On Raven, Reading the Signs & a New Age Coming

Maybe we can all feel it – the stars and planets, shifting and gliding. Heavenly murmurings about the outer planets settling into, or arriving at, their new positions: Saturn, Pluto, Neptune. Even naming the planets like that seems to be some heavy incantation. It is a captivating way of understanding the world, but I am not mathematical enough to be astrologically savvy – it is too precise of a discipline, one of degrees & angles, cycles & patterns. My mind doesn’t seem to work that way. When I look up into the skies - and though I can follow Orion’s winter journey, and bid the moon good morning/good night – my lens is more ‘the cat & the fiddle’ than conjunctions & alignments

January sunrise.

And though the celestial firmament draws my attention at times – like one glorious morning of rose and golds in what has been a January of grey skies, all old ghosts and ash - I most often find myself looking at the ground. Maybe trying to keep my feet there as my head swims with all the violence and chaos around us. When trying to make sense of things, I look down rather than up for any signs that might help.

For a while there wasn’t much to see – all signs of life wiped clean by the snows. There is a purity to fresh snow, and we had lots of it, the white covering everything, tree branches, buildings, the fields. Then the hardness of the cold. It gives an almost a plastic quality to the way the snow looks, like a coating, a laminate. And after such snow and cold there are few signs of life. Were we all smothered by the snows, tunnels sealed up, nooks and crevices filled? Subnivian channels crushed? Where was everyone?

Then, slowly, over a few days, a stirring. Hare tracks, then lynx too. Glad they are both still moving through their eternal cycle. And then fox, squirrel, chickadee tracks circling the dried stalks of evening primrose, partridge up nibbling on the birch catkins. All is as it should be. Normal.

And then, both startling and beautiful, the work of Raven, his markings in the snow. What Raven had created demanded consideration, an attempt to parse out, imagine, see, understand, what old words might be conjured by the strange outline. It was so other-worldly, took my mind to those Age of Aquarius lyrics, ‘mystic crystal revelation’- the brain being a strange creature unto itself.

And so the sign? As the good folks of Minneapolis, and all across the US, show their incredible starch in the face of very scary and brutal conditions, during this time of hope and dread, what can these markings in the snow possibly tell us?

In their almost angelic strangeness, Raven’s tracks write a story that says normal, ordinary, is no longer enough. Out there is something better that must be sought out, fought for, created. If we are to meet these ruptures head on, then let’s make the most of it, let’s be willing to tear the whole, miserable apparatus of greed, injustice and mercilessness down. Every action, both small and large, counts now, for all of us. For our fellow humans, other creatures, and the land itself.

Raven, having slipped down to earth from the firmament above - being both mage and scribe, all ancient feathers and beauty - left his outline in the snow. And how not to understand upon seeing it that above and beyond is what is needed in these dark and confusing times, that it is time to push towards a time when ‘love will steer the stars’.

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The song Age of Aquarius was written by James Rado, Gerome Ragni and Galt MacDermot for the 1967 musical Hair. It was recorded by The 5^th Dimension.

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