Crows for the win
Crows get a bad rap in modern Western culture. They’re big and black and scary-looking (sadly, if that isn’t meta, I don’t know what is), they seem like they’re yelling at us, they tear up garbage bags and strew trash all over the street and yard, we haul out their image at Halloween to up the faux-creepy feeling. They belong to witches and demons, right? They eat dead stuff! Happily!
I was afraid of crows for a long time.
When they’d stalk around the yard, I felt threatened, like they were somehow harbingers of doom. I told them to stay back. They hopped and pecked and stared at me, eventually flapping away on those enormous wings, cawing into the distance. They traveled in threes or fours, I never saw one on its own.
When I had the cancer scare a while back, I was waiting for biopsy results and crying on my porch, begging to my ancestors and mama tree to help, help, I have so much to do yet. I heard clearly in my mind something like “the crows can take it from you,” and I found myself saying out loud “Crows. Crows, please come help.” I watched disbelieving as crows began to light in the trees and on the neighbor’s roof, cawing softly. I held my hands where the maybe-cancer was and tried to draw out whatever I could, and then I said out loud “crows, please take this away,” and tossed it in their direction. They mooched around for a minute or two and then started to leave, one by one. The biopsy came back negative.
I fell down an internet rabbit hole about crow medicine, reading that crows are the keepers of the sacred laws, that they walk (fly?) between the human and unseen worlds, that they are Source’s messengers and go-betweens. When they come, they are telling me to tell it like it is (like Source says and like I know), to live my truth, and when I do that, in exchange they sometimes bring me Source’s blessings. I feel a little crazy writing this, and yet it feels increasingly accurate: the crows help to eat sickness for me, I think, but only if I am living my true path.
If I’m not living my true path, then it makes sense for me to be afraid of them, because they’re telling me Source knows that you are dicking around, this is not why you’re here.
Like so many birds, I think crows hop around and look scary and throw our trash everywhere because they’re saying HEY YOU DUMB HUMANS, LOOK UP, PAY ATTENTION. When we put our trash out, we’re manifesting our separation from mama earth in a black plastic bag, pretending like we’re “throwing something away” when really we’re putting things we don’t want into a pile on mama earth somewhere where they will make her sick. The crows are just pointing this out to us. And looking for food, because, you know, why not.
Crows are exceptionally smart, like all corvids. They have life-long memories, and teach their families about what’s good and what’s bad – they have learning and culture, just like humans. When we’re afraid of crows because they signal “death” and “witches” and whatnot to us, that’s just us continuing to believe, insanely, that we do not die, that people who connect to mama earth are somehow evil and crazy, and that we don’t need to pay attention to Source’s messages.
We are part of the system and the crows remind us of this, and typically when we object to what they’re doing and call them jerks, we’re the ones being the jerks.
[Ask me again in a few years how I feel about them eating my gardens, I guess. But for now, crows for the win, because we all need these reminders.]
