Shadow's flight
Walking towards grief and the mystic presence of crows
When we talk about death awareness, there's a large proportion of that which is around awareness of your own mortality and the fact that you will die one day.
But there's an equally important component which is around the awareness of death of others and thereby the extent by which one is aware and accepting of the death of others is the experience, suppression or avoidance of grief.
I've spent my adult life living with the belief that I had gone through the process of mourning and grief around the death of a close friend when I was a teenager.
But this week contained a very potent dismantling of that presumption and what was most powerful about it was the way in which my grief and my suppression of it materialised in different planes of awareness, and in a way, different layers of reality or existence.
It first started with a very clear dream, the details of which I won't go into, but needless to say it was sufficiently symbolic for me to bring the dream to my psychoanalyst, who I meet with three days a week.
This is only the second time in one year that I have brought a dream to her and what was fascinating about the dream was the level of subterfuge and misdirection that my own subconscious created for me as the dreamer (the fact of which is a fascinating topic for another time).
In one moment of the dream I was with an older man, and being encouraged by him to walk down a corridor in a building. But when I discussed and reflected on the moment in my therapy session, I realised that I was being asked to walk down a corridor that was based on a real life experience - in an old familiar place - that, when I realised where it led. The feeling of grief opened up. In my dream I refused to walk down the corridor. In my therapy, I almost refused to talk about it. I was quickly engulfed in my deep grief.
At that moment I realised - by refusing to ‘walk down’ a specific corridor, that led to a place of deep pain in my past - that I had been putting off, avoiding and suppressing my experience of grief for a very, very long time.
All this to say that in my psychoanalysis session that morning I was finally - through my dreams, through my subconscious - offered - through the security and safety and relationship with my psychoanalyst - a space to finally confront the thing that I'd been avoiding my entire adult life: the deeply, horrifically painful experience of losing one of my closest friends to suicide.
Confronting that pain is one of the most difficult things I have to do and I'm at the beginning of that journey in a way. However, the reason I am writing about it now is because the awareness that my subconscious raised from the depths - via a dream, into my conscious awareness, that I was able to then articulate to my therapist - brought about a huge emotional change in me and the awareness of my grief, the awareness of my feelings of loss was powerfully unsettling. In my journey to develop Mortals, and support people to approach their own mortality awareness, I am a little bit embarrassed about how much awareness I have to cultivate myself.
But that aside… the really crazy thing was what happened next.
When I finished the session, I left the building and walked across the car park. I couldn't have gone more than 15 steps until, in my vision there was a bird circling me.
This bird circled around me - wings open and gliding - and then dropped down less than a metre in front of me.
It stared at me, it opened its mouth and just stood there. A black crow.
Now if it had been a pigeon I wouldn't have thought much of it, but the crow its own strange presence, and the fact that it just dropped down in front of me out of nowhere, circle after circle… It literally got in my way. I had to walk around it. It wouldn't move.
I thought that's really weird. That is really weird.
I had the sort of sense to wonder: why has this crow come out of nowhere to stare at me?
I mean, immediately after I walk out my psychoanalysis session where I finally - after 22 years - begin to open up to myself, responding to the invitation that my subconscious presented me from a dream, to began to finally explain and tell someone else about my experience of deep grief when I was 17 years old? Why did this crow appear just now?
I remembered - reluctantly almost because I try not to think too much about how the sausage is made when it comes to psychoanalysis - when I looked it up, that psychoanalyst Carl Jung values the crow and the raven as a very important symbol.
So what does it mean when the crow, which symbolises to Jung the human shadow, does something like that?
Jung said that the crow and raven are a ‘nigredo’ symbol. They equate to the dark aspects of the psyche. In Jungian psychology, the shadow represents the unconscious part of the personality which the conscious ego does not identify in itself, often encompassing repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, instincts, and shortcomings.
The crow, with its dark and often ominous presence, is seen as a symbol of this hidden part of the self.
But it’s not just Jung. He was pulling upon lots of different traditions and mythologies, and crows are used everywhere around the world.
In many cultures, crows are associated with mysticism, transformation, and the crossing of boundaries between life and death. Their appearance in myths and folklore is often as guides or messengers, leading souls to the afterlife or acting as a bridge between the material and spiritual worlds.
But if the crow represents the shadow, and the shadow is all the things that are unconscious… what's happening when a crow decides to plonk itself right in front of you after you finally confront the darkest part of you?
I'm left with a couple of thoughts:
There is great power in finally connecting with yourself and being receptive to the transformation that occurs through awareness - be it grief or mortality
That nothing happens in isolation, that everything is connected and that as meaning-seeking beings, symbols can be very important to navigating very confusing, very dangerous, very unsettling experiences
Whether random, or an expression of something larger and deeper, this crow reassured me more than anything else that I becoming aware of my true feelings and emotions - in this case my grief - which connects me to the world in a way that feels more enlivening than trying to shut it out (like I have for many years). As a result, I'm grateful to that crow for showing me something important.