crows at the end of their daily commute to their nighttime roost at Still Creek, from this wonderful video by Daphne Xplores
| fifty crows suddenly land on the rooftop, all around me a cacophony of raucous sound and the fluffing of feathers, a presence, an intelligence, animated, excited, glancing around |
commute — etym.: Lat. meaning to transform, change into something else |
| attuned to each other and more alive than this lost, scared, bewildered human could ever hope to be |
“To hawks, our gritty country lanes look like shingle beaches; the polished roads gleam like seams of granite… All the monstrous artefacts of man are natural, untainted things to them.” — JA Baker, The Peregrine |
| my roof’s a mere staging ground a noisy-greeting meetup before the flight to join the others, a short, imperative migration to Still Creek: a daily dusk pandemonium of collective joy and connection |
“Still Creek: Each Morning/ We Fly/ To Work/ Steady Steps/ Spinning Wheels/ Till Like The Crows/ We Return/ To Roost.” — Poem written on 9 adjacent pylons supporting the SkyTrain that runs parallel to the crows’ daily flyway to their roost in Burnaby |
| a glimpse, perhaps of what we were like before we got lost in language and concepts and removed our selves from this, from everything, in order to try to make sense of it |
“If you turn outside yourself — to the birds and animals and the quickly-changing places where they live — you may hear something beyond words…” — John Gray, The Silence of Animals |
| not that we had any choice.
the crows observe me, |
“The hardest thing of all [for the human animal] is to see what is really there… It will not be meshed in words” — JA Baker, The Peregrine |
| and then, as if cued by some unseen signal, some first-follower call, they are off from here, a rowdy clamour of wings, caws, turning to catch the wave of communion: and then “the hardest thing of all… |
“The world in which you live from day to day is made from habit and memory…. [Our glimpses of the real world] are the times when the self, also made from habit and memory, gives way. Then, if only for a moment, you may become something other than you have been… Contemplation… aims not to change the world, or to understand it, but merely to let it be…” — John Gray, The Silence of Animals |
So much to appreciate in all this…
Maybe take a peek at Becky’s bird drawings…!
https://www.rebeccaclarkart.com/feather
Always Thanks Dave
Her work is amazing, both her natural drawings and her human portraits (eg St Francis). I didn’t realize she has a new book out, which I’ve just ordered.