God is a Crow
The following essay was written sometime in roughly 2006 which at this stage seems not only lifetimes ago, but like a movie I saw about someone else’s life. But I still think of the line, “God is a crow” almost every time I see one, which is a lot. There is a Native American tradition that states that God is a fly. If you can see God in or as a fly, a critter that is generally regarded as a bit gross at the best of times, then you can see God in anything, which, of course, it is.
Before we dive in, please consider upgrading to paid. It’s not much monthly, only $8, and it really does help me out to keep creating this. Thank you and on with the post….
A few summers ago I was constantly back and forth between Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Whether it was for the show I had there, or friends, or birthdays it seemed like I was making the trek every other weekend. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a long drive, only two hours, which began to seem like I was entering into a time portal and magically emerging in Pittsburgh. I didn’t mind the two hours there and the two hours back because it gave me time to think about whatever, and of course, to sing to all of my favorite songs I had in the playlists entitled “Singing Songs” and “Disco Baby” on my iPod. Luckily, I almost always had gorgeous weather while I was driving, and I witnessed everything from breathtaking sunsets to heavy rainfall that glowed purple from the strange light of the storm. I never quite added it up, but every other week, for three months, four hours round trip; that equals a lot of thinking and a lot of singing.
One of these times driving back, I’m not even quite sure what I was thinking of before, but I saw a crow sitting on a guardrail on my side of the road. It was then one of those moments that somehow is frozen in time for a second, where everything becomes a still picture and you have some sort of realization. As I looked at the bird, it popped into my head that God is a crow. The second I thought it I was confused by the statement and I dreamily thought of where something like that had come from. I found myself rationalizing quite nonsensically, saying to myself, “Well, he could be, but then God’s not really a ‘He,’ but I suppose then it would be They could be. . . .” I also mused on the sentence itself, thinking of Magritte’s painting, “This is not a pipe,” playing through the whole palindrome with my version. And thus continued the silliness in my head.
Yet, as my mind kept echoing “God is a crow,” my true revelation came to me from somewhere underneath that hazy blanket of silly ponderings. It was all in thoughts without words, but these thoughts were somehow an entire thesis’ length of explanations, all received simultaneously and comprehended all at once. It was definitely not something new or even that miraculous that dawned on me. In fact, most of us know it already, as I most certainly do, and abide by these same notions in our daily lives. But perhaps this time it was more of a knock in the head than other times, and perhaps I saw it from a different level, a different perspective, than before.
Yes, God is a crow. Just as God is a tree, a blade of grass, an ant, a jellyfish, the ocean, the sky, and everything else in this great kosmos of ours. Yet, it isn’t simply just the air we breathe, because chemically and whatnot, we know what that is comprised of. But rather, it is inside the air. Ken Wilber talks about the four quadrants, basically the inside and outside of ourselves as the individual and also of matter, and the inside and outside of the collective, in its cultural and social context. I’ve always understood and known this to be true, that as a human, I have all these organ systems that make me tick, yet all of that has an inside, for lack of a better term. In people, it is the spirit, the soul, whatever you’d like to call it. But everything has this inside aspect to it, right down to a quark. I’m not exactly saying that a quark has a soul, but it has an interior that is relative to itself, just as we do. All of our known world is somewhat like a stage set, with performers and the like, doing what they do. But like in any performance, there is a lot going on backstage that the audience can’t see. I caught a glimpse of the backstage that day.
Featured artwork:
Merlina, oil on canvas. In the collection of Bridgette Anderson
Here is this week’s YouTube video. It’s a long one. This is part one of two on the human face of the Cherubim. This is pretty in-depth so you are watching and painting right along with me as I render the image.
I will be teaching an in-person workshop in Berkeley at The Alembic. HERE are the details.
