Crow Medicine
The laws of spirit are not the laws of man
For the last five years, I lived in a corporate-owned three-story apartment building on the second floor, where I became befriended by crows. The apartment’s south-facing windows and balcony opened to the forest with a mountain view and a lake whose surface I could read in winter when the trees lost their leaves. From my ungrounded perch during the balcony years and with my deceased father’s bird watcing binoculars strapped around my neck, I watched hawks, woodpeckers, cardinals, mountain bluebirds, finches, hummingbirds, Canadian geese, and crows.
Chuck and I took possession of the apartment on February 1, 2018, amidst Appalachian winter, a temporary solution to our living situation that lasted more than five years. I feared the timing of our move, but mountain winters had turned unusually mild.
Then Spring came, and the early morning cries of a Red-shouldered hawk pierced the dreamtime and demanded that I rise. We met at eye level, me at my bedroom window, he on the branch of a white pine, calling for a mate. The pair eventually found each other, supposedly for life. From the balcony, I watched them. The hen and her tiercel built a nest in the crook of a pine, more than halfway up the tree but within the canopy, from gathered strips of bark, lichens, twigs, mullein leaves, and conifer sprigs. The neighboring deciduous trees continued to leaf out with each passing day, slowly closing in on the hawks until they disappeared from my sight, protected by the forest foliage, until one needed to hunt and took flight.
As far as I could tell, only one fledgling left the nest in early summer. And each year, when the hawks returned to rebuild, the solitary tiercel would sit on the branch outside my window and occasionally bring me a message. With my binoculars, I admired the forest-dwelling buteo’s distinct reddish barring on the breast; the splashes of orange on his shoulders, underwings, and leggings; the black and white checkered wings, and the strongly banded tail. We met this way eye-to-eye many times during those five years, but it was the crows with whom I bonded the most strongly.
I missed the ravens I studied and wrote about when I lived in the Desert Southwest and Pacific Northwest. The crows became my replacement corvids. I thought of them initially as inferior to the more stately raven, which has the uncanny ability to mimic human language. Crows, however, also produce human speech sounds and are some of the most intelligent animals on the planet. They captured me with their social and emotional intelligence.
I observed their communication, which came from different parts of the forest. The lead crow would send out a series of caws until a group of them would fly over and gather in the trees across from the balcony to fuss and play and preen each other or to use the limbs as a staging point from which to sail down to the grassy lawn and hunt for bugs. I began to recognize their various caws and spoke to them out loud. And they began to recognize my voice and face. I also spoke with them telepathically, and they showed me many things through second sight.
Once I asked, “How long will I need to live in an apartment with no ground I can call my own?” The houseplants and the ones I grew on the balcony created beauty and helped me endure not having a garden or a place to put my compost other than depressingly down the garbage disposal.
In response to my question, a large crow flew a short distance away and landed at the tippy-top of a tall forked pine. He sat and waited. Then I saw that the two growing from the one represented Chuck and I. The tree was dying below the fork, and a few dead branches protruded from the trunk, but the top remained leafy and green. Then the message came. When the tree has died, it will be time to move on. But when and where would that be? They told me I had things yet to complete that tied me to the East. I longed to return to my ravens.
The completions fell across my life and computer desk like water for chocolate. They were emotional, on the verge of boiling over, and ultimately liberating. In those five years I finished launching Five Element Academy, an online university teaching the wisdom of the Chinese Five Elements while the herbal medicine community became highly polarized. I completed the She Loved Horses CD project with an all-star lineup of musicians while suffering from mold illness, which affected my voice. I worked on my memoir until I learned that my birth parents weren’t who I thought they were and found two half-sisters by the same mother. I survived COVID and the near death of my husband during his COVID Initiation. My son got released from prison, and I no longer had to store the last few boxes of all that remained of his worldly possessions.
And I filed a claim in court with a team of lawyers in Miami and settled an ugly three-year lawsuit with an in-law who did not have my best interest at heart. That legal settlement gave Chuck and me enough money for a downpayment on a small house in Silver City, New Mexico. Settling with my in-law felt like the final piece needed to release me from the East. The pine tree confirmed that feeling and up and died. I watched in awe as no green emerged from it that spring, and with every branch dead, even the bark began to peel and fall away. It happened so fast. I had been released.
