A Raven's Eye View

When was the last time a crow said hello to you...?

In many land mythologies, the raven is the trickster, the playful winged one who sweeps and swings across the sky, seeing everything...

I recall noticing my first raven, thanks in part to my ornithologist friend who pointed it out to me, above the Gogo water behind Largs. I must've been in my mid thirties at the time, about the same time I noticed my first Jackdaw in Kilwinning (next to the tombstone of Robert Service's parents). To be sure, I was a late bloomer in terms of recognizing the larger family I belonged to. We had no education at school (St. Aloysius, Glasgow) that took us into Nature, that forced us to re-cognize where we actually were in terms of our 'anima' and 'anam'. Teilhard de Chardin would've been appalled at how the Jesuits left out the hills and the shorelines, the woods and the meadows, as part of our overall education. You could even see the Campsie Fells from where we were on Garnethill, indeed from some of the classroom windows on the appropriately named Hill Street. And yet, not once were they pointed out to me as a possible source of 'learning' or 'seeing', or 'development'.

I wonder what John Ogilvie would've thought of that, or Ignatius Loyola whose spiritual exercises regularly involved, like so many holy men, the whole context instead of just a fragment.

The words 'Mind' and 'Soul' indeed never really meant anything to the young man that I was other than some obscure definition that no-one could ever explain very well. It was only when I began to immerse myself in Nature, in the act of being born again and again and again..., that I realised what Mind and Soul actually were: that is, the epi-phenomena that arise when all is as it is. Nevertheless, what is can be an aberration of what Nature 'intended', and this is how it is with modernity to the point where Mind and Soul are contaminated. The goal then is to uncontaminate, to strengthen the immune system by way of our relationship with Nature to the point where the contaminants cannot affect you. 

The ravens know this, and act accordingly. Nature knows this, and simply is. Man on the other hand has been so blindsided by the gloss and glitter, and the song and dance of his own small segregated self, that he is completely in the dark, which explains why he can do and say some of the things that he does. If man were not in the dark, if he stood in the light till he became it, then the world would be a very different place. Poets would be presidents, and bicycles would be cars. And ravens and jackdaws would be considered part of our extended family like our cousins and uncles. 

Soon, Mind would return to us, as would Soul, and we would, through our new animated and awake view, realize where we were...