Sylvia's Journal

For many years, now decades ago, I used to travel with my Medicine cards. I was introduced to these cards by my native American roommate during a training workshop in the early 90s in San Diego. She used them with me several times during our week together. I was astonished about the pertinence of the messages that her card readings revealed. I soon learned that these seemingly co-incidental messages from another world, the world of animals, were very helpful in re-directing my attention to things I never paid much attention to. Once I started doing that I picked up messages everywhere. I didn’t even needed  to consult the cards, having learned the essential core of many of the animals’ messages by heart:

Ants on my paths reminded me to be patient. A fox in the area reminded me of the importance of family (and maybe a call was in order). A hummingbird took me out of my complaining mode and redirected my attention to sources of joy. An otter card once pointed out that a team I was working with was not honoring female energy, ignoring the one junior woman on their team. The frog was a reminder that a time of cleansing was overdue.

Eventually I stopped carrying the cards as my confidence increased in my own ability to pay attention to things on the periphery, especially when the kind of small animals crossed my path that I barely noticed and sometimes squished.  With African colleagues we made up the core messages delivered by animals that were common in Africa but not  included in Shams & Carson’s North American book.

Over the last few weeks I have noticed a lot of Crow activity around our house, including mating – something I have never witnessed. They have always been here – crows are even depicted on a more than hundred year old Harper’s magazine engraving of Lobster Cove. But I don’t particularly care about crows and ignored them. But now they are so in our face, so loud and so numerous, that it’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore them. There was a message and I’d better listen.

What I remembered about Crow is that they are harbingers of change. In fact, whenever I would drive away from our house during my early morning commutes I would hear them cawing and I would murmur to myself that some sort of change was coming my way. That’s all I remembered about Crow Medicine. 

I searched for Crow Medicine on Google and found what I was looking for here. The part of that long description that resonated with me is this: the crows are reminding me to speak with a powerful voice, rather than being a fearful and soft (or even missing) voice in the wilderness of today. With nearly everything out of balance, or terribly unjust, Crow Medicine points to the use of one’s personal integrity as a guide; to add one’s ‘caw’ to that of others, to regain our integrity and stand by our truth. 

Crow Medicine serves as an antidote to this feeling experienced by so many, of being alone and powerless to change the big things that need changing. Shams and Carson write: “[…] be mindful of your opinions and actions. Be willing to walk your talk, speak your truth, know your life’s mission, and balance past, present, and future in the now. Shape shift that old reality and become your future self. Allow the bending of physical laws to aid in creating the shape-shifted world of peace.”

Thank you crows!