I see my light come shining
From the west down to the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released
– Bob Dylan
In Native American medicine and spirituality, Crow Medicine is the medicine of Law, and the Book of Law is bound in Crow feathers. I learned this from Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power Through the Ways of Animals by Jamie Sams & David Carson, who worked with Seneca elder Grandmother Twylah Nitsch. Before living in the apartment, I never had the opportunity to be in a relationship with a murder of crows. I never thought them bad omens but did think of Crow, however, as an omen of change and as a teacher.
All sacred texts are under the protection of Crow. Creator’s Book of Laws or Book of Seals is bound in Crow feathers. Crow feathers tell of spirit made flesh. — Medicine Cards, Crow
Crow is the keeper of Sacred Law. Wampum Belts beaded by Native women, also known as Sacred Law Belts, contained knowledge of the Great Spirit’s laws and were kept in the lodges of women. Crow medicine sees a higher order of what is right and what is wrong. During the most painful and confusing moments of the lawsuit, fighting a family member I loved, Crow reminded me that the laws of spirit are not the laws of man. The crows outside my window encouraged me to do the right thing and to persist. I bit the bullet, took a second job to pay for the attorneys, and claimed what was mine.
I had hoped to find a crow feather during the balcony years but never did until the last moment possible on the day we moved. My daughter, Lauren, and I took a break from packing and loading boxes to sit on the balcony in Adirondack chairs before they got taken away too.
“Look, Mom!” Lauren said, pointing down at the lawn beneath us. And there it lay. Right below me, in plain sight, was a large black crow feather, perfectly intact. Lauren didn’t know I had asked the crows for a feather, but she has second sight too. Super excited, like being awarded a prize, I ran out of the apartment and down the stairs to retrieve it. I offered it to Lauren since she had been the one who saw the feather, but she knew it had been for me. Sometimes we need our daughters to see the things we cannot see.
That same morning before Chuck woke up and the moving crew arrived, I stepped out on the balcony and into the cool mountain air hoping for a private moment to say goodbye to the crows. And sure enough, there they sat. I sang to them, thanked them, and asked them to let my Raven friends know I was coming. They were more subdued than usual as we gazed at each other eye-to-eye, me on my balcony, the crows perched on various branches of a living pine. They knew I was moving away. I told them everything, and they had witnessed me from the beginning. I would miss them and dare to say it felt as though they might miss me too and dropped a feather practically at my feet.
There is a medicine story that tells of Crow’s fascination with her own shadow. She kept looking at it, scratching it, pecking at it, until her shadow woke up and became alive. The Crow’s shadow ate her. Crow is Dead Crow now. — Medicine Cards, Crow
Crow also taught me a valuable lesson about my shadow side. Crow’s fascination with her shadow helps to explain the meaning behind the colloquial idiom, “eat crow.” I have eaten a lot of Crow. And I pursued personal growth and healing through many disciplines, spiritual practices, workshops, therapy sessions, breathwork, personal development training, and shamanic initiation. I received much healing from those modalities until the time came, inevitably, to stop picking at the shadow. To continue would have put me in danger of being consumed. I had seen this happen to friends, colleagues, and peers. Obsessed with doing “shadow work,” they became workshop junkies picking at their shadow until it woke up and ate them alive.
Moving to the Southwest to me means letting in more light, gaining better health, and honoring the past as my teacher. I have come alive because I was willing to let something die. And like the Girl Scout song I chanted around the campfire, “Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold,” I am making new friends in Silver City but left behind some gold. One of those new friends is a Raven. The one that greeted me when we arrived at our new home in Silver. Raven comes by most days with a swoosh of his wings and a musical kraa. The crows said they would let him know that I was coming. And they did.
Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold
- from a poem by Joseph Parry, written in the late 1800s.
Bones & Feathers, by Thea from the Eagle’s Gift CD
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May your eyes always be clear, your heart open & May All your Teachers speak to you with the same Respect & Love that you offer them.. Thank you Thea 🙏
Thea, your writing is beautiful. I so enjoy your posts. Thank you.