Yoga in life: Crow pose

“What did you learn today?” asks my 12 yr old son as we set out the utensils before dinner. Interesting, since i had had my first day back into academia no one had engaged me in conversation about it—until that moment. It was a tender moment that it had been he who had inquired. “oh” i was caught off guard. Who says this thing called writing is easy. I can’t even make a sentence work out. Remember the richness of the moment... the tenderness the void that i so often find myself being in the middle of as i think thru where i need to be in my life. At 46, with one useless master’s degree and a second marriage destined to “fail” i feel like i am wearing concrete boots and am just waiting for someone to throw me into the lake. The wondrousness of my children—the little hands of my baby and my pre teen’s interest in my anthropology class give me hope. I plaster the walls of the computer room with her marker drawings of spirals and “balls” and attend his basketball games and sit with the other mothers. It is then that i am glad to be without my daughter’s dad, to sit alone to cheer on my son. But, now he turns the camera to focus on me and i am riveted by his interest.

“oh, umm,” i stop to rewind and remember that i had indeed been in a classroom again. Returning had been a monumentous step. I am still in disbelief that i even did it—in the past 12 years there had always been some kind of excuse—too much money, no outcome, it would take away from my child’s world, a new hope that a new partnership would be just that a hope that my dreams would be fulfilled.

It takes over an hour to commute to buffalo. That’s two hours of extra child care. Along the way in midwinter the open lake plain that the highway is built on is home to many hawks. If i did some research i could probably tell you how many species, but from my limited mother experience i know there are at least 2—red tailed and red shouldered hawks. The fields now lay with a sparkly blanket of snow and the hawks roost on the telephone poles looking for breakfast. Once a huge red tailed hawk swooped down in an arc inches in front of my car as i traveled along at 60 miles an hour. They seem to have learned how not to get hit. In my younger days, experimenting with forms of meditation, i came to believe that my animal guide was a hawk—so every time i have encountered one, i understand it as a message of some sort from the universe. Writing this now, it seems silly, flat, predictable. But, there it is. Except that on my way to buffalo, i encounter so many hawks each way that it has cheapened, made into brass the sightings—the possible enormity of the message i am suppose to receive. Universe where are you in the dive bombings of feathers? What is this message?

“oh, we talked about crows’” i finally answered looking into his dark brown eyes. Sometimes, still after 12 years when he and i lock eyes, my words come from a depth of truth that i don’t speak from to many other folks. “Crows? I thought you said you were taking an anthropology class?” he responded beginning to drop that shield of mistrust that children learn to do at a certain age. “Well, yeah. I am. The professor talked about language—and how language when studied by anthropologists is studied by categorizing words. Like—counting words, or words to describe weather.” As i spoke, i realized he was interested. Interested in a way that he hadn’t been in what i had been saying to him for years—we have been struggling to make meaning of our mother-son relationship. So, I told him of how there had been some research done that indicated that crows could count. They could count people entering into and leaving a cabin to determine when it was “safe” to raid. They could count how many members were in their group.

When I was in my 20’s, i lived in a house with a friend who was suppose to be sort of house sitting. It was this mansion of a house—enormous by my standards with a grand staircase and several large ballroom type rooms. It was mostly unfurnished, so we held after hour parties in it and filled it with people who would turn the empty room into dance rooms with pumping techno 90’s music. The crows lived in the woods surrounding the house. Every morning that winter they woke me ½ hour earlier than i wanted to be up cawing and squawking at each other—a dozen maybe or less. They were relentless... their annoying calls to each other seemingly to delineate territory or food. I never knew, didn’t want to know. They were vermin to me...nature’s pests. But, scary, like back in my mind i was thinking like Hitchcock...

Baby melt downs—do you know what a baby melt down is like? It takes the strongest person to not react- to not have hideous self loathing ticks falling out of your hair nightmarish sensations to surface. To keep them down like vomit... is so hard. The hardest thing in my privileged albeit- latina life thus far. It just makes me want to retreat in to a ball – a sow bug draw my knees up and bite my arm to keep from screaming.

My baby daughter sees crows everywhere. She hears them calling to each other, to her in the crispness of the western NY winter air. She looks around turning her head to spot them. I find myself looking too, to locate them as her actions make me want to find them—for her these creatures that i took no notice of before. She turns her head and when she finally locates them she smiles and makes an imitation of the call back to them as if she too is a member of their group—what number would she be i wonder. We both sit in the snow; our world has become silent except for the occasional caw from above. We take big breaths.

Contentment now— now standing in her snowsuit and socks turning around in a slow clockwise circle holding a pealed banana in her hand slowly turning circle after circle after circle never losing balance. A meditation. A smile. A lesson i need to learn to trust in the moment. All good things will come.

