seen a Weasel on this walk for a good ten years or more. The bar is already set high.
Further on I take the footpath up across a field and am given a sign from Red Kite, the angel bird from the last newsletter, who wheels above me on my entrance into the field - I’m on the right path. I push on through a wood, cross another field and into a fenced ‘alley way’ - simply a wide grass path fenced in with pig wire. Here I can see across to the Black Mountains which ring clear as a bell in the distance. It is at this juncture that I hear a scraping noise, a little like a Corncrake but definitely not a Corncrake - too short, but similar. Whatever it is, the noise is coming from the hedge in the field to the left. I train my binoculars on the hedge but am none the wiser. The footpath goes up over to the left and I will pass the hedge as I walk. When I get over the style there is a bird call I think I do recognise. A Redstart.
Over the past month or so I have acquired the Merlin bird id app and on two occasions have learned the short pip of a Redstart not far from home. I have learned something from an app, which wasn’t something I was really sure about, but I also had the desire to hear and see a Redstart this year. So what came first, the desire or the bird or the app? And does it really matter? Nonetheless, I whip out my phone and the app confirms a Redstart. An encounter, in sound, that exceeds my expectation.
As I begin to walk up the short rise to the very top of the walk, a small bird comes out of the hedge, and hovers about 3 feet in the air and 3 feet from me, then dives into the hedge behind me. It has a reddish breast and tail, a black face and white hat. Then it emerges, hovers again, drops and snatches up a small white butterfly. I’m so excited, it’s a male Redstart in the flesh, in the feather! Then I realise that it came out of the hedge at the point where I had heard the Corncrake imitator. I think it must have a nest there and the Corncrake is actually a nest of Corncrakes, sorry, Redstarts. I sit down in the old thin pasture a little way from the nest area and get my binoculars out. I can hear the Redstart adult peeping and the scraping craking of the nestling fledglings. Patience is not a problem in a situation like this. Within minutes the male Redstart, in his finest suit, arrives on the top of some pig wire and flicks his rich russet tail. Within seconds he has dived into the hedge and the craking has intensified in its urgency for a meal. Then the male leaves the hedge and the craking gradually calms. Within less than half a minute the whole process is repeated but this time the adult is the less flamboyant female. I watch her fly out after feeding her young and land down by the stile.
Then I notice that the craking is moving down the hedge towards the style . . . so not nestlings, but fledglings! I walk back down to the style and sit on its top. From here there is absolute heaven on my bird encounter desire plate of the day. Two fledglings are out in the open field perched on some pig wire being fed by two adults. They are smaller examples of the adults, with shorter red tails and a dumpier countenance. I sit and watch with a great sense of fulfilment and my expectation completely sated.
As they begin to move off down the fence line, I decide to leave them to it and return to my walk. The rest is uneventful, barring five Ravens cavorting in the wind, but as I return home I turn over the whole experience in my mind. What does it all mean? After all the ‘encounter’ has reached beyond my expectations in leaps and bounds.
When I get to the little meadow of wild flowers that has a small thicket brake at its bottom near home, I hear a Redstart again. And then, of course, Red Kite angel flies over as if to say “I told you so”.
Next - Redstarts are featured on the BBC Springwatch that same week. Of course they are.
A week or so later and on the way to somewhere else with a friend we visit the venerable yew tree at Much Marcle Church. In all the years I’ve lived in this area this is my first visit. She is, indeed, a majesty of a yew tree and has seats in her hollowed trunk. Walking around under her boughs my ears catch the peeping call of a Redstart. I dart out into the graveyard and we find a pair of Redstarts in the far corner bouncing around the graves and the church yard wall abutting Homme House. We listen and watch as they flit through a great oak tree on the boundary of the church yard . . . this seems significant . . . because churches and their yards are our current cultural representation of Christian faith or spirit. The Redstarts being on the edge of the church yard suggest to me that our idea of faith and spirit is about to, or is, changing.
What does it all mean? I confess to having a desire to see a Redstart this year. A new bird arrives according to my desire each year. In my mind it seems that the desire can be ‘heard’ by nature in a spiritual rather than literal sense. When that desire keeps being rewarded, in many different ways, I am convinced, yet again, that we humans are entirely in sync with nature . . . through a sort of lattice of desire. And as churches, together with their venerable yews, are as near to organised religion I feel able to accommodate, then I see this final Redstart encounter as akin to having my prayers answered. Not with a craking or a scraping, but fully fledged and ready to set out on my own.
Then the full moon on June 11th . . . it being the major lunar standstill. I did not see it rise and was more aware of it being the full moon in Sagittarius and a strawberry moon (my garden has been awash with strawberries this year). However, at 2.50am I woke up and lay sleepless for a while. I then realised that there was a red glow on the wall above my bed. I got up remembering the moon and there it was, the strawberry moon, glowing red and low on the horizon. Yet more confirmation of the red of Red Kite and Redstart culminating in the red moon . . .
What is the significance of red - in astrology it is often associated with the planet Mars which is the ruler of Aries, the cardinal sign of beginnings or the start. I’m very aware that the (near) conjunction of two heavyweight planets, Saturn and Neptune, is happening now after entering Aries recently. What does that mean? In my view I see it as a structuring (Saturn) of spirit (Neptune) in a new, or initiating, way (Aries). The red of Mars is not a warning as such, more a call to attention. And this is a call to attention for everybody. The actual conjunction of Saturn and Neptune will be exact on 20th February 2026 - at 0° Aries - right at the (red) start of Aries. So we are being given a taste of it now . . . in readiness.
So am I ready (red) to start? Well I think I’m getting closer to the new - which involves metaphysics/esoterics, I feel much more confident in my direction and each day my understanding is deepening. I’m also aware (and surprised) that there may be more shamanism to offer - watch this space . . .
For those of you who are interested in the astrology course that is currently on the website, I will be altering this considerably. It will have an esoteric rather than a conventional basis which means it will be based on the ‘soul’ rather than the ‘personality’. More on that in future newsletters.
As an addendum, later in June I heard a Redstart across the field behind my house after the above sequence of events. Of course they may have been there all the time but I have only just noticed them. As with Red Kite, they appear to be on my doorstep . . .
Mandy
