Skip to main content

Weird...

I just got back from a jog around the neighborhood. I ran out to College Ave. and just after I'd turned around and was heading home a crow flew in front of me, cawing lustily, and up onto the telephone wires. I kept running, and after I'd gone just a few steps, the crow flew down from its perch, still cawing, to a tree branch ahead of me. We leapfrogged like this for a block. I turned a corner into a pedestrian walkway between blocks, and stopped when the crow followed me, still cawing down at me from a pine tree.

I looked up at the crow, trying to understand what was going on in its head, but it just kept cawing, glancing down at me occasionally, and flying from branch to branch every so often. Another crow flew up, silent as the first was loud, and took in the scene. When that one flew off after a minute, I decided to keep running.

The first crow followed me through the walkway, across and down the street, and around the corner, still cawing. When I got to the Highway 24 overpass, the crow stopped atop a lightpole, silent for the first time in ten minutes. I kept running, thinking of the old superstition that ill-intentioned spirits would be unable to follow over running water. I don't know what the crow's intentions were, but it sure did raise the hairs on the back of my neck.

Comments

Elizabeth M. said…
Wow, crazy.

Leon has a book, Animal Spirits, or something like that, which you might want to look at. It lists all kinds of animals and meanings behind their visits. I don't know the specific Native American tradition the book comes from, unfortunately. But it might be helpful in interpreting what this crow (or raven?) might've been trying to tell you.
jkh2os said…
oh, that crow just wanted to sex...you...up!

Popular posts from this blog

Family and Gender in Ancient Rome

I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household

New Post!

Of course I'll wait to update this damn thing until the end of the semester, when all the shit I've been putting off for the last few weeks and months is cascading down on me like a fountain of lukewarm Coors Light. After Tuesday, things will be a little less hectic, but frankly I'm just looking ahead to the end of the week. If anyone has any ideas about applying a psychoanalytic method of art criticism to the devotional aspects of Georges Rouault's Miserere (in particular Plate 23, Rue des Solitaires) and the pros and cons of doing so, I'd love to hear about it.

Be true to your school now!

This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to