OMENS

Every morning, just before seven, a murder of crows fly south over my house. I know this because this is what time I am out opening the chicken coop for the day and feeding the chickens. How very Little House on the Prairie this makes me sound, even though I am far from the prairie. Right around dusk, that same murder of crows fly back over my house in the direction they came from. I have no idea where they settle for the night or how they spend their day. I only know of their comings and goings. Back and forth. I only know their daily commute, but I wonder about them and where they go.

I have a friend I met through camp who is almost intimidating in her coolness. I feel every bit of my nerdy geek girl self when I am standing in her presence. I might as well be wearing broken glasses, taped together between the eyes and orthopedic shoes and my arms filled with all of my science textbooks that I’ve kept since college. She’s just badass and cool and she’s constantly driving off into sunsets on solo car/camping trips. She posts beautiful pictures of her surroundings and every time I see them, I feel a pang of jealousy. I find myself jealous of the position she puts herself in to be able to acquire those photos. I am jealous of the mindset that allows her to pack up the car and go. I’m not sure I have ever been in a pack up and go mental state. Not even in that brief period when I was single. Oh man, talk about missed opportunities. If there was any time in my life to run off on my own for a weekend, that would be it.

I think about where I was in my head at that time and realize that I did not have room in there for those kinds of thoughts. I am not the person I was then. I don’t feel like I’m the person I was this time last year. I sort of feel like I’ve become a person I don’t want to be. This is not an unusual feeling for me at this time of year; this is old self doubt. All the things I should be more of and less like. This feeling happens this time year because I leave so very little time for myself or I realize just how little time I have left for myself. Michael and the Cabbage will sleep until noon if left undisturbed. I move around the house extra quietly on Sundays to maximize my alone time. Every time I think I might get a day to myself, I always get shanghaied into something else and the things I had put on the top of my todo list get booted to the footnotes. But now I’m thinking of that murder of crows and how it would be nice to fly off somewhere for a day or two. Move those todo things out of the footnotes and back to the top of the list. Move myself from the footnotes to the top of the list.

Here is what my magic crystal eight ball predicts for the future. I will scoop up the dog, throw a change of clothes and toothbrush into a bag, grab my camera and jump into the car. I will choose a random spot on the map and go. Not just once. This is will be a regularly scheduled event. I have plans for myself in 2022.

MURDER OF CROWS

Snow geese

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I dreamt of a murder of crows sweeping over head in one large choreographed group. Their large black bodies with wings stretched out wide soared back and forth. They did not behave as a usual murder but instead swarmed together like a murmuration of starlings. I stood transfixed by the sight of them. In the mornings there’s a large murder of crows that, like the traffic commuters, fly somewhere south of the city. I have watched them from a window at work moving languidly as if through water, one by one, heading in that direction. In the evenings I have watched just the opposite. They come from somewhere south of my house and fly back to where ever they roost for the night. The crows of my dream were not like those crows from real life. Have you ever witnessed a murmuration? Hundreds to thousands of starlings move over a field or body of water like a school of fish, swooping and swirling together in dance. It is a breathtaking and mesmerizing thing to witness. Crows are not known for this behavior. They may travel in groups but they’re loaners within that group. Very similar to a gaggle of gothic teens. Also a crow is at least twice the size of a starling and watching them swarm in such a way was almost scary. Except I was not scared. I reached for a camera and frantically ran back and forth capturing the whole event in blurry photos.

Last week I wrote up a class description for the workshop I am offering at Camp Wildling. I have a very clear vision for this class and know exactly how I want to present it. I sent it off to Kelly so she could put it on the website and five minutes later I heard the first whisper. What makes you think you can teach a workshop on photography? I closed my eyes while gently pinching the bridge of my nose, nodded my head and thought “here we go.” I had wondered when my inner doubt and self saboteur was going to make it’s presence known. I knew it was coming because I just felt too confident about this workshop and my abilities to teach it. I did the same thing when I found out I was going to be hanging my pictures in a local restaurant for two months. I spent weeks tugging at my hair and gnashing my teeth, asking myself “what on earth was I thinking?” and telling myself I was not good enough for this. I never even realized I had gotten over all of that until I talked to Talaura in December. All of the worries about the showing that I expressed to her where technical things like how to hang the pictures. It was Talaura who pointed it out that none of my worries had anything to do with my artistic worth. I paused when she said this because there is some part of me that still has that doubt. That kind of doubt has just become so minuscule that I hardly even notice it.

A lot of folklore portrays crows as harbingers of death. We see them linked with scarecrows and Halloween decorations. They come across as dark and gloomy creatures cawing out ‘never more’ in poetry. A crow is more than this. There is some ancient legend about the fall of the Kingdom of England if ravens are removed from the Tower of London. There are six of them living in the tower now. The Pacific Northwest Native Americans believed that a raven was the creator of the world, carrying around a pebble in his beak until it was too tired and then dropping it in a large body of water. The stone became the land we live on. Crows are smart birds, maybe even as smart as apes. They use tools, sometimes even make their own tools and they recognize faces. Some crows can count. One lu-lu dream interpretation site I came across said the groups of freely flying crows in a dream represents your intelligence and suggests that you trust your instinct. Basically it means you should believe in yourself.

If this is the case, then may we all dream of crows behaving like starlings.