(looks up from a mountain of code and past a mountain of ants)

Oh hello. This is not a paid announcement. Rather, I'd like to welcome owldolatrous warmly to Live Journal. Owl and I go way back, further back than I'd care to admit because it would reveal to you that I'm not really 29 years old. Suffice it to say, we go way back. We've been friends almost since the beginning of the world wide web. How's that for old?

Anyhoo, I just wrote this guy's recommendation letter for grad school, so it's obvious I think very highly of him, and very fondly of him. Venture over to his glob and you'll find something unique, extremely well-thought-out, and very juicily political. Yes, that's a word.

For those of you heading to San Franciso, well, he's told me that he is king of the city. So when you arrive, place some flowers at his feet and I'm sure he'll offer you a beverage. He's kind like that.

Me, I'm busy and fine and tired and fine and earning the money for the summer, and mostly fine, and sometimes not too fine. More than anything, I miss writing. A lot. But look for more of me towards the end of the month and into June. I'm planning to reinstate balance once this avalanche is behind me.

Owl! Glob! Go now!

I seem to have far too much to say in this medium, and just at the point where I have too much to say, I have almost no time in which to say it.

Things have been super busy.  I've just billed the biggest month in four years of consulting history, and have been wrestling with the schedule that comes with such a high revenue.  With semi-daily calls to streamsandpools and what seems like it's going to be a weekly doctor visit, my nights end at dinner and often resume for a few hours to make up the lost time.  Toss in social events and housework needs, and it means most of my waking hours are spent either working or waiting to return to work.  It's a grueling schedule that will continue throughout most of May.  But surprisingly, I seem to be handling it fairly well.

I think I can chalk some of this up to my new daily routine, which involves a half hour walk each morning fresh from bed, followed by a shower and then a big steaming bowl of oatmeal with two eggs.  It's been transformative to start my day with exercise and a big breakfast, to be able to connect immediately with my physical self and give my brain space to process the neighborhood, the birds, the sky, the weather instead of the spin or the thousand things going on in the Big Life at present.  I find that, generally, it's caused a lift in my mood, or at least a decrease in the tendency for a downturn.

Waking up each morning and immediately looking forward to my walk and my oatmeal is a new experience for me as well.  It makes me feel more like the person I'm working on becoming.  Not that there is anything wrong with the person I have been, but he has some destructive patterns that need to go away in order for him to be the old man I'd like to be eventually.

I think this doctor journey, though it's far from over and may even just be starting, is something that is giving me the final last jolt into a healthy practice and a way of looking at myself, my life, and my body that I've felt was needed for years.  I consider the time after my divorce to be a time of reclaiming and rediscovery, and I'm feeling like that particular period is coming to a close.

In the meantime, I've been doing an experiment which involves my child, mainly revitalizing and remapping the places of joy in my life, an exercise that I will be trying to eventually feed into my writing and approach to writing.  I decided earlier this year that I was going to take myself to a movie a week, and see all the big action blockbusters of the year, all the comic films, all the movies that my child would have peed himself over when I was a child.

The experiment, though, hinges on losing the critic mind, which I'm finding to be both very fulfilling and very difficult.  My child never wanted to intellectually dissect a movie when it was over, discussing plot holes and weak parts of the direction and the script.  He never wanted to compare it to other movies, to the book, to other parts of the series or to analyze the actors and their commitment to the part or the part's fit for them.  And yet that's always what my adult does, sometimes even while the credits roll.

The idea is to go to these films without the critic, to find something in them that wows, to connect with the richness of the fantasy, to suspend disbelief.  The idea is to see good where there is good and to accept the good without pointing a finger to what could be better, yearning for more good, or worse yet perfection, to fill up the well of the child and let him swim in the glee of these otherworlds.  And it's been working.  Forbidden Kingdom gave me Jackie Chan as the Drunken Master again, and Jet Li  as the Monkey King.  Iron Man gave me one of my favorite childhood comic book heros brought to life.  And each movie introduced me to worlds that my imagination longed to linger in.

In a sense, I'm trying to get to a place where I'm better able to come to a thing in whichever mind I choose to come to it with, to be able to joyfully be the critic without feeling like I'm naysaying and to be able to joyfully be the childmind without feeling like I'm just swallowing pablum.

