thinking/making: catching thought in process

31 August 2018: To pierce a crow’s eye

I have been drying and peeling fruit stones.  I have photographed an avocado boat.  I have dipped into the water with the oar of a Canadian Canoe and touched Lily, Lotus, searching for the rhizome below.  I found what I didn’t know I was seeking in the bulbous lignotuber of the Arbutus which here is a protected Oak, a place where native objects have been carefully buried (for future use?)

Crow looms over the process, casting its eye.  Crow is Raven, the First Nation Trickster, seemingly stupid, irrational and untrustworthy, yet providing the necessary agitation that enables access to an ancient store of knowledge.

The Trickster abounds in contemporary politics because there is much to learn, much that we have lost in our contemporary experience.  The Trickster is not the way but resonates at our deepest level and causes us to act on our primitive knowing so that a way forward can be found.  The Trickster points to all that is wrong, delighting in it so that we can ignore it no longer; dancing naked on our collective wounds, defecating on our public monuments.  Turning a blind eye to the Trickster enables our wounds, our monumental disasters to dig in, deeper.  Confronting Him with logic merely feeds the frenzy.  We need to watch and learn from His mistakes, for in His doing is the key to Her undoing.

Crow provides access to the deep and a way out again, pecking over the old dark bones so that they can re-emerge gleaming from the dark to light our way.

(“to pierce a crow’s eye” is a Roman saying for something thought impossible to do ref. Mayberry and Kramer eds. 2007 The Cryptopedia: A dictionary of the weird, strange and downright bizarre)