Flickr photo by anthonut, part of a series entitled Spending time at the Ranch.

The magpie builds a material fortress for itself and its offspring, and then decorates it with baubles and bright objects to remind itself that the home is not just a place of safety and security, but a place of growth and beauty. The magpie comes into our lives to tell us to focus on our homes, is our home protected? Do we have the luxury of material security? Magpie brings these aspects into focus. —Magpie, the Cunning Prophet, Wildspeak.com

As we drive up the steep hill to Rowe Mesa this morning, we are surprised by four magpies flitting across the road on black and white wings and a whole bunch of magpie attitude.

“Look!” I say. “Magpies!”

“What are they doing way up here?” Dennis is peering in disblief through the cracked windshield at the perpetually formally-dressed birds over the steering wheel of our GMC 454. The battered truck is humming upward, light as a feather with no horse trailer in tow.

The kids are craning their heads out the windows, holding the collars of the heeler dogs so they don’t jump out and give chase to these interlopers in our dry and dusty part of the wilderness. The ten- and eleven-year-old point at the birds like they are some kind of angels skimming across the red dirt tracks in front of us, disappearing over the pinon trees and juniper into the ponderosa.

I’ve had magpies in my life since I lived in the Pojoaque Valley many years ago. The Pojoaque creek attracted them in droves. They nested in my cottonwoods and Chinese elms. They built their dense stick houses in my Russian Olive trees. Treasure troves of stolen goodies that our black barn cat used to try and plunder until they kicked his ass. They perched on the apple trees in the orchard that had been planted with such hope.

I was used to looking out the kitchen window nearly every morning to see a posh black and white bird perched on the rump of my dozing Andalusian mare Caprichosa. Horse and magpie as compatible with each other as if they were some kind of dual soul. One creature intermingled with the other. Black and white wings way too small for that round, Rubinesque body and those bell-shaped hooves. What the white mare couldn’t see beyond the confines of her corral, the magpie flew out and back and told her. I swear. Like a shaman.

When I opened the gates of the acequia above my Pojoaque property a lifetime ago, the magpies teased the geese and the hens marching about the ice-cold water suddenly flowing across the buffalo grass and goats’ heads. Smug and superior about having wings for flight over these land-bound domesticated birds, the magpies dive-bombed them without mercy while Caprichosa watched over the gate, swishing her thick white tail.

And I stood there, next to my crumbling adobe house, land-bound as a Rhode-Island Red too. With no flight feathers to catch hold of the air and lift me up.

This morning on Rowe Mesa, as they visit us a good two miles from their home on the nearby Pecos River, they sail straight into the heart of me. And the hearts of my family too.

Four of them. Four of us.

Jesus said, "If those who lead you say to you, 'See, the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty." The Gospel of Thomas