Crow Instructions

It's a cool breezy morning here at the lake. Spring has been full of rain this year and the leaves on the trees are a lush green and out across the water, the red banks of the shoreline are much less visible now. The long protracted drought has finally been quenched.

Phoebe's have nested close to the house and their morning conversations are a delight: fheebee, fheebee back and forth across the deck . The scarlet tanagers have returned for the third year and their distinctive call can interrupt me from most anything: kick-burrr, kick-burrr.

But my steadiest friends, outside of the bristly little wren whose kingdom is the deck, are the crows. They rule the treetops with vigor and zeal. They consider themselves the owner of everything in their realm whether anyone else thinks so or not. Communal, raucous, territorial and rough mannered there is nothing particularly elegant about them. And if the world doesn't revolve around them, no one ever told them. They sail back and forth between the trees cawing and shrieking; pestering hawks who are spying for lunch or grumpy owls waking up for dinner. They are the personification of confidence. They love nothing better than to discover an intruder and flap and caw and dive bomb them until they surrender and flap away on sulking wings. A group of them on surveillance can carry on and on filling the woods with their annoying call. It always translates to me as something like 'Gotcha! Gotcha!'

In thinking about how crows have such an innate sense of their purpose of life, I can't help but think how different we humans are from all the other inhabitants of the natural world. It seems to me they all came with a complete set of instructions on how to be phoebes, snakes, foxes, crows, while we don't come with any at all. We don't even get those half baked versions that weary parents find on Christmas Eve as they attempt to assemble the 5000 part toy with duplicate labeling of parts A and B and C written by a computer on the other side of the world.

No, we come naked, and already greatly annoyed at having been expelled from our warm water worlds as we are thrust into the bright lights of life—apparently without a field guide. For the rest of our lives we wander, trying to make some sense of our experiences. The journey is long and confusing and oftentimes overwhelming. At the same time, it is also exhilarating, wondrous and in rare moments, miraculous. When we make our last turn on the final leg, no matter how arduous our trip, most of us will be sad to go.

So why is that?

I am wondering this morning if we do indeed come with instructions. Perhaps life is laid out so we will slog and struggle, and maybe come near drowning on occasion but also have the chance to soar and sing and fly among the treetops. Perhaps we are meant to throw ourselves like our cousins the crows, whole heartedly into living. Could it be that each time we do our sense of direction and self becomes clearer? Could it be that life is designed to help us all have moment after moment that will burnish our understanding so hopefully by the time our journey ends, we will have learned its one great truth: love is all that matters.

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could."

Louise Erdrich The Painted Drum