They are beautiful, aren't they? Those wings?
On another corvid, the raven, and back to David Abram in Becoming Animal... after he'd spent a week or so staring all day every day at ravens, the shaman said he was ready. Told him to look at the bird and as the raven took off, Abram's senses, his consciousness, went with him or her. He felt himself flying; he saw the land unfold below.
It sounds magical, mysterious, but I think of that time I watched a fox running along a fence-line, trying to get away from the road, and I felt, in myself, the racing heart, the terror. It was horrifying. I think too of how I feel in my body the experience of a sapling blown in the breeze. Once I felt as a plastic bag, caught in a wire fence.
His experience is more extreme, for sure, but he had spent about 70 hours staring at ravens in the week preceding it.
A junior version of this allows us to watch a crow playing in the gusts and know that she is playing; to watch and listen to a crow chasing a red kite and know that he is anxious and angered.
There is a porosity to the mind. And a greater porosity if we practice letting the world in. A lesser porosity if we are always filtering, colouring, questioning, denying. Until we become the lonely single ruler of a fragile state unable to reach out and commune with other earthlings.
I watch the crows. I listen to their different calls. I attend to the ways I have offended them (by carrying the camera, by watching them too closely). I rise into the air and seek a resting place in a tree.
Ravens are majestic birds. I like what you say about attending to the crows and their ways. I was just reading yesterday that one reason that crows get together in rookeries is to have a way to share "news". I think that's great. 🙂