Song of the Day: Omaha / Counting Crows
Word of the Day: Caw!

It’s been all crows lately. I woke up one day a few weeks ago full of crows. Not “thinking” about them, more like being impregnated by them. Inhabited. Possessed. I went out into my studio and began to look them up on google. A few hours later I had sifted through hundreds of them. Photos and paintings, many articles. I had known that crows are incredibly smart (how intelligent? They will modify available objects, turning them into task-specific tools in order to access food. They have a sophisticated language. They recognize individual humans and develop unique relationships with them accordingly. They are incredibly familial, they play for pure enjoyment, and the list goes on and on…), but that was not why I was suddenly obsessed with them. Frankly, I had no idea what it was I found so magnetic about them.

But there was a quality to this fixation which I recognized. It had all the markings of a creative episode. I had known this kind of altered state for decades. It most often accompanied sustained, intense musical creativity. But it also came with things like working on my constructed language, writing my book, and making some video artwork. On the more general end, it signals creativity. On the more rare side, it augers insight, revelation, or even development (one of my most intense episodes with this kind of altered state was when I knew I was going to become a father, and I wrote over a dozen songs about my daughter -who was not only not born, she was not even conceived. I had merely kissed her mother-to-be, and instantly knew with utter certitude I would have a daughter named Ara, and began to communicate with her through music and lyrics.).

I began to paint crows. Hundreds and hundreds of crows. I found it incredibly frustrating. I felt like Richard Dreyfus’s character in Close Encounters, furiously sculpting mud and earth and household items trying to create this sculpture of some potent symbol on the periphery of Awareness. I went through a ridiculous amount of rice paper and paint. Slow, delicate strokes in miniauture detail, huge broad strokes of minimalist calligraphy, violent smacks of exploding paint. I smeared, brushed, splatted, dripped, and dotted paint over hundreds and hundres of feet of material. As I do with most things I paint, I burned them as well, burning off the edges, and letting fire take parts of the painting, adding to the surprise and discovery in the process. And as a reminder that every “thing” burns. Sooner or later, it’s all ash. BUT… nothing worked. And it made me mad, insane, berzerk. I literally spent twelve hours painting the first day, and instead of feeling purged, relieved by the engrossing study of BLACK FUCKING BIRDS IN INFINITE PERMUTATION, at the end of the day it was WORSE. Much, much WORSE.

I climbed into bed at 2am with my wife, smelling horribly of smoke and soot, having held lighters and candles to dozens of paintings- to no end. I had black paint in ever crevice of my hands, face, feet (I paint barefoot, often with my feet). My jeans and shirt were ruined, and when I lay down naked, I woke up in a dark outline of paint stains on the bed. Like a chalk line, but in black calligraphy paint.

That night I dreamed of crows. More accurately, I dreamed I was painting crows. And it drove me fucking crazy in my dreams too. Because my mind did not miss a bit. Even though my gross body had dropped out of the frenzy for a well-earned break, my soul never paused. My subtle body was even more intensely engaged. All night, me, the crows. Painting, painting. And the problem was simple, but impenetrable. I am not a great representational painter, but even if I were, it wouldn’t have helped. Because whatever crows were trying to manifest through me, it wasn’t about depicting some photographic portrayal of crows through precision paintings. But I was also damned in the other direction. Try as I might to conjure the “essence” of crows, or the extemporaneous exuberance of crows, the enigmatic fuckers would not YIELD to form. Not in the most abstract and minimal, not in the most sophisticated and detailed. I woke up the next morning INSANE. I literally opened my eyes and felt them -their energy, their depth, they’re being- in my BODY.

Those bastards had nested in my soul.

My wife looked at me like “oh no…” she recognized the obsession. The absorbtion. I grabbed a gallon of coffee, and ran out to the studio for day two of the fury. I spent another day in a tornado of black and white. Little crows, big crows. Abstract, representational. I went to bed late again. I dreamed of crows again. I woke up and went out to the studio again.