The crows—i started with the crows because they seemed so inconsequential at first. Oh, so did you know that crows- the corvids- know how to count? My partner, overhearing our discussion added,” and, they also return to the site where a family member dies.” We all looked at each other, a moment in time. Really. My son had completed a report in second grade about the turkey vultures. In that year we learned that they mate for life. But, then so do the corvids- the crows. These menacing seemingly bottom of the bird chain members. Our lack of intimacy and empty sensations of love sink in the awareness of that sadness between us. The crows seem to know more than we do, as our vision of partnership collapses under the weight of childbearing responsibilities. The enormity of this fact is sickening. We shuffle onward to get through tonight's meal. I am sorry for my children to have to exist in this quagmire of sadness so thick it forms crusts like oatmeal left on the inside of bowls sitting in the sink all day. Somehow, my son seems to be oblivious.

The circling stops and she smiles a partially eaten piece of banana in her mouth. “Do you want to go see if we can find the crows?” I ask. She opens her eyes and mouth wide and gasps as enlivened surprised. “Maybe we can hear them calling.” She pulls my hat away from my ears and puts her tiny finger inside my earlobe. “Yes, we can hear them with our ears” she does the same thing to the other ear, “yes, we hear with our ears.” She gently puts her finger tip on my eye so that I blink. “Yes, we might see them with our eyes.” She tries to touch my other eye and I blink again. The she touches her own two eyes and she blinks.

“Don’t talk to me! He screams pulling his legs up onto the couch and wrapping his arms over his head like he might be divebombed by bird shit. We were working in halting fashion trying to get through a discussion about his Math class and the possibility of him having to take summer school. “It’s just a B! Just a B!” he raises his already loud angry out of control voice in desperation. The baby, who was climbing up on the furniture stops in her tracks and flinches. As usual, in these moments I am glib. Calm. Maternal. . A model of calmness and loving virtue. Right, hah. Once in 5th grade, a boy punched me in the stomach when the teacher asked me to retrieve his test from him. It knocked the wind out of me. I gasped feeling like I would never draw breath again—I thought I was going to die. This moment with my son felt like that. Although instead of a fist, I feel like I had been stabbed with a long knife right through my solar plexus—my center for power. Lack of power, that’s what I feel like in these moments. I don’t know how to act—I am silenced by my own silencing.

Last summer while I was trying to work outside in the garden and watch over her while she sat up on a blanket, a hawk circled the sky. This hawk has been visiting the sky over my garden for the three years I’ve gardened there. I make no mistake thinking that she visits me, it’s just good air space—the convections I think where the good soaring conditions are. But, I would still feel like it was a good omen—good wind energy coming at me—a blessing. Well, then I remembered that I now had to protect a baby. I look over at her sitting there with the only defense she had her wobbling quadruped crawl. Then they arrived-- a small family group of protective crows. Since it was summer, I believe that their nestlings would have been out of the nest by then and no longer needing to be protected from that kind of predator, however here they were, flying into this airspace above our garden and body slamming that hawk. They body slammed her right out of the sky; I couldn’t see her anymore. That same sort of incident has happened several times since then including just last week while she and I stood together and watched in our snowsuits and boots. She made her imitative crow call back to them—since they appear to be in the same clan and all.

so, more stories of the uniquenesses of crows come back to me each day. A murder of crows is the poetic term for their groups but the biologists refers to them as flocks or societies. Authors abound write fictional accounts of their antics—their genius—their trickery—how they care for their extended family members. How they are feared as harbingers of doom. There is an end of the winter collective that happens in our village square. Hundreds if not a thousand crows gather as the sun sets to roost and “meet the single crows.” That’s what I’ve since read is what they are doing. But, man, are they loud. I get out of my car one particular evening to go teach my class and the noise their combined voices make gives me pause. But, I stand still with the car and the street between us. The sky behind the large deciduous tree is greyish-white with a possible snow storm in the future. The branches of the tree are black and extend wide into this misty grey white dusk. My eyes began to adjust to the dimness and not really expecting to find anything I watch as the shape of the tree reveals itself. On the branching limbs sit the crows chirping chatteringly.

She stands on a little chair at the kitchen counter—eating and exploring as I work getting dinner together. I like this side of who I as a parent—a teacher—a woman and it occurs to me that so much is wrapped up in our image of who we think we are, who we want to be, how we want to be remembered by our children especially if we come into this world via parents who left themselves as scarification on our lives.