The implications for silencing my critic mind when it comes to writing are immense.  I plan to add my reading and writing practice back in to the mix once the work load softens.

And now it is late and I must to bed.  There is more to tell, about my upcoming trip to England, about my dread about Mondays, about my mother and my family, but these will have to wait.  I'll be back whenever I can, and until then, thank you.

Most of this weekend has been spent sitting in my front room with the windows open, either smelling the late April breeze still speckled with cherry blossoms, or listening to the soft rain patter against the dark green leather leaves of the bush tree below the sill. Minutes passed and then hours passed and soon days will pass.

The silent quality of this gentle drizzle, the birdsong behind it, the lack of voices and machines lets me hear my own breathing, uncoils my thoughts that have been so tightly wound around the spoke-stem of my reality. Each day I've gone for a walk, half an hour to an hour throughout my neighborhood in a practice I began when I returned from the doctor some weeks ago. At first it was exercise and my heart rate complained and my legs screamed for the sanctity of sofas and cartoons. But then I hit my stride and the weariness of steps turned to circulation and the feeding of energy into my joints and muscles.

And now when I walk, it is how it used to be. My legs move and my breath rises and falls, and my thoughts and laid out behind me like breadcrumbs, and my thoughts go before me like swallows, and my thoughts spin around me like small planets on which infinitely small civilizations go about the business of ecosystems.

( Continue… )

I realize it's somewhat disappointing for me to post a meme like this after so much silence, but there you go. I just really dug this idea and so wanted to share it before it left my brain in this hazy, wiggly distraction storm I have going. Plus, I'm bringing all the fun back to all the bigness in my life.

Soon I'll write more here, and thanks to those of you who have asked me to do so.

The iPod Oracle MEME!

( Hear from the oracle... )

There is no breath I can take that is as deep as one we take together. There is no dawn that stretches as far across the sky as those that break from our union. Bird song falters incomplete. Waves stumble upon banks and slip back into dark silence.

I am here eclipsed without her, anima and animus divided, the shadow of something large and earthly rumbling in slow revolution between us. And I pull up my knees and wait. I drum in the heat of her. I fall on sharp stone and bleed into it, lean into it, sway into the howl that begins in the first molecule and extends to the last shudder of being.

Hovel, growling on haunches, crawling on bellies under grey-tipped branches, the hole in the sky flickering in the lattice of broken fingers above. Wrong. Every cell screams the wrongness. I hear my own voice, primal, enraged, like a wounded god. I am bellowing and my eyes sting with pain.

I am lucky. In the small, throbbing death, I am shown the way. In the bear heart it is born again. In the wolf breast it grows strong and fierce. In the raven's wing it unfolds and disperses like seed that roots even in the shadows of gravitation.

I am patient with prey. It will be brought into the light, it will find the field and I will take it. For when you are hungry, you know the meaning of food. And I will have this thing I want, for only now do I understand how much it is wanted.

There's a planet between us. But it is moving. And my muscles tense, and I watch quietly, vision sharp, breath shallow, eager.

I've come to realize that my relationship with not knowing has been one of bigness and smallness. In the overwhelming sea of it, against the tornado, I curl tight and imagine that I can den up, blacken the sun and remain invisible when it passes over me. I imagine that if I hold my breath while the shadow of great wings sweep the contours of my burrow, if I become like the rock and like the sand, if I camouflage into silence, I will be spared the talon of it's fickle notice.

However, when I look at not knowing as the thread that passes through all things, I realize that it's not only around me, but of me. It becomes something familiar, comfortable, interconnected. It becomes a thing that is shared in the deep heart and experienced commonly. There is no place to hide from it, because there is no place where it is not. There is no sense in hiding from it, because it makes up life itself. There is no reason to hide from it, because being of the self, it no longer holds the sense of threat.

I say this because I am working on celebrating the adventure of my life instead of being afraid of it. I'm working on establishing the practices in my life that lead me more into a sense of fulfillment, and committing to those practices not out of a feeling of obligation but out of a feeling of self-love. I am working on reconnecting to the energy of story, following the myth of my life where it leads, instead of trying to dictate all the time where it should go, or where it is most comfortable, safe, and known.

