Tuesday 1 July 2014

Dead Crow

Anyhow.  You have to laugh.  I’d given up on synchronicity – just called it coincidence.  I’d given up on magic – just called it mind games.  And then, while I was in Cornwall at The Pause, I was woken up by the loudest bird I’ve ever heard.  It wasn’t just cawing, it was cawing right outside my bedroom window at stadium rock gig level.  It was the Ian Gillan of crows, the Ozzy Osbourne of avians. 

So I went down to breakfast and took my bowl of Bircher muesli to the table out on the patio and…shit.  Literally.  Bird shit on the table.  Not just a little plop but a great stinking puddle.  So I went in to get a cloth and, when I came out, there was more – all over my chair, all over the wall behind it, all over the ground around it.  A veritable splatterfest of shit.  No wonder that bloody bird was shrieking – it clearly had a shit-storm of diarrhoea going on.  A right belly-ache. 

Anyhow, nobody else seemed much interested, or even much aware of it at all – it was obviously my shit, and nobody else’s.  I forgot about it until that afternoon when we sat down and each picked out a card from the Medicine Cards Pack.  And, lo and behold, what did I pick out?  Crow.  Bloody crow.  Shitty old crow.  Well of caws I did. 

But actually, Crow is really really interesting.  Listen to this:
“There is a medicine story that tells of Crow’s fascination with her own shadow.  She kept looking at it, scratching it, pecking at it, until her shadow woke up and became alive.  Then Crow’s shadow ate her.  Crow is Dead Crow now.”

Yeah. That’s about right.

Crow can shape-shift and that chimed too.  I sometimes feel as if I am too many people, too many things, too many personas all fighting against one another.  Maybe I just need to shape-shift a tad.  Maybe I also need to throw up some illusions. 

And then it said, “Human law is not the same as Sacred Law.”  Oh yes.  I have no truck with human law, I really don’t.  And, curious, that law thing – see yesterday’s post. 

“Crow sees that the physical world and even the spiritual world, as humanity interprets them, are an illusion. There are billions of worlds.”  Right on, Crow. 

And so it went and so it did.  It said I have to be willing to ‘walk my talk’ (ouch), that I have to ‘speak my truth’ (ouch ouch), that I have to ‘know my life’s mission (*frown*), that I have to ‘balance past, present and future in the now’ (do I look like that much of a magician??). 

Later that day I found myself drawn to pick up a pen and a paper pad for the first time in years and, of caws, I scribbled out a crow.  And it grew and shifted and gave birth to all sorts of shapes and creatures and faces and forms.  Creative Crow.

And then, when we went to the beach…ah, but that’s another story.




I wonder...which totem would you pick from the Medicine Pack?  

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