Those Old Crows

Two great black crows squawked their way through the better part of my last day in Santa Cruz, just outside our window in the redwoods across the way. If I were a wiser person, I would have stopped everything, gone outside, and watched for an hour or two to get the gist of the thing. Were they mating? Were they playing? Crows mate for life; they enjoy clowning with each other, they have large extended families where the young are raised by aunts and uncles if the parents can’t. So what was going on up there? Well, I didn’t have the good sense to go be with the drama; I flung my way through yesterday like an unseeing woman, fogged-in, without a brain.

Instead of sleeping, I was up late the night before. Tending the endless stream, getting the programs together for the east coast Sisters Singing events in Asheville, New York, Philadelphia and Fredericksburg–re-reading poems, choosing timing, considering possibilities, sending emails. Buzzing along into the wee hours with the speed of great intention and love. I awoke the next morning suddenly deserted by it all. It was as if I’d dreamt some slow leach of who I am. I am preternaturally calm in general. How strange to find that my heart fluttered like an unsafe bird with a predator nearby. I could not find the source of the unquiet, and lurched my way through the day feeling as if I was inside the mind and life of a stranger.

But by the end of the long day it was all finally done; the programs complete; emails arrived and answered; bills paid; clothes packed; everything punched neatly in a three-ring binder. Just before sleep, I wrapped the Sisters Singing grandmother drum and fit it into my plane roll-on. The drum came to me in a dream where the Zimbabwean medicine man and healer Mandaza Kandemwa took me and the Sisters to the ocean and told us of a drum that would carry us and the book into the world. He held the drum carefully in his hands, but it was not fully manifested. It was mine to go and find. A few weeks later I found her at Rhythm Fusion, the great quintessential drum store in Santa Cruz, and she has been with us since the first gathering on November 8. I understand that she is meant to be at every Sisters Singing gathering–she is sacred container, cauldron, singer, and witness. At the end of the journey, the grandmother drum will be the energetic bowl holding all the sisters.

Sigh. I sit crowded on a plane, the laptop cramped in my lap. The drum and other parts of the altar are wrapped in the bin above me. I’m tapping away just like those old crows yesterday. All day as I was running errands and keeping track of details, the crows called and caawwed. Crows have carried my father's spirit since his death. And they share some energies with him–a bit loud, even brash, a tendency to be over-bearing. But charming, funny, handsome, intelligent as all hell. My dad, the one who led the parade in Ireland, the one who carried many people under his great wingspan... it was as if he was with me, blacked winged in the skies. In those old crows I heard the leader of the parade telling me to journey forth, daughter. Journey forth!

I am not alone in this work. There are the crazy-wild grandmother spirits who have led this journey from the beginning. There are the spirits of my mother and my father, who led Americans all over the world on their tours. The spirit of my brother Dan, always present. Within my ordinary human frame there are African medicine men, teachers and mentors, animal spirits, ancestor guides. Everyone has come to the party.

The plane begins to land towards Chicago. We’ll spend three hours on a layover in “Oprah’s city”, as Jean keeps calling it. She and I are chattering together like old dear friends; we have rediscovered something in each other these days. Then we’ll be on to North Carolina, to see my dear friend Terese at the airport, the long drive from Charlotte to Asheville, then on to see her beloved Michelle and the new home they have made there.

I begin a whole new part of the story. Today I am located again within my skin. The spirit beings are with me; we are held on invisible air in the sky, just like this plane suspending, unbelievably, on air. Each human is a great gathering. We meet as people–our ancestors and animal spirits and invisible guides with us all around. I can feel everyone, living being and ancestral spirits, a great choreography, all getting ready to meet for the dance.

March 31, 2009 1:30 pm