I heard a single crow make a call that drew easily 60 or more other crows to its tree. They kept coming and coming, eerily like the Alfred Hitchcock "The Birds" movie. At first I was amazed, and then I grew more and more uncomfortable. "They keep coming..." I softly say out loud. I felt like Rod Taylor playing "Mitch". Softly because I didn't want to sound like an alarmist. For a moment I thought about going into my car, rather than stay on the comfy patio chair outside the coffee shop. I could hear the Bernard Herrmann compositions stirring and whirring. *laughing* My favorite exclamative was used.
Birds dispersed eventually. The end.
But not the end. My mind has given that moment a life of its own. Growing in ever greater detail with many hypotheses as to why it happened. I want to create meaning. Do I like fairy tales too much to not make up new ones in modern life? Do I want to amplify the mystery or solve it? All, I suppose. With mystery, magic, and Byzantian complexity I am filled. I want to be in the thick of it.
I think upon that moment with imagery and feelings that draw from the Hitchcock film, a shamanic peyote story a friend told me of turning into a crow and their flight, the Van Gogh painting, the Raven from Poe, the murder of crows that live outside my window on my camphor tree, the Egyptian lore of destruction, Aesop's fables...I can go on and on. All of these stories are copulating in a giant Bacchanalian fuck fest, making brand new ones. Which is my love. The love to lose myself to find myself.
The crow, the magpie, the raven...Nature itself. The fear, the awe, the aching embrace to it. Death/change that will come, that must come. I say all this not with trepidation, but with excitement. I can't wait to find out what is next. Well...not right this minute...it is a sleepy Sunday, a dream day, a day to slip away and come back when I so choose. I choose not yet.
