Crow habit

I have a crow habit. I know them: Crow, Crowie, and Croatia. There are more but I can’t remember their names. Some have asked me to paint them as they see themselves. It’s hard to describe but they don’t see themselves like we see them. They can be oversized black squares of energy that talk and move around in trees and fields. One square might be one crow or it might be 100.

Earlier I attacked the alley blackberries like a goat and I would have eaten them with my mouth but I am not a goat so I used hand tools and gloves. Before that, I hadn’t known what to do. I had hit an invisible wall so I went out to cut back the thorny branches and after 30 minutes my heart was calm.

I know this good works person, she will dig ditches for the ditchless on her days off from work.

“Try to be a full bucket pulled up the dark way of a well, then lifted out into the light” is what Rumi recommended.

Recently I advised someone to move slower, to ground before moving because she kept falling and breaking or bruising parts of herself. Then this morning I swung up onto my bike and lost my balance and immediately fell over the other side onto rocks. I laughed and bounced back up so as not to alarm my passing neighbor but it hurt. I peddled with an aching knee and thought – ground yourself before moving! Is everyone my teacher?

I went for a walk whistling Talking Heads (And She Was), and gave a chipper good morning to a worker smoking a cigarette who seemed pleasantly surprised to be spoken to.

The bright spot of this month’s bird walk was not the standing around in pouring rain in the mid-40 degrees. It was watching a birder kneeling under a huge pine tree collecting owl pellets. She makes art from the bones inside the wooly looking dung “See, this looks to be a rat mandible,” she chirped. I’ve never thought of making art from rodent bones inside owl droppings.