Not really a Thanksgiving quote

[janradder]

So I have this irrational fear/superstition about crows.

I've always felt like they are somehow ominous portents of doom and I've always chased them from our yard and trees when I see them because of this. The one time I decided to get over this and just leave the damn things alone was a couple weeks ago. The result? My dad wound up in the hospital with an irregular heartbeat at the beginning of the week and I ended it by having PTSD flashbacks of being bullied in school (real stomach-churning, tremor-inducing flashbacks). Okay, so maybe it wasn't the crows that caused it, but the fact that those things happened has done nothing to assuage my feelings about them.

Now today I went over to our friends' house to take care of their cats. In the trees, on the yards, and overhead were about thirty crows -- cawing, circling, hopping, and generally looking like that last scene in The Birds where they walk out to the car. Not good. But when I came back outside, there was something far worse. All the crows were gone, save one: a dead crow, its neck twisted unnaturally to the side, laying right next to the front steps of my friends' house. Now what the fuck is that supposed to mean?

Comments

[pierogi-queen.livejournal.com]

Apparently the flock of crows hanging about on trees and wires IS a protent of doom - at least as far as that dead crow was concerned.

My mother said her mother told her that seeing crows meant that someone was going to die. Glad it was a crow!!

don't be afraid young Skywalker

[(Anonymous)]

My father has been very into Carlos Castaneda for decades--Castaneda is an anthropologist who studied under a Native American "sorcerer" in the Southwest. My father once told me that in those books, if you see a lot of crows, it's an omen that there's great power or wisdom around.

I googled crows and Castaneda and got this link to Google Books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=K7xMjWjqVmcC&pg=PA129&lpg=PA129&dq=crows+and+Castaneda&source=bl&ots=qvTTWspt_E&sig=0T-_0Ccz28AQ3SjygxxHLvIrB2w&hl=en&ei=cXjxTIewD4K2sAOg7smoCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false


which is kind of interesting. It talks about how crows like to look at dead things because there is no light in them (which could explain why in superstition they are an omen of death). If you scroll up a little bit to the prior page in the link, it talks about crows avoiding things that move too fast, and being attracted to things that move just right.

So maybe you keep seeing crows because you move just right. Or you're wise. Or are a powerful sorcerer.
(That might help with your to-do list if you're a powerful sorcerer.)

I read the first Castaneda book when I was 11 or 12. I think one of the hooks is that you can literally be walking along one day as your ordinary everyday generic self, and then you'll run into a sorcerer and learn to be super-powerful and fly and stuff. But since that hasn't happened to me yet (despite my father once telling me he was reading about crows and Castaneda one time, then looked up and saw me sitting under a tree with a hundred crows in it), I kind of realized that I wasn't going to become a sorcerer someday.

My guess is that your fear of crows comes from your need to embrace them in order to achieve your true powers. Your ancient enemies have somehow instilled a phobia in you in order to prevent you from attaining your sorcerous might. At least, that would be the case if you were in a book.

As far as your dad, I wouldn't put too much stock in it. He didn't die. So you could take that as a negative or a positive: negative--he ended up in the hospital; positive: they found out about his heartbeat and presumably have given him medication to help him overcome it in the future. And as far as the dead bird, with its neck at an unnatural angle, I think most dead birds I've seen have their necks at an unnatural angle. I'm pretty sure they can actually move their necks almost all the way around (like the girl in the Exorcist), so that's probably just what happens when they die. Their neck swerves because they're not holding it in place anymore.
As to the PTSD bullying stuff, again, I think you could see the positive there: your son was being bullied, but it sounds like the school (per Haddayr's recent Facebook post) has dealt with it in a remarkable way. So the darkness of your past is being overcome in his present.

While I am not superstitious myself, I could see crows as a sign of change for you. And change isn't necessarily bad (see the positive spins above on potentially negative events). Change can be good. And maybe the crows just like to be around to see it.

-Ben.

[geniusofevil.livejournal.com]

It means the crows know what you did last summer