Crow Moon – Change
original image by Luz Adriana Villa A.
It’s been a long day in a series of long weeks that have left me feeling like a shell of my usual self. Sitting on the concrete steps leading up to the main entrance of the campus building in which I’ve been a student for the past eleven years, I can feel the cold damp seeping into the fabric of my clothes and settling in close to my skin. Above me the sky is at that intermediary stage of late afternoon turning to dusk, the clouds ever so slightly deeper grey than half an hour before.
One of the few remaining cars parked in the grounds starts into life and is driven down the hill that leads to the university exit. And stillness descends.
A solitary crow caws once as it passes overhead, and I watch it without seeing, my mind striving for emptiness after the hectic fullness of the workday now done. Another chases to join it – a streak of black feathers against the monochrome grey sky. I register its momentum, but it still does not pierce through my fog-ridden consciousness. Three more now follow, crying out loudly, demanding my attention, and this time I look up just in time to see a whole murder of crows blotting out the clouds above. The noise issuing from the cruel black beaks is near deafening and I cup my hands over my ears in response.
They swoop low to the ground, chasing blades of grass, beating their wings in complex syncopated rhythms, before rising on invisible updrafts towards the tall pines that skirt the campus loch. A few stragglers trail behind, their individual caws discernible now that the cacophony has passed. And then I am once again sat in silence, my pulse thumping in my veins and echoing around the space between my ears and my cupped hands.
Lowering my hands to my lap, I stare at the pine trees, the roosting place for this corvine community, and see nothing but the shadowy outline of branches and the small gaps between the trunks where the light gets through. It’s as though the last minute never happened. And yet, I remain fundamentally altered from the experience.
Crows are thought to be psychopomps: guides which accompany your journey as you move from one world to the next. They are transitory creatures, messengers of change, intermediaries for the unconscious mind to communicate with the conscious. Harbingers.
As we move into this cycle in which we will celebrate the vernal equinox, a sure sign that spring is most definitely here in the Northern Hemisphere, we can see that the crow flies out before us, guiding us from one season into the next. The full Crow Moon is a time where we can more readily access the messages from our unconscious, so be sure to take note of any unusual dreams or, indeed, recurrent signs in your waking hours.
Also, this is a good time to look at your life from a bird’s eye view and see what it is that needs to be changed. The energy of the crow will help guide you towards and through the transitions you feel you need to make.
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