The practices that I have made an intent to begin, that I have posted about and discussed and promised myself, I have not begun. I realize this. I watch the days and the weeks pass as I struggle with situation. I feel hesitant to post because I feel like no movement has occurred, like resistance has silenced even the smallest footstep. Normally, this would frustrate and depress me. But today, looking at the sunset over the mountains from my front room, I decided to give myself gentleness and understanding.

For four weeks, streamsandpools and I have worked hard on our relationship. I have worked hard on letting go of my fears and of opening my heart fully to her. I have worked hard to release my attachment to my space and my time, to transmute my romanticized view of myself as a loner, and to better understand the claims I will make for my own power and my own path within our partnership. I have worked hard to see who I could be within it, and to accept the discipline it will take to be mindful and true to myself and to her during it. Together, we have worked hard in establishing intimacy, in supporting each other wholly, in co-visioning the kind of relationship we'd like to have together.

Big things are shifting in me as I work on these concepts literally by the hour, as I mull them and explore them while I launder, while I bathe, while I eat. The work I am doing is underneath, in the foundation. It is big work and it is important work. And it occurs to me that all the processing in the world, all the intent and plans, all the battle cries for practice accomplish nothing if the foundation is not healed, if it is tainted by fear, if the heart of the furnace is anything but love and trust and engagement.

So I'm giving myself a break. I'm letting myself experience one thing at a time, rather than demanding I do it all at once. I'm acknowledging myself for the work I'm doing the first two months of this year, and revisiting the next thing once this work has had time to unfold and blossom. I am valuing the short time that streamsandpools and I have together this trip, getting as much out of it as possible, and carrying that transformative power into the return of my temporarily solitary life where I will begin to work on practice and application.

It feels good to recognize the value of the unseen and the deep, and how that relates not only to the more manifested aspects, but also to the possibility in the excitement of the not knowing. I like the feeling of a full belly fire and the weight sinking into my knees. It feels like the potential for dancing.

It's interesting, this view of myself as a mythic figure, someone destined to journey through his life alone, hooked into the silences, glimpsed on the fringes, with all the time and space available to both become expansive and to wallow in indecision from too much choice. I remind myself that I began this trip driving across country ten years ago last September, and that apart from a few robust chapters, I've been able to self-fulfill that image, to live it to the best of my ability, and to become extremely attached to the comforts of the definition it provides.

I feel that somewhere along the line, I may have forgotten the heart of that romantic intent for the sake of the pretty shell around it. This was meant to be a journey of adventure, to live my life as an experiment and to make it somewhat extraordinary. Lately, as change has thrust its multi-hued canvasses across the eaves of my porch and began brewing in cast iron stew pots a concoction that smells of the thickness of exotic meats and many-syllabled spices, I have frowned out my priest hole and closed my shutters. It is far easier to dwell in the small spaces I construct than to fully accept what my beliefs bring me: constant challenge, constant call for transformation, the constant fire of a steel lupine lock-gaze and the tensed haunches begging for action.

But now I am in love with a woman from England who demands of me that I am what I claim to be and that I believe what I say I believe, that I am what I am without the pretense of selective faith, that I act as I act through self-respect and lovingkindness. I am being brought a relationship that will require me to expand and heal. I am being brought a situation that threatens the delicate soul shell I build and sometimes fill with distraction and depression. I am being asked to grow up, and given the challenge of doing so without becoming an adult. I am being asked to end my patterns, to own and ask for the spaces I wish, to take the things I wish to take. But more than anything, I'm being asked to choose the world I have always said I was choosing, to truly accept what these last ten years of solid intent have brought to my door.

It frightens me to be truthful to myself, to act even through fear slavers and shrieks. But I feel a sense of blossoming here, that a very large shift has been building and being co-created for a number of years. And like a small child who doesn't want to go to school, I'd rather roll over and sleep longer, pretend that my summer continues and will never end. But the next day comes, and the structure and the expansion of school is full of joy, and I will find myself sniffing pencil lead and fondly doing my homework and stretching myself sometimes until it hurts in order to become more flexible.

