[sunbug]

If Ravens are the subject. I’m there!
So apologies if I covered this before (even in another Deininger myth blast!)

My experience also happened on a cliff…the edge of Grand Canyon. It was a time of transition as my Grandmother had passed recently and my Mom, Dad and I were going on a trip Out West.
Grandmother would have gone with us.
But in memory of her…we went. Mother had driven her parents out west a long time ago and she wanted Dad and me to see it too.
Many adventures happened including Mesa Verde (seeing those small hand prints in the cliff is humbling.)

But neither Dad nor I had seen the Grand Canyon. It was mind blowing.
everything just opened up…you could feel it…
I played a little Zuni flute I’d just bought at an Arizona trading post…just sitting back from the rim…gazing across all those painted layers.
When I returned back to the camper and sat with the sliding door open, this huge black Raven came sidling around to the open door.
This was no harbinger of doom…this was a character of Native myths curious, trickster and that something else…

(He) picked up a pebble to show off a ravens excellent tossing skills…except it did not go as planned as the pebble bopped him on the beak. (He)shook ruffled his feathers in Corvid frustration. So yes a bit of trickster/clown energy (and not scary clown)

But for me something clicked. For me it was not the archetypes associated with the raven but the Raven itself. Since the Native cultures have other life forms besides humans alone as archetypes and or energies. The raven was a representative of Raven in that imaginal realm.
I had other raven references earlier in my life but had never acknowledged them completely until this moment and once I did that raven story connected into other adventures, chance meetings and so forth.
Wherever I was or would go, I would (see) these birds. Appearing literally to engage my consciousness to “play,” in this imaginal realm. Still happens.

Sometimes I joke the crows point the way to go…(crows too fit with this)

As the crow flies y’know.

One of my favorite connections through my feathered friends is the Naturalist Bernd Heinrich who raised and studied Ravens himself. I was looking for raven calls for a music cd and Had read Bernd’s Mind of the Raven. I contacted him but his return email said all his cassettes of calls were in a shoebox somewhere. He recommended Cornell lab of ornithology, which I used. But even though I never had bird calls from Bernd Heinrich, I gained a lovely pen pal friendship instead. And I even traded him my CD for a signed copy of his book Geese of Beaver Bog.

One other thought: there was a lovely couple from Finland or Friesland? And the wife was really spooked by the Raven. So that was interesting because probably for her or within their culture a raven must have add an ominous perception. But I was not afraid at all.
This was a Native Raven!!…not Poe’s never more bird! Or the black winged war goddess of ancient Ireland!

Now I in my usual parzeval or entish manner have carried on as well!

I hope more participants come to participate with this!!

 

p.s. the other participant in the trip was Prissy (Caprice) our soon to be “well traveled,” Blue Point Siamese.
By Wyoming she stopped voicing her Siamese opinions!