...But aren't Birds Aerodynamic?

The idea is to just stop. Just wait. Don't react. Therein lies the whole universe. Just don't react.
~ Yogi Bhajan


Driving back from a glorious day-trip to the east shore of Lake Tahoe, one of my closest friends and I were talking, seemingly without pause for breath, as we had been doing for the past five days of her visit. We covered everything from taboos: “What would you do if you saw a mother berating her daughter loudly at the airport?”- to God: “Do you really believe there is a heaven and a hell?” - to relationships: “How do you get over someone that you loved? Are we all just trying to find again the first person that we really loved?” As she expounded upon her preference for older gents, I saw something flicker from the left window.

Right. Into. My. Windshield.

I screamed. Oh my god, what was that? We both knew, but didn’t want to say that it was a bird. And it was, sadly, not likely still in this plane of existence. We circled back just to make sure. The small bird looked dead, but I thought I’d make one more run of it, so to speak. Apparently my subconscious has considerable Buddhist leanings – I aimed strategically - and missed him entirely. We looked at each other and agreed that he (or perhaps she) was already dead, so we kept driving.

“But aren’t birds supposed to be aerodynamic?” I kept asking. “Isn’t that just something that they ARE?” For several minutes my friend assured me that I hadn’t done anything wrong, and I took a few of my kundalini yoga breaths. OK, OK, OK…. So anyway, back to conversation.

After several minutes… THWACK.

Unbelievably, another bird had hurled itself into my windshield and bounced off – a black bird. I fought back tears when I looked over at my friend. Oh my god, Brandy, what does this mean, her eyes screamed. And normally I would have some ridiculous pseudo-psycho-serious-b.s. answer about signs and symbols and messages from God and the Universe. But two dead birds in ten minutes… I was silenced.

My friend reminded me that everything passes from one existence into another – the birds are fine… onto the next “phase” – whatever that may be. Yet even with this reassurance, as soon as we got home I looked up the animal medicine card for Crow.

Crow medicine, as explained in the Native American animal wisdom teaching, reads: “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. Then Crow’s shadow ate her. Crow is Dead Crow now.”

Chills ran up both of our arms. It goes on to speak of crow as a magic shape-shifter, having the ability to be in several places at once, to bend the laws of the universe and change forms, and to see the physical world as the illusion that it is.

The beginning of the medicine card is what held my attention. My friend and I had been trying to solve the world’s problems over her week-long stay… at the very least, her recent divorce, several heartbreaks, an impending move. We talked of acceptance of what is… and then immediately tried to decipher what had gone wrong and what needed to happen next.

The crow message was clear: Stop looking for the answer to why something happened. Stop scratching at the scab. Stop trying to solve the problem. There is no problem. Staring at the shadow too long will only make you believe that darkness surrounds you. And the fact is… we only see our own shadows when we are looking in the opposite direction of our source of light.

Sometimes, it happens. Something comes out of nowhere – makes no sense at all, baffles us in terms of the laws of gravity and velocity – and slams with a shocking force. Whether a suddenly strained relationship, an unforeseen illness, the loss of a job, or the random anger of a stranger – it can feel akin to the impact of a moving vehicle.

But perhaps these unforseen “signs” and “shadows” are simply here to snap us to a waking state – to get present – and maybe, just maybe, to do nothing but lift our eyes off the ground and look in the direction of the lightest part of our life.

It means focusing, not on dead birds or “fixing” something amiss in our lives, but communing with dear friends, using our intuition to decipher the reality of right now, and enjoying the small but amazing gifts of every day.

Yes, birds and cars are aerodynamic, and husbands love their wives and good employees are rewarded with perfect jobs. Except when this isn’t true. What we limit ourselves into believing is that when birds lose their velocity too quickly and people fall out of love and the market goes south – that these aren’t all perfect alignments with the flow of what is next.

Crow is Dead Crow now. And so it is.

Wishing you oodles of love and happiness,

Brandy