I do not think I can blame my mind’s nocturnal meanderings on the Lockdown, it is something I am prone to.
A little thought or word will flit across my subconscious, tempt and titillate, and then, off it goes, in search of the illusive thought, waking up other little thoughts in the process.
This is a longish train of pursuit, starting with an Instagram video done by our daughter, small_creature in which she does little talks about creatures. Last night she spoke about both the McGregor’s Bowerbird and the Hoatzin.
Hoatzin adult
It is this bird that set off my meandering in the middle of the night. Firstly it bothered me that somewhere in the deep recess of my memory was another bird from South America that was also rather unusual in appearance and of some significance, but just odd letters kept cropping up Q, T, Z, L and perhaps there was a Y or an A. Nothing would stick or form a word.
Then the mind went off again in pursuit of another little flitting teasing thought.
This QYTAZL bird was sacred to the…..Incas, Aztecs, Mayans?
Off again, the Incas, the Aztecs, the Mayans where did they all live?
In the vague, thought flitting meandering my answer to myself was, The Incas lived along the west coast of South America, sort of Peru. The Aztecs a bit above them Columbia maybe and then the Mayans in Mexico.
(Daytime googling provided the actual answer, Incas, Chile, Peru and Equador. The Aztecs, mainly in Mexico and then the Mayans in southern Mexico and northern Central America including Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Yucatán Peninsula and El Salvador.)
The flit then continued……another word Valparaiso, where did that come from?
Valparasio is a port city, it is in Chile……
The flit snagged, a book, read long ago, a young girl from Venice, her father, an awful brother, silver mines, an earthquake, a precious book.
The book, what was it called? nothing would stick, what was that bird? what was the significance of the precious book? round and round and round.
Suddenly, The Skin Book, The Book of Skin, not right and what was that bird, it had bright colours, a vicious beak….
Thank you for morning and Google.
With morning the book’s name suddenly popped out from the deep recesses,
The Book Of Human Skin!
Then to Google for the dreaded bird.
The Resplendent Quetzal, ok, so maybe some of the letters were not there but close enough.
The Resplendent Quetzal is an important symbol in both Aztec and Mayan culture. The trogon’s name is derived from the word quetzal, meaning “precious” or “sacred” in several Mesoamerican languages, so it’s no surprise this bird was considered divine. The quetzal is associated with the snake god Quetzalcoatl and seen as a symbol for goodness and light. Quetzalcoatl was even represented as a serpent adorned with the feathers of a Resplendent Quetzal.
As a result, the lustrous tail-feathers, which can grow to be a meter long, were donned by Aztec and Mayan rulers in their headdress. However, because the birds were sacred, quetzals were simply captured and set free after their elegant plumage was removed. The penalty for killing the bird was death.
Quetzalcoatl
The Aztec god of wind and rain, as well as learning, agriculture and science, Quetzalcoatl was said to have played a key role in the world’s creation. In one version of the creation story, he and another god, Tezcatlipoca, transformed themselves into snakes and ripped a giant sea monster named Cipactli in half; one part of her became the earth, the other the sky. Though the earliest depictions of Quetzalcoatl show him clearly as a snake with a plume of feathers, later cultures represented him in human form.
I hope you enjoyed this little meander with me, it never ceases to amaze me what goes on in my head when I am supposed to be sleeping. Do some of you also suffer from these night time meanders?
The Magpies' Nest 