“There are no happy endings. Endings are the saddest part, so just give me a happy middle, and a very happy start” – Shel Silverstein
The Raven – I saw him first. A loud clank on top of a metal roof. Clumsy and heavy. Usually the birds are much more graceful. I looked up. I saw the crow with its long black beak, wide and angling down. Perched on the roof a prison cell block and about thirteen feet from the other crows. The eerie feeling that something that wasn’t right started to set in. The crow on the edge of the prison must have been twice the size of the other crows.
I wasn’t alone. Down the walk, a gathering of other awestruck individuals craned their heads to see this new stranger. Each one with their chins tilted to the sky like the soon to be visually impaired town folks studying a fascinating solar eclipse.
I did something you do in the wake of tragedy or in the middle of some natural disaster, I just started talking to a group of strangers about our shared unnatural experience: “Is it me or is that crow way bigger than the other crows?”
Self assured and confident he had information that he was privy to that no one else knew, the town’s village idiot spouted off his superior knowledge of all things happening: “That’s a Raven.”
Wtf? Why is there a raven here? My world slowed and my steps became like molasses. I looked over my shoulder at the otherworldly messenger. His head turned so he could watch me as I stepped through an event horizon and I could feel the pull on my particals as the gravity of the moment poised to tear me apart.
It was a Raven.
Go villiage idiot. Way to figure out what the rest of us couldn’t. As I watched it, the Raven had enough in common with the other crows that it could sort of fit in. It was jet black and had these long well defined feathers of all birds of flight. However, it did not belong here.
Is this a sign or a message?
Walking down the grey weathered sidewalk, there sitting on the roof staring back at me up, like a fortelling tarot card from the cosmos was a Black Raven. The the aviary ambassador was standing straight up, in perpendicular defiance to the rest of the mortal world.
I won’t venture to say’ “Like a sign…” because it wasn’t like a sign, more accurately it was like glaring neon lights flashing and flickering in the low rent hotel slums of the U-District. My Raven was a bold in your face, this is a sign. Like many other instances in my life, signs have had very significant meaning and incredible gravitis.
Your life is going to change
Something new and unexpected is going to happen
The universe smiles on you
You are not forgotten
Soon you will go on a great adventure
Unfortunately for me, like most dimwitted mortals, I have a severe hindrance to perceiving the grand designs of the infinite. I recognize the importance but beyond that, decifering the interweaving tapestry of complex universal shifts…
Ehhhhh? I don’t know. It makes planning the day strangely unexpected and a little unsettling. Like first dates, new schools, and job interviews. Always a gateway to some new unfolding of life’s flower petals.
My Raven was like one of those unfoldings. It wasn’t the first time either. Birds and feathers have always had a place at different junctions in my life. The last one was a smooth white feather standing upright in the grass as if planted there by some unseen hand.
With this Raven, I wonder to myself what the underlying difference is? Ravens have always been considered otherworldly and mystical. Deliverers of death, carriers of dreams, ambassadors of good will and protection. What does my Raven mean in signological context?
The Japanese believe Ravens carry souls from one life into the next. Like feathered servants to the land of doorways and portals. Ones that lead to places we could have never imagined. Powerful beings of passage, Ravens manifest the riverboat’s hooded figure. Divining the divide from one world to the next.
Maybe an indicator that today, there’s something different, something has changed. Destiny’s text has been rewritten. That there is a door, and it is waiting for me…