The morning child is not comforted by what the mid-day teen will find, and so it's a process of conversation and self-trust. I will need to step out of this divorce apartment, shake off the stagnation skin of hibernation, push back against the writer's cramp, and immerse fully into the second world. I will need to finally leave behind the fiction of myself for the much more interesting, viable, and dynamic fact. I will need to open and soften, choose spaces and invest in the mindful efficiency of moments.

But I can do these things. This, after all, is the adventure of my life.

A quick update, and more soon to come. Thanks for your comments, they mean the world to me.

But now, some pictures of my trip to Vashon Island with imtboo, trochee, and streamsandpools. Thanks from the bottom of our hearts for the kindness of this gift. Boo and Troch, you rock.

Betty McDonald Farm

It's half noon on a grey, rainy, cold day in Seattle. I'm waiting here for lunches, for showers to be finished, in order to go about the day with streamsandpools. What I'd like to do is sit for a few hours and write a lengthy novel of my state of being, all the things that have happened since I returned from Christmas, all the things that happened in-between my last two posts. It's been years since I've felt this kind of hunger, the hunger to write, the hunger to create, the hunger to make music, the hunger for stepping up into shamanism, into shintoism, into creation, into myself.

That hunger is pulsing inside me. I dream about it, I think about it, I sit in the bath and contemplate it, I carry it on my shoulder, I wear it on a chain around my neck. I worry sometimes about the immensity of what I still want to do with my life, and how to balance that with a relationship, the amount of solitary time it requires to be a writer, the amount of production time it takes for music, podcasts, animations, new technology. I know I'll struggle with taking that space for myself, in asking for it or in just making it happen. But I think it helps to speak that clearly, to realize that one of my big lessons this year is in taking myself seriously. And taking yourself seriously means grabbing for your dreams, investing yourself in your own fulfillment, and seeking the balance in your life that allows for those things to happen.

For a long time, I've considered myself not worthy of making those choices, those choices not worthy of being made for sake of other choices. But I don't feel like that anymore. There's a life beyond the life that isn't being led very well, and a great number of voices in my head falling silent. I have floods and torrents and bonfires of creative passions, a drive for connection that has never been fully met, a world that holds the heart of me that is only visited briefly and only engaged in through periods of intensity that are followed by periods of stagnant fallow. And it's not enough anymore.

The other night, while walking back and forth to my basement, I suddenly was given a moment of clarity where I saw the illusion of reality, the struggles and the spin, the noise of worry, those distractions that take one away from the truth and the soul of being. And I said to myself "I'm being tricked". This thing on top of the real thing, this layer that sometimes completely obscures the light beneath in a penumbraic eclipsing of the source is often the thing we believe in, instead of the source itself. I basked for as long as I could in that moment, seeing the energy and time that is invested in the construct, the small amount of mana that trickles down into the true, seeing how different life is when one chooses instead to seek ways to directly invest all that time and energy into the true itself.

That's the space I'd like to hold in the future, and it's a space that is very difficult for me to maintain, a space I may need your help in maintaining and keeping me to. However, I feel like I've been shown the way in, and so I'm hopeful that it's a place I can return to and work with. Practice is key, and I realize that now, to keep a constant level of connection flowing, to remember and to dive deeper on a daily basis into the true, and for me, to speak to my world and be reminded of its solidity, it's value to me, and how it among all else deserves my utmost priority.

I'm so tired I can hardly form words.

I walked in the door last night at 4am, three hours delayed from when I was supposed to arrive. The plane out of Columbus was delayed. The plane out of Vegas was delayed. The shuttle was delayed. And the airlines lost my luggage.

No vegetarian fare, no fish fare was found in Columbus, and with only 15 minutes of transition time (despite the fact that we sat on the runway for over half an hour before leaving) between flights in Vegas, there was only time to use the restroom.

The numbers are thus: Awake Friday for 21.5 hours. Only food in a 26 hour period was a can of pringles, a carton of animal crackers, two small packs of preztels, a power bar, and two cans of coke.

I developed a raging cold Thursday morning, which persisted throughout two days, but western medicine saved my head from exploding on airplane landings. Today the cold persists, but mainly the sleepiness continues.