So, two more years have gone by and I still wallow in this quick sand making one decision after another and not following through. I am more plagued now with the uncertainty of my future especially now with all of the impending doom economic scenarios being painted by economists and friends. She doesn’t notice the crows anymore. She exhibits bouts of angry 3 year old tantrums that are so over the top that I am unable to even place myself inside myself to hold on to the handles before I fly. I envision life without her—a life that is mine again. They are fantasies but they scare me that I must think them to stay on the ground. My future once again becomes a way out of my present misery—a possibility that may unfold and offer me peace. I am alone in this because of course, this is not the way that a “good” mother should think and feel. I feel like one of the women in the Hours—maybe all of them.

Ellen Bass wrote:

To love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again.

Is this the dance? Is this my crow dance? The lessons are not coming.. that is now obvious. I am marching in to winter again- feeling like the air has been sucked out of me. Clawing at the things that seem easy—easy to add in to an already easy predictable life. I feel like somehow I’ve been hiding out—hiding in the existence of my children, hiding from the fear of losing them, hiding from self doubt that I won’t succeed if I challenge myself, hiding under the bed of a limited partnership, hiding from my voice. It is here, finally that I believe that my voice was finally silenced—in my own hideaway—fear has led me to that final form of being—a fearful, lonely, scared and bitterly hurting creature. Traveled to the beach at my mother’s house without him last year. Don’t know how I even convinced him.

We worked on bakasana—crow pose tonight in class. This was the second week they worked on the pose while most of them weren’t even there last week. It occurred to me that the pose was difficult but perhaps it was in the way one perceived its difficulty. The perceived response to the pose then was either one of love or hate—just like the swelling murder collecting in our village’s square as we practiced on the other side. The fear of landing on ones head is so overwhelming also for some students that they freeze with frustration. I, on the other hand see the pose as something like a tilt—like those old pinball games. You find that you can glide into the tilt and then as you are trusting in the support and the certainty that gravity will hold you up—you watch while your toes lift off of the floor—then you experience time standing still—a perfect moment elongated into future, past and present tense. It’s that teetering on the brink that I feel I am in my perspective and focus each day. If I think too much about the future I will collapse into an abyss of despair and anxiety—barely able to breathe. If I sort through the past, I will return to the surface with the knife between my teeth but regret held onto tightly in my hands. The posture is strength yet yielding surrender and trust. Somehow—I think this is the lesson to allow the other aspects of life to unfurl—the strength, trust and balance so that fear just doesn’t stand a chance of even breaking the surface of the water.

When I was 12, I swam competitively for the local YMCA. It wasn’t a rinky dink kinda swim team—no, they were serious AAU competitors and when you missed a practice during the week you had to go in on a Saturday and make up the workout. So, one weekend I found myself at the pool swimming the suggested yardage. It was daytime—we practiced at night so the sunlight coming in through the floor to ceiling windows casting glare on the water was unusual for me to witness. I was intrigued by the play of light and reflection on the floor of the swimming pool as I swam along the surface stroke after stroke—breath after breath. I began to notice how alone I was in the pool and then my better angels decided to wonder about sharks , since Jaws was the current rage in conversation during lunch at school. I , of course wasn't allowed to go see it—but who needed to actually see the movie that one’s imagination could fill in all of the necessary detail to allow mere hesitation to grow into an enormous great white shark in that YMCA swimming pool. Breath after breath—stroke after stroke… I swam as hard as I could barely breathing gasping as I clawed my way out of the pool. Fear has been my companion since I was a very young person. But, it was one thing when it was a great white shark chasing me in a swimming pool—quite another when it is something without a face—just a huge dark expanse that death can’t even touch. It’s not even dark—it is the unspeakable evil of wrenching me from my children that is so enormously powerful to even just speak of it jolts violent shockwaves of atrocity through my body, claws and squeezes my chest and punches my gut with such force I can't take a breath. I have to shake it off like those tics that coated my hair in that nightmare.

Fear of feeling too much vs stagnation or is it petrification…when did I get so old…

Drummimg journey, in drumming armpit sniffing crow dances, I let go of one of those deeply imbedded constitutional ideals that I need a man. The heavy silver ring flings off my skinny finger and is flung far into fresh deep snow on the top of the hill. Maybe I will find it in the spring when the deep snow has melted-- I doubt it somehow.

I find out that through further research, crows were a sacred bird of the god Apollo and even Celtic legend finds favor with them. The Anathabaskan Indians from the interior of Alaska talk to them if they encounter them in the woods as one might talk to their god. Zora Neale Hursten also refers to them, I am told and I still am waiting to know. She called it a crow dance and I keep finding them being referenced in my life. I discover that to the Awapaho and Cheyenne Indians, the crows that they refer to as dancing are the spirits of departed friends. So the crows are spirits? Why now have they abandoned me. I beseech you—I need you to show me the way—I need you to help me find the beautiful fearless way—I need you.

The trees are empty now. And, I die again for the life that is to come.