Naturally I live among crows. They roost and feed in the cemetery. I see them strutting about on the open ground at the corner of the road. On early summer mornings I can hear their claws clattering on the metallic roof of the church as they seek out the best sunbathing spots, always facing away from me and towards the dawn. I greet them, as I do most animals that I pass by along my way, but they’ve never been particularly insistent on being noticed. Until now.
I was engaged in an ordinary zoom call – a monthly catch-up with a friend. We were talking books and writing, as we normally end up doing. Sat at my dining table I have a view to the front garden. Crows suddenly descended. I’m not sure how many you need for it to be a murder. Probably more than the three taking up station on my garden wall, and stomping about the lawn. They called to be noticed. Once acknowledged, they nodded and took to the wing, up and away over the roof-top.
It would be later that I wondered about the number (three) and started to think about witches. Overly influenced at a young age by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and more so later by Pratchett’s subversion of the weird sisters, which you may know by now produced one of my favourite characters of all time, I tend to think of a coven as a threesome: the maiden, the mother, and the crone.
Before you sisters out there feel the need to contradict me, I do know that covens can be any number – although like training sessions and business meetings they become unruly once you get beyond 12+1.
Crows. And witches - who, for the record, are simply wise-women. Keepers of the stories and the knowledge. Crows and Witches both.
That was the beginning. I started to dream Crows. They emerged on the pages of books I was reading. One landed just across the water meadow, within a very short time of a friend pointing out that this, too, is one of our sacred spaces. Waiting in the bus station, I was watching the gulls feeding on the morning’s scraps. A herring gull flew down to the tarmac to retrieve a whole slice of bread it had dropped: Crow swooped in and took more than half of it away. The gull looked more bemused than annoyed, then looked at me as if to ask what had just happened, then got on with eating the bread still at its feet.
Crows continued to return to my garden. Look at me. Fly away.
My garden is a semi-typical suburban affair. Partly tended, partly neglected. There was a plan for it, but mostly it does its own thing like a teenager you’re encouraging to be creative, until they decide on some wonderful self-expression that you’re less certain about and you come over all Victorian-discipline on them. We have something of a stand-off my garden and me. Advance and retreat. Oh yes…let’s be more positive and call it a dance! My garden and I dance together, and around each other, and sometimes, just occasionally, actually in step!
What I mean to say is that it is not an especially, specifically, crow-friendly garden. They have been the last to come down. Robins. Blue-tits. Blackbirds. Magpies. Jays. A solitary goldfinch this week. Pigeons, obviously. Crows have been limited in their visitations.
I seem to remember that they loved the hanging fat-balls – but so did the rats so I stopped putting them out. Call me squeamish if you wish, but I find having a rat squatting on the bird table a tad beyond the pale. The rats seem to have disappeared for now…and the crows reverted to the margins as well.
Until now.
I don’t have Crow in my personal animal medicine so I had togo back to the book to find its meaning. In the teachings of the Wolf Clan Crow is “the left-handed guardian, gateway to the supernatural…keeper of the sacred law… Crow is an omen of change.” [i]
In the Mayan culture Crow is a cross-eyed future seer, one unafraid to be a voice in the wilderness, a speaker of the truth that it finds.
In the Celtic tradition, Crow also represents “hidden knowledge, messages from the otherworld; often it’s a trickster” but somehow also wise. I love the story that Sharon Blackie tells of the old woman in the cave, weaving the world into being, weaving the most fabulous fabric in all the gorgeousness of the world as it can be. She also has a cauldron over the fire, and whenever she is distracted by having to stir her soup, Crow flits down and pecks her tapestry apart until it is mere threads and a remnant of warp. Crow flies back up to its perch in the darkness of the cave. The old woman retreats from the fire back to her work, and finds the tatters. Rather than raging against Crow or her lot in life, she finds on the floor a single glistening thread and begins her work anew…weaving the world into a different being. The weaving and the soup stirring and the crow-pecking continue in their cycle because, as Blackie explains it, Crow knows that if the weaving stopped it would be the end of the world, the tapestry must never be completed, it must always be started over, redesigned in the living of it into life. I suspect that the old woman knows this also.[ii]
When I started to write this piece, I went back to The Enchanted Life and tried to find the story in the author’s own words. I scrabbled about and it refused to be found, so I have told it from memory – which is probably the way all the old tales should be told – then I had a ‘not-good’ day, one in which I wasn’t feeling my way into my own life. I picked up the book and it fell open on that page.
Part of the moral of the story is that Crow does not come to the call. Crow comes to the need.
My personal encounters with Crows have been less magical, more mundane…but I have always felt that they talk to me. Or more precisely: they laugh at me. When I am taking myself too seriously, I hear a Crow voicing its view upon the matter. Apart from generic greetings, I suspect that my most frequent comment to Crow has been “who asked for your opinion?” I say it light-heartedly though, a jest between us, Crow knows I need her opinion, especially when I am being absurd, ridiculous, overly self-absorbed. Now, though, I can’t help thinking that she has stopped laughing and wants me to pay deeper attention.
Now I need to figure out how to do just that.
[i] Medicine Cards, Jamie Sands & DavidCarson
[ii] The Enchanted Life, Sharon Blackie
