Love in the Time of Corona… or Flight of the Raven

I’m sure you’ve had an experience like this. You talk about something to someone. It can be kind of random. You end up talking about it for a while. Maybe someone looks something up on the Internet about it. Clarification. Edification. A story, maybe. Yes, these kinds of things always have a story that lies at the heart of the conversation. The hidden finger that pulls the trigger on what earlier appeared to be random. And then, like later that day or the next day, whatever you were talking about happens. Like your conversation called it into being. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

Anyway, Anya and I were sitting in the backyard practicing social isolation and feeling close—love during corona, to borrow from the title. There’s a beautiful Live Oak towering over the deck and wicker chairs. In these days of Corona the tree has been feeling to me like some royal guardian. A crow flies into its branches and another into a neighboring, lesser tree. They’re very noisy, these crows. And their calls gather more crows. Five. Eight, maybe now. And they’re all talking. A murder of crows, as they say. Anya asks, what’s the difference between a crow and a raven?

While I am not academically trained in anyway about birds of any sort, I suddenly felt expert in this matter and decided this was an opportunity to appear knowledgeable and valuable to my partner. The truth is, I am a great admirer of crows and ravens and used to watch them endlessly. I find both to be incredibly clever and crows to be particularly playful. I have seen more than one video of crows placing tree nuts on a road such that a speeding car will roll over it and crack open its shell. And to prove that this behavior is in no way accidental, in one video, the crow repositions its drop location to a crosswalk where traffic stops long enough for it to collect the shattered bits without the crow getting run over.

Ravens, on the other hand, well, they are clever, yes, but they have always held a rather spiritual place in my heart. Maybe it’s the fact that so many of my friends would speak of ravens whenever they came back from a yoga retreat in the desert. They’d say, I was meditating and the guide asked us to invite our totem animal and mine was a raven. I would nod but I didn’t know what to make of such things. In spite of my own unusual encounter with a raven, I wasn’t sure what to do with a totem animal.

Years before this backyard conversation, I lived on the San Juan islands north of Seattle. On Orcas Island, specifically. There were crows on our property but there were ravens. Always in pairs, it seemed. And their calls to one another were guttural and mystical. They are referred to often as huge, notably bigger than any crow. And some are. But I saw smaller ones, mostly. I always knew the ravens from the crows, however. Flying in pairs with their mate—they mate for life, you know. And I could always tell by their voices. That undeniably deep-throated alto sound. I noticed that their beaks seemed to be open a lot of the time. Like they forever had something to say or maybe they were whispering to their soulmate.

Out there under the oak tree I told Anya these things I knew about ravens. And I told her my story, too. My raven story. She had not seen a raven, or so she thought. I told her I had not seen one in years. I wondered if they even lived in this area. And then we talked about other things until the raven-versus-crow-thing got lost in the sleepiness of the hot afternoon.

The next day we were walking through the neighborhood (socially mindful) when a blur of dark feathers swooped before us and into some trees in between two houses. As it arced into the branches it uttered a strange call, low and guttural and Anya remarked immediately, “What was that? Did you hear that weird call?” I was smiling. “That was a raven! Just like we were talking about.” I cannot tell you how excited I was to have a raven this close again. It stirred in me something as deep and mystical as its own voice. Anya and I were already holding hands, but I squeezed hers more passionately.  I couldn’t help but imagine that this was some sign.

Here is my story about the raven.

Years ago, I had dreams of becoming a raven and flying around different places in the country. Mountains. Lakes and rivers. The ocean. You cannot help but feel mystical about something like that even if you don’t do yoga or meditate. And there was the fact that, over time, I lived in several of those places. You would think that living somewhere you visited in a vivid dream would give the place a definite feeling of home, like, this-is-it. I had a sense of purpose. Kind of. Yeah, sort of. But nothing ever felt like home. So, like my moving and forgetting, the whole raven thing faded from memory and significance.

But now I am with Anya. This is soulmate stuff here. I’m not kidding. Amazing connections and shared history. There are big signs and, but that doesn’t matter: there is the love. This love does not need signs. And that’s why the appearance of the raven was so sweet and so perfect. This is not someplace I flew in a dream, but this is where I have finally landed. And the raven showed up out of nowhere, called by an unassuming conversation between two lovers under an oak tree. And now when I walk down that street or pass by on my bike I spot the raven and its mate. They mate for life, you know. Did I say that already?