I returned home to find a note announcing that my apartment complex was being sold and that maintenance was being handed over to a realtor while they searched for a buyer. I have no idea what exactly this means for me, but I would suspect that it means I'll be moving this year.

And then finally, I woke up today to more ringworm on my cat's face. Either that, or he's been in a tossle and cut himself. Results and continued cat health diagnosis will happen Monday when I wake up and cart his furry ass into the vet. I'm trying not to spin too much about this.

On the good side of things, I had a fantastic talk with the very supportive, lovely, and quite partnership-capable streamsandpools today. And I opened my presents from her to receive two fabulous books, but more fabulous than words can say, the most perfect of all perfect stuffed bears who I'll keep with me for the rest of my life.

During said talk, my luggage arrived, putting a better spin on the day.

I also received a visit from monagrrl with the touching, much appreciated, tear-producing gift of veggie chili so that I don't have to venture into the cold and dark to find food.

Hooray for community.

My visit to Columbus was pretty good, and one of the better visits in years past. However, the highlight rising heads and tails above all events were my visits with drshorn for some good laughter and deep connection that friends who've maintained a friendship for almost 20 years can have.

Now I go start laundry and eat my chili in hopes that tomorrow I'll be more centered, more rested, and more gassy.

Happy Birthday, blackwingedboy!

When I was growing up, I received the cut-rate version of everyone else's toys. Video game systems were purchased at Radio Shack. Clothing came from one of the many odd-lots or discounted super stores. Before Target was established, K-mart was the mecca for all things.

I knew my family didn't have the kind of money that was all around us in our affluent Columbus suburb. I was aware I was living in the "slums of Arlington". And apart from some serious issues with not being heard or witnessed as a child and young adult, I had a pretty happy time of it. I didn't want for anything, and I quietly accepted the fact that I'd probably end up playing my Tiger Electronic Football game while other kids talked about how exciting Intellivision was.

( I had my own game... )

Rows of rounded cone-shaped lights reflect across the canyon, float like jellyfish suspended in the space between buildings. Everywhere I look, they are white and luminous, filling each window, tiny ufos, white chocolate kisses, ghostly glass hearts. These reflections can seem more attractive than the reality of them, the simple smokey fixtures, the imperfections sanded and flecked in the surface.

There's an old hippie outside with three backpacks. Two he carries, the weight of their contents pull his arms straight. One he hitches onto his back and shifts his balance, his freshly lit cigarette ashing upon the sidewalk, spreading fire before the cleverly-named boutiques. I wonder what each of them contains, my mind racing across every possibility, from the absurd to the probable. And this infinite potential of the untold story can seem more attractive than the revelation of their actual contents.

I'm writing in a coffee house with imtboo, who is real and breathing and wearing a red sweater, the tiny white moose on her chest seeming to continually pull my attention towards it. Around me, the baristas stack chairs and sweep away the dust and the flakes of skin, the scuff marks from a hundred feet, the remnants of the passing of moments. Bruce Springstein alternately blares and coos over the speakers. There's no ignoring him.

And these things are beautiful. The spaces between change are full of promise and death, sudden and intense surprises, or simply the long sustained hum of the resonance of living. The minutia of mundanity holds as much mystique as the most outlandishly dreamed-of adventure or the biggest Hollywood blockbuster epic. It just requires a shift of focus, an appreciation for the shortness of states of being, the understanding that a new second comes as the old second slips forever away.

I can't quite explain the feeling of wholeness in having a single identity on Live Journal again. The extent to which so many of us can somehow perceive of the order of a virtual space, and care about what it contains and how it is contained, continues to amaze me.

I'll be posting more soon, as things are a bit mad with preparations for December. But I did want to welcome back my original presence and thank my alternate presence.

If you are looking for entries before June of 2006, you can now find them in bwb_archive. If you are looking for me, you can find me bundled up and watching cartoons while the massively large and bright moon pierces the cold glass of my windows.

Things are good, finally. And I'm excited to get back into writing.

There will be some changes here at the circle W, my friends. They aren't changes most of you will notice, being friends of both blackwingedboy and blackwingedboy, who are of course me. They aren't changes anyone but me will care about. However, they may affect the availability of this journal for a short period.