The third day, I got closer to knowing them, to finding them, when I painted a series called “Sheho” between two crows in a very weird conversation. Sheho is a ceremony in Zen whereby transmission of lineage mind between teacher and student in conducted. When that came out, I understood I was painting my family, that the two crows were my teacher Genpo Roshi and his successor, Musho Hamilton. I understood the crows in general were my lineage, were actually Zen monks. Living, dead, incarnated, excarnated. They were the counsel of my Zen guides (how the fuck could I be so dense, so slow, so dumb? It’s all the fumes. Paint fumes, smoke fumes, burning plastic fumes. That’s how.). At that point -which came fairly late in the day on day two- a little vista opened. When I finished that scroll, I had a major sigh. The first opening internally and externally, and when I set the brushes down and looked at it, I thought,

“Good. Now I can get started.”

As in good, now I know what I’m supposed to be painting (from the inside, the interior animating Presence which is supposed to be coming forth), and so I can begin.

I walked outside my studio to get more coffee back in the house, and I SHIT YOU FUCKING NOT, the tree in my back yard was full of CROWS!!!

I almost fell down when I saw them. To be honest, it scared the life out of me. My heart raced in shock and disbelief. Then, I started laughing. I jumped up and down, laughing, and the crows squawked at me. Are those REALLY crows, I wanted to be sure. Not black birds, but crows. After looking at hundreds and hundreds of pictures and paintings on google all week, I was somewhat an authority. And they were indeed crows. And I simply could NOT believe my FUCKING EYES. It was quintessential spooky. When I told Ken Wilber about this, he said it was the exact, true definition of synchronicity. I spun around, looking for someone -a nieghbor, a passer by- to share the moment with. There was no one. Just me and crows. I didn’t want to leave them either. But I could not contain my excitement, and went inside to tell my wife.

“Honey, there are CROWS in our back YARD!!”

She looked up at me like ‘what the fuck is going ON with you? Are you into witchcraft now or some shit?’ but instead looked at me from the corner of her eyes, and eight months pregnant lying flat on the couch, moaned “that’s greaaaaat… honey….”.

But she knew as well as I did that we had NEVER, not once, seen crows in our yard. I cannot recall seeing crows in our town, period.

In fact, the last crow I had seen was when I was staying up at Ken’s big house in the mountains, by myself. He had moved out of it, so had Marci, and I was there alone when a blizzard hit. Several feet of snow fell in no time at all, and I was stranded on top of a mountain with one of the best panoramic views in the World. I sat alone in the hot tub room in the back of the house, which was made of three walls of glass, perched above an enormous chasm of trees. Enormous, white flakes, impossibly pure and soft, wafted to the ground. I gazed for a long while, the hypnotic peace of ineffable beauty caste its spell of spooky silence, muted in White. Then, a single enormous crow flew by in slow motion, maybe twenty feet in front of me, and the entire snow-covered Mountain became a canvas to it Mystery. It stunned me life few things ever have. When it was out of site, my stomach tingled. My chest vibrated. It sounds ridiculous, but I really felt that crow was somehow linked to me, personally. That its presence was not an accident. Moments later, I wrote the song glass in that hot tub room, my body and soul still reverberating with that crow…

Falling snow,
on the back
of a gliding crow

Of a crow…
Of a crow…

And on this day, having told my wife about the crows, and shared it with at least one person, I ran back outside, excited as a school girl to see them again, play with them, tell them I know who they are, I know where they’re from. When I got outside, they were gone. They were fucking GONE. It had been, maybe two minutes I had been in the house. I was dumbfounded. Crestfallen.

I painted crows all day again. Then, went to hang out with Ken. A minute or so into my crow stories, he said “Well, have you BECOME THE CROW yet?” And then, another major “aha”. I went home, and painted my self-portrait. And then, a murder of crows sparked, and took flight inside me. They’ve been flying out since then, and the electrid energy of them possessing my body, mind, and soul began to relax at last into a communion. Since I had finally recognized them, and myself, they began to tell me their secrets. I started doing Big Mind with the crows I am painting. The first one told me…

Those seeking comfort
cannot be free
Those not free
cannot offer comfort

and so it begins…