By Guest Blogger, Laura Tabet
After I received my vision of the Crowrider, many years ago, (see previous blogpost) I started to have daily, overwhelming, numerous, fascinating encounters with crows. Suddenly, they were everywhere. They cawed at me when I stepped out of my front door, they camped out in my back yard, they chased me home, they showed up in my dreams and once I came upon a dead crow on a hike right in the middle of my path. I buried that crow as an offering – as an act of commitment. Once a hundred crows seemingly flew out of my friend’s head as a murder of them stormed from the branches of the large Oak we stood in front of – a frenzy of black marks screaming upward in elegant disorder. And once, during an exceptionally stormy time in my life, and on a particularly windy day, I took a hike on Ring Mountain (in Marin County, CA) desperately seeking support for the chaos in my life. I climbed a large rock and sat there as the wind peeled my skin back, when suddenly two crows careened across the sky and came to a point right in front of me. Cutting and carving, diving and chasing, opening their wings to the force of the wind, playing fearlessly in a decisive beautiful dance – crow was my teacher.
It was evident, after not so long, that this big black bird had become a dominant presence in my own psyche but then I started to notice overwhelming evidence that crow was making its way into popular consciousness as well, mostly through current fashion and art – there was crow flying off a lady’s purse, proudly posing on a shirt at Target, and peering out from some fancy napkins in an expensive design store. When did crows become cool? When did crow subversively (clever crow’s favorite method of making contact) make its home into collective consciousness?
At first I wondered if the proliferation of crow in my life was just a case of “the Volvo syndrome.” What is “the Volvo Syndrome” you might ask? Well it was back in the early 80’s that I first recognized the phenomenon that once my family bought a big Volvo station wagon everyone else did too! Now that I have developed past my childish, appropriately solipsistic, perspective of the world, I now know that all those Volvos were most likely already on the road before I started noticing them – I’m guessing this was probably my first lesson in “perception is reality.” So was I encountering these black-winged creatures because now I was wearing crow-colored lenses? Were all these crows here the whole time, or are they pressing into our awareness, crowding onto the sidewalks, and cawing louder than ever before?
Then a year ago I came across an excerpt from Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s book Crow Planet, printed in the Utne reader. In her chapter titled “As the Crows Fly” I read these words: “There are more crows now than have ever been in the history of earth.” And “For the majority of people on the face of the earth, the crow is the single most often encountered native wild animal in their lives.” According to Haupt’s perspective crow is the wild, brave, creative and feisty intelligence that perches on both the redwood branch and the telephone line – a clever consciousness of creative survival that straddles the seemingly separate worlds of nature and culture.
To further illustrate her point I will share, that a single, enormous crow is the only “nature” I can see from the café I’m sitting in here with my laptop and pile of books. I watch him circling gracefully in the crisp, blue Fall and as crow lands its significant weight on the branch of a city tree, I am entranced by the slow, spiraling descent of yellow leaves falling to the sidewalk below.
Many years ago, I remember inviting my friend to go on a hike “in nature” and was stunned when she asked why I didn’t see my concrete-covered neighborhood as “nature.” She was an ecosystemology student at Cal and I loved her challenging and radical ideas that made me question why I didn’t see walking down my street as “being in nature.” When did I start to see nature as something out there?
Wendell Berry defines nature like this: “What we call nature is, in a sense, the sum of the changes made by all the various creatures and natural forces in their intricate actions and influences upon each other and their places.” Or as Haupt writes, “How we live where we live is what makes us part of a natural ecosystem.” Crow seems to reflect the gritty, instinctual intelligence in us that knows how to align with the ever-changing, speedy flux of evolution – nature and culture side-by-side, not separated, but arising simultaneously and co-creatively.
Don’t get me wrong, I certainly love (and need!!) my time in untouched natural settings, to let my nervous system ease itself into the stillness and beauty is deep medicine for me. But if we separate our idea of nature from our urban environment then we are separating ourselves from the magical, pulsing, animated soul of nature as well. If you consider the great metaphor of Nature – as the passionate, living soul within each of us – then any idea of going to visit Nature for an hour of hiking starts sounding CRAZY! It’s not sustainable to reserve our experience of vitality and magic for the rare moments we find ourselves at the edge of the ocean, or beneath a canopy of redwoods. And I’m not comfortable with this tacit agreement we’ve all made that I only get to feel alive, joyful, and in collaboration with magic in short, structured installments while I dutifully slog through the dis-enchanted experience of culture the rest of the time.
What crow reminds me to do is to look for the magic in every moment – with my crow-colored lenses I start to feel the living breathing pulsing element in everything. As I step into my “nature” – this complex sensing body – I start to feel the soul of the tree in the median of the road as well as the soul of the broken-down car across the street. Magic is everywhere!
Wake up to the magical aliveness all around you. Take a walk down your street and relate to your neighborhood as “time in nature.” Take a deep breath, come into your body, BE your creaturely self and a whole world of sensation and animation will come alive for you. Ask, where am I separating myself from my own nature to fit in to culture? Don’t go and visit your soul from time to time, BE YOUR NATURE all day long.
Remember, nature isn’t out there, its right here flapping its wings inside you – let it dance in the wind.
Laura Tabet, MA, (PhD candidate) is a healing arts practitioner, teacher, writer and Crowrider, working and flying about in Oakland, CA, supporting the training of future Crowriders – individuals interested in gaining capacities and highly creative lives through engaged transformation. Cranio Sacral Therapy, Imaginal Psychology, Intuitive Consultation, Mythology, Astrology, Energy Work, and Expressive Arts are her most trusted training practices. She is currently writing a dissertation on human initiation and the role of imagination in engaging the creative potential of change and seeks playful collaboration with all interested Crowriders! Visit Laura’s website
Image: Print of Papercut by Nikki McClure