Back in June of 2006, I split myself again in two, as I've done (and regretted) many, many times in my diary/blog/journal experience. One of those places, this one, ended up with all the writing and the other place, that one over there, ended up being largely abandoned. In the meantime, I kept commenting not as the me here, but as the me over there. That's resulted in a journal that I write in and a different username I comment with, but whose journal hasn't seen activity for over six months.

I've become fragmented. And with the notion that I'm going to be moving more experimental, comment-disabled, somewhat fictional ideas over to blogger, with its ease of multiple blogs and ability to stop and go on a whim, the current blackwingedboy now doesn't belong. I'd like to unify again. So I'm doing away with this journal, blackwingedboy, which will soon be magically renamed by the Live Journal gods as blackwingedboy. All entries, comments, images, userpics and styles will remain intact since June 2006 when I started it.

What is now blackwingedboy will be archived, and potentially then renamed to reflect that. All entries previous to June of 2006 will reside there, and I'll provide a handy link to that from the new blackwingedboy.

Still with me? If you are friends of both journals, you'll keep getting my entries on your friends page and nothing will change. However, they will not longer appear as wolfishsunshine, but as blackwingedboy. There's no need to friend the archived blackwingedboy user, because no new entries will be posted at that address. Therefore, there's nothing for you to do, and in fact reading this post was an interesting waste of your time.

My feeling about my constant desire to split in twain, and my tendency to want to see wolf and raven as two separate, not entwined pieces of my energetic makeup are very obvious to me. That's a part of this decision for sure. But mainly, I'm feeling the need to simplify things in my life, and choosing my beloved blackwingedboy as the center of linked blogs and journals makes me happy.

I expect to get all this underway by December 1st. Thanks, all.

Sometimes I think I should have left this house when I had a chance, when my father died, when the marriage broke a few months later. But instead I decided to root here and heal in the place where everything stung. I've lived at this address for five and a half years, the same carpets and the same walls around me. Sometimes it is the heaven that I dream of, and sometimes it is the loneliest place I've ever been. Mostly, it is somewhere in-between.

( Continue on… )

Tonight I dragged my sick-feeling body out of the house, as promised, to write at a coffee shop, Chocolati in Wallingford. My prediction was that by venturing into a coffee-loving city on a dark night and keeping close to a major American university in the middle of term, I'd have the place largely to myself.

I'm horrible at anticipating trends and outcomes.

( And then what happened? )

Twice every year, the position is right, the skies are clear enough, the night is dark enough so that the moon is framed in the upper panel of the window that sits next to my bed. During it's pregnant blush, the silver sea flows down onto my face and against the flesh of my chest. And I lay curled up in it, comforted, some otherworldly and instinctive belonging hushing my tired eyes.

A month has passed since I was visited by the wind tribes and the raven masks. During that time, I have lost my wolf ring to the unforgiving pipes of a toilet, I have become sick and then well, my mother has gone through two surgeries, and I have helped say goodbye to two animal people. I have struggled with eye maladies, have prepared myself for having to move from my apartment, have worked very hard, and have gone through a depression. During that time, I have performed a Samhain ritual which marked the beginning of 2008. I have had deep conversations with good friends. I have mourned the long dead. I have come to many realizations.

But I have not written anything until now.

There are three flavors of "no". There is the knowing that "no" is the answer. There is being afraid for either very good reasons or temporarily immovable reasons. And there is fear from uncertainty. I've made too many decisions out of the last flavor of no, and many of those decisions, though small, eventually gather together and scurry and soon have weight enough to squeeze shut expression and openness. Spend enough time trying to outfox uncertainty, trying to navigate it without stumbling, and you eventually find you aren't moving an inch.

Saying yes to uncertainty is embracing impermanence. Nothing is certain and all things change. Nothing is fully predictable. The streams of moonlight through my window will be gone in a few months. Already as I write this, they shift position further and further from my face. Last night may be the only clear night this season where I will get to experience them. Or there may be clarity for weeks.

And so the questions I ask myself as a writer who finally wants to take himself seriously, who is more than a bit bored with journaling, are "what's next?" and "where?" and "how?"

