Learning to Notice

Crows and Plutonium

I struggle to post on here with any consistency or regularity. I struggle period. I struggle to find my niche, my focus, my purpose, my way in life. I haven’t followed through on the poetry project I was going to do this summer and have all but lost interest.

I have however, turned my attention to the signs in my surroundings. I’ve always been terrible with that. My nervous system, my intrusive thoughts, my troubled but also imaginative inner world have mostly kept me from seeing what’s right in front of me.

I’ve learned more about the “atomic city” I live in. I pay attention to the streets and homes designed to lure exclusively white professionals to manufacture plutonium for the first atomic bomb, where the high school mascot is the bomb and they are called The Bombers. I’m not fucking with you. Look it up. It’s horrifying.

I finally understand the reason for the dark, low vibrational energy that’s held me hostage for the past ten years living in Eastern Washington.

But I’ve also just recently given myself over to crows.

Earlier I wrote I shared a poem about seeing a group of three crows twice while on a walk with my ESA, Twix. Today, I came across a freshly dead crow in the middle of the sidewalk. Twix wagged his tail and gently sniffed the fallen bird. Twix holds space for everyone. I said, “Yes, buddy, I know. Friend is gone.”

Whenever he sees any living thing, he’s excited. When he wants to rush up to them I always say, “That’s a friend, buddy. We don’t scare our friends.”

Even in this town, with a superficial charm and dark past, the Messengers ask us to pay attention. They know what’s beneath the soil here, in the river, in its radioactive soul.

So, i admit I’m lost. I admit that every single day I feel my brokenness tighten in my chest, I feel the wrongness of being here, the alienation of a town that relishes its “victorious” creation.

I confess too, that this is a test and a lesson to hold onto what I value the most outside of the bubble, the echo chamber I lived in for over two decades.

Most of all, I’m grateful for my guides, for the crows that initiate a transition into something I can’t quite envision yet, but know is inevitable.

Whatever it is, will help me finally integrate my Shadow, finally, without apologizing for every breath it shares in my resistance.

The Crows look for the lost, the willing, the ones who honor their gifts. I hope I make them proud.

…

Even though it hasn’t been the rigorous study I had planned for my summer, I have experimented with different forms. These are three haikus about the topic I just discussed in the above article.