Defiant Raven

You joined the meeting about ten minutes in, slamming up against the plate glass again and again. Your greeting rang through the  bones of all the corporate workers like a giant tin drum waking the ancient dead. They looked on, their mouths open wide as you hit it for a second round before calmly landing, shaking your feathers and walking off. You said what you came to say.

I first saw you when I went for my job interview there, you and two others landed on the sign outside the building, cawing out to me again and again. I knew then I’d get the job that day.

That was so long ago, a year after you’d first come to me and I danced you in ritual. Somehow I lost trust in you, even though you were always there watching me, talking to me, caring for me. Really I had lost trust in my own heart, and that was the way we connected, through the heart.

Its your kindness I want the world to know, thats what so many of us have forgotten. Your spirit is blanketed in eons of lies, hiding your true power, your divine love. You carried my ancestors to their reward, as they died from starvation, or from battle, or from age that curled them like oak limbs. You were the vessel that carried them through the fear and the troubles that sometimes plague the land. The company you keep with death has never cooled your love.

You carry me now, back to myself, the heart I so easily forget. You flap your wings and my unmovable anger becomes a small puff of dust. Last night you showed me how the love of the Earth connects everything. I wish I could be humble enough to truly receive all you have to teach me.

You bring me to the edge of the ocean of souls who are neither here nor there, you bring me to work with the dead. And you do this all out of a purity of kindness that is beyond this world. You care for all souls who are lost, until they finally find their peace, though it may be eons from now. You peer into the darkness of eternity without flinching.

Mender of shattered hearts.
Guardian of transformation.
Shepherd of spirits.
Fearless love.

I know its only by listening with my heart that I can understand you. I know now that if I don’t understand you, its because my heart is closed. Now when you talk to me I stop and listen. You should not have to knock so loudly,  you have given us so much. You are beloved radiance.

Defiant Raven by Ron Mead
From Flickr, used under 
a Creative Commons license