Answering those questions is trying to determine something that is uncertain. The only way to determine it is to walk through it. And that's what I plan to do. Tonight, I knew that I wanted to post. That's enough. Tomorrow, we'll see what comes along the path.

Overall, at this moment, I know that I want to go to bed and see if the moon will meet me in that quiet place again. It's a place where wolves dream and howl in their sleep, and everything makes sense. It's a place of vulnerability and promise, and communal with the eternal yes.

When you spend enough time living by large bodies of water, you eventually meet this wind.

It's the kind of wind that begins across the calm surface, hidden away in the carved tree house of the wind people. It has wide wings, this wind, and launches itself out over the railing made smooth by many hot hands. It soars like an owl, silently down the depth of rock and wood, ripped and serrated leaves a mossy green blur in its passing.

A few inches above the water, it pulls back and lets its momentum propel it. It races, its power a wake behind it, its presence a sound wave that rattles the scales from fish. As it goes, it picks up debris, old iron buoys, amputated tree limbs, fisherman mosquitoes out too far too late. And when it reaches the other shore, it slams into the first structure it finds, spreading itself over glass windows and dodging its fingers through cracks of walls.

One by one, its brothers, its cousins follow. Over the railing, down the cliff, across the water, and against the cabin. They roar in coup. They leave the scattered remains of their found treasures on the banks. And as the sun rises, they float their secret canoes back to the tree house to wait for the call again.

( Last night... )

When he called, he made a sound that was a cross between a cat's meow and the lowing of a cow. He took a breath and thrust his head forward, slamming the vocalization deep into his gullet so that it began with a croaking, like the start of an ancient machine.

It came in threes, this noise, obviously picked up from his time around humans. Was it the mimic of an animal or the bleat of some piece of landscaping equipment? Wherever he's gotten in, in whatever secret corner of shiny things he'd discovered it, he was obviously fond of both the sound itself and the attention he'd get from making it.

And so it was, that I was sung to by a crow.

I arrived at Lake Crescent very late, speeding across the darkened Olympic highway while shuffling Rush songs. My finger throbbed from where I'd sliced it open on the cat food tin, a deep gash that had poured blood for half an hour and almost ended my trip before it began. The parking lot was empty; a complete silence, a starless night hung over the cabins. In the yellow haze, the humped shapes of a raccoon family could be seen making their way towards the water's edge. I tossed my belongings on the extra bed and settled in for the sleep born from an exhausting week.

Now I sit in the windowed lodge room, on wicker chairs. The same crow that sang to me this morning, who followed me around for half an hour, never more than 15 feet from me at all times, has arrived again and is surveying the lunching guests in the hopes that some small tidbit will be left behind. To my left, across the wide expanse of shimmering water, two anglers wade knee-deep and cast hope into the depths. A handful of boaters row lazily into the grey-white mist. A woman in red with long boots kisses her lover, not knowing that I am watching them.

Everyone is drawn to the pier, unable to resist walking to the very end. The compulsion is irresistible and I watch people try to pass by without giving in. But one by one, the instinctive pull, or the human desire for exploration, or the indescribable need to be joined with water, tugs them along the weathered planks towards those last few inches of wood.

The sun comes out to burn off the fog and it nears the midpoint of the afternoon. I've been awake for five hours and have no idea where the time went. This is a blissful realization, because I've done nothing but be. I've watched a sparrow mob leapfrog across the shoreline, pausing to gobble insects before lighting as one to land a few feet further on. I've watched the ducks quack-launch themselves off the driftwood and heard the sound of flickers and the symphony of birdsong to which I'm still unfamiliar after seven years.

And now the child takes off her bright orange life vest and the crowd noise from the last group of lunchers rises behind the plate glass. All day, alone in this room, I've had old woman and their daughters stroll in and remark on me. "Oh, he has his laptop". "He's all set up reading". "See that man, honey?" Seems that I too am this odd and fondly observed creature.

I'm already feeling more connected, like I can hear again. There's so much to be changed and reclaimed in my life. But for these two days, I'm happy to be a singing crow, alone with his shiny things and looking for tidbits.