June 2013 Archives

I've had some close relationships with nesting birds this Spring. There's a cardinal's nest in the shrub just feet from where I sit to meditate, write in my daybook and generally attune with Spirit, and a Carolina Wren's nest in the eaves of the gazebo where I work most afternoons when the weather is conducive. It's been a joy to see Nature up close as the babies hatched and the parents nurtured them to fledglings.

As I sat outside this morning, writing in my daybook, I heard a mighty cacophony coming from the area of our neighbors' shrubs. It was a mélange of panicked baby bird cheeps and adult bird squawks. When I looked over, I saw a whirlwind of birds arising from the bush and several cardinal adults chasing a crow away. I did not realize until I looked it up that crows not only eat bird eggs, they eat nestlings as well.

As the scenario repeated a couple of times with the huge crow brazenly returning to do his dastardly work, I felt myself hating on the crow and wanting to intervene on behalf of the "good" birds--the birds I liked. And then it hit me: the crow is not bad or wrong. The cardinals are not right or good. The crow eating the baby birds is not evil. It is just as much Nature as the harmonious-seeming flow of nest-building, egg-laying and babies maturing to leave the nest and become adults. The crow, in the eyes of the Divine, is just the crow, doing what a crow is designed to do.

The crow does not do what it does to be cruel--it does what it does because it is playing its part in the balance of it all. This, of course, is not any great wisdom or original thinking, but what was profound to me was to realize that I had automatically chosen to see this in Difficult World terms. I had let the DWD determine what I perceived and had judged what was happening--what was at its essence, a neutral situation and that put me in DW, where "bad" things happen.

Judgment is an express ticket to Difficult World. The birds were only in Difficult World because I put them there. Just as I was only in DW because I chose to be. I choose Easy World where everyone plays their part in a higher harmony than judgment permits us to see.

As I finished writing this, I thought to Google to see what "crow medicine" is about. This stood out to me from this page http://www.birdclan.org/crow.html: "Crow is the sacred keeper of the law. Crow medicine signifies a firsthand knowledge of a higher order of right and wrong than that indicated by the laws created in human culture." Of course, the highest order of right and wrong is that there IS no right and wrong in the eyes of the Divine--there is only Love.