The raven sits with heart-shaped wings and a thick neck on the highest dead branch of the maple. I have come to know three of her calls. One the familiar caw, another the sound as if someone is knocking on hollow wood, and the third a soft round song.
She’s outside our bedroom window in the morning and my studio in the afternoon.
Unlike Poe, I find ravens auspicious.
“Raven guides the magic of healing and the change in consciousness that will bring about a new reality and dispel “dis-ease” or illness.” Writes Jamie Sams and David Carson in Medicine Cards. Ted Andrews writes, “Raven teaches how to take that which is unformed and give it the form you desire.”
I’ve been thinking about Ravens as a catalyst for changing my reality since I started taking notice of them last summer. All year, I’ve been watching them.
How they are all wings with a pointy head and small tail when they fly. How their throat seems to bulge, almost like a frog when they sing that soft song. And how it takes their whole body to make those raucous caws.
I’ve been in and out of therapy since 2007.
And each time I begin again I wonder if this is the time I’ll remember something I hadn’t before. Something that will help explain why I feel the way I do. Why I have such a hard time being around the people in the family I grew up in. Why I have such great anxiety and panic, even dissociation when I have contact with them.
It was just two weeks ago that I awakened to the fact that it’s not that I will remember something I’ve forgotten. It’s that I’m seeing what I always remembered differently.
I am finally seeing those memories clearly, with clarity in a way I never was able to before, instead of through the filter of the myth of my family.
“Of course, you couldn’t see it clearly,” my therapist said to me, “you grew up that way, to you it was normal.”
And when everyone else still behaves as if it’s normal, then there must be something wrong with me. Or so I believed for so many years.
It’s not easy to change a mind. To rework those neural pathways. But I’ve done it before, so I know with work, it can be done.
I’m not ready to write about the detail of my new awareness yet. I’m still working through it. My new reality varies from being as solid as the deep roots of an old oak to flitting like a moth around my reading light at night.
For me the magic of Raven is not about wishing or manifesting something I don’t have.
It’s about seeing the truth, my truth with clarity. And being able to accept it and embody it, no matter how painful it might be. Because I know from experience that pain eases with truth when it’s brought into the light.
Not that it is easy or that there isn’t loss, but in my experience, it is always better.
Growing up when I was hurting my mom used to say “Sometimes we have to hurt if we’re to heal, pain won’t last forever and heal we will! That statement gave me hope in my pain and still rings true for me today. Blessings on your healing journey Maria!
You mom was so right Josie. Thank you.
I so understand this, Maria. Not easy work, but I commend you for your courage.
Thanks Barb.
The year I turned 70 it was as if scales fell from my eyes. I moved to New York, somewhere I had never been that was not touched with any memories at all. I settled down, incredulous, wondering what had happened I began to write about my life before and now 5 years later I am able to look back and see exactly how I came to be me. Sort of like completing a jigsaw puzzle. I feel so unencumbered! You will get there too!
Ah Carolyn, What a good move for you. And the writing of course an important part of it all. I do have faith I will get there. Now even more Thanks.