Category Archives: Raven Speaks

The Raven’s Lesson

And I told her, “You have to make a choice. You can’t go around looking for something or someone to tell you what to do. Where to go. Especially in your spiritual life. That’s why you left the church. You didn’t want anyone telling you what to do.“

“See, some deities and forces of nature will always be the same thing. Like how a cat will always be a cat, until it dies and become something else. A corn stalk will only be the various stages of corn stalk. But us humans, we can be anything. We can shift our consciousness and explore. We can create with our minds. We can meld as we yearn. This intelligence is what makes us special. But, because of this, we are also vulnerable. This is what I am talking about. Our openness makes us easy to entrance, to seduce, to be tempted away from the path we have been treading on when we are not sure if we really want to leave it. So we have be careful.“

“Don’t be fooled, my friend.”, I said. “That there are many deities that are like the corn stalk. If you go to an applesauce maker and you start asking him about peanuts, eventually, you are going to find yourself talking about apples. If you go to the Mother-mother Goddess, she will bring out the mother goddess in you, no matter what the topic. The Mother Goddess force will make you want to stretch your love for anyone, whether it is good for you or not. And then if you go see someone else about the same matter, say Aphrodite, she will show you something entirely different, but very Aphrodite-like.

“It’s prisms upon prisms. It is hard to know which is what. That is why we keep in close contact with our teacher guides. They have been and still are, shamans. They know this special skill of blending and yearning and twisting and turning around the rivers of energetic influences in the cosmic and real life scenarios. They know how to come back home for respite and leave those influences outside the door. The teachers, they stay outside the drama and they give really good advice. They tell us how and whether to deal with new spirits. They don’t ever get up on the throne or give commands. They rather inspire and speak sweetly. And if they yell, it is out of concern for us. It is never an admonishment. We still have to make our choices.

“We are taught the craft of discernment. Of gratitude to the various beings and forces around us, of the ways of merging, detachment, respect and incorporation. If we can keep our heads, we really can have it all. It’s fun and it only works as we learn to stay in our center. Yes, it’s important to have great respect and honor for our Spirit helpers, but the relationship is reciprocal, not hierarchical. Yes, they are vastly more powerful than we are, but they are not interested in bossing us around, and don’t have life plan for us either. Their agenda is to help us come closer to our own center. How that is manifested on our physical plane is up to us.

“If you are actively looking for spirit to tell you what to do, you are looking for another prison. You are lying down when there is work to do. You are letting your fears take over you. The final answers to what we are looking for are not going to come from the lips of a spirit guide. They are going to come from the realizations we have when encountering the pressure, the currents of life. Well, the spirit guides might tell us those things, but we won’t understand them until life teaches them to us in spades.

“All of the helping spirits are talking about love. While some are committed to supporting our discovery process, others have their specific way to get to it. Kind of like a relative keen on ‘helping’ or a friend obsessed with a hobby. No one can tell you your way. Only you know your way. Maybe your way is through another prison, I don’t know. Maybe I was giving you this big speech because I was just hoping for some company along my own path.”

~~~

She had stopped listening and was receding, I could tell. This frightened me and I became angry.

I shouted, “As Above, So Below. It’s not a celebration every day in the spirit world. There’s a lot of work to do, beginning with ‘Why am I so afraid?’. Can you have a relationship with spirit without giving your power away? Can you accept the love that these great beings have to share with us without feeling unworthy or tremendously better-than-anyone-else worthy?”

I told her that there wasn’t enough room in the boat for everyone when we are all off on our own, looking for the perfect boat, which only seats one, or maybe two, or maybe enough room for a handful of friends. We didn’t even have to go anywhere. We could stay right here and focus on the shadows in the room. And our friendship.

“Let’s do this together”, I said. “Let’s do the great adventure. The one where you fall down and then you wander around wondering why that happened, and then you meet someone new, and then you lose yourself, and then you find yourself again except that you are different. Then you relax into yourself as much as you can with having been changed, and then you get used to it, until it becomes too much and you have to hit the road again. Another growth spurt. See who’s still around from the last round.”

~~~

But she wasn’t around anymore. She had gone back to her search and I was left alone, with my shame and anger. The raven was hop, hop, hopping outside my window and the glass of water next to the sink was once again, my only friend. My truth burned at me through the vanity mirror and my eyes looked away.

“Dammit”, I said, “Why can’t you just be nice?”

Raven Speaks

The Raven, she is relentless.
She won’t shut up and she makes no sense to those that have not tested their trail.

She is loud,
even in her scrapes
because every sound that comes from her,
rings of the truth.
Truth we don’t want to hear.
Truth we bleed for.
Truth of the spaces we missed, of the things we buried.
Truth of the lies spun around us.

Truth of impending doom if we do not follow her into the darkness to retrieve what is ours.

Raven II

black

The Raven, she embodies the hollow night.
She sits in the blindness next to you, quiet, yet unspeakably noticed.

She peers into the spaces between your bones, and she sees everything about you. She sees it all, and then she envelops you with great comfort.

A glow escapes her feathers, whose crevices are unable to keep back her infinite soft light, this compassion, this grace, this calm.

Both powers held in her shape
of daunting yawn of night
of complete and quiet acceptance.

You are known here. You are loved here.
In the silence.

by Tasara

Raven ‘Gets’ the Light

One of the Raven Stories: Given to Tasara by a raven

[Meant to be read Out Loud.]

The people were living in a dark time. They didn’t really know it because that was all they had ever experienced, day after day, foraging for food by smell, bumping into things that other people had moved into the trails sometimes.. They had a way of living that was just fine, with berries and nuts and a story here and a story there but there was something missing…something they knew they missed somewhere deep in their bones but without knowing it in their heads.

But Raven knew it for sure because she had been to places of light and of dark and seen them both, along with everything in between. She was a great traveler and a great shape-shifter. She traveled in the dark so often it was as natural for her as a fish swimming in the ocean. She could see perfectly well in the dark. She could see the souls of beings and see their veins running fresh with hot blood. She could see the blocks in their patterns and their hidden secrets as well. She could see the curves of the dark cavernous walls and feel their vibration, and she knew them to be in the inner vessel of the Great Mother’s womb.

She wanted her human companions to be whole and balanced, thinking not only would it be nice and nurturing but that it would also be a whole lot more fun for her. It was time for them to go live somewhere else, anyways. So she donned her traveling cloak and became a half raven, half man.  A wily man, full of spunk and adventure, all ready to take on anything, to call on all sorts of mysterious and cantankerous powers in order to accomplish his means… or goals…or means..or whatever.  😉

Then he ventured off. But he was barely out the door and he got a craving! And you know how that sort of thing works with a raven..cravings…curiosities…. 🙂  So he went down to the wide, wide Cauldron of Compassion that is hidden underneath the Tree of Life and dipped and SIPPED his beak into the pure and delicate liquid gold. Yummy-nummy!

The priestess who tended the Cauldron just smiled at his greediness, watching how he treated this elixir like candy, seeing the path he was about to take.

He went and climbed the highest branches up until they were only tendrils so light there was nowhere else to step but right onto the white-sketched avenues of the upper realms. He waved at Spiderwoman but didn’t get too close because he knew that she had a job for him and it was impossible to say no to Spiderwoman.  He steadied up the crazy ladders to see what was up there..only finding stardust and not much real light so to speak for his naked bodied friends down in the caverns.

I mean, there was lots of light, being so close to heaven and such but there wasn’t what he was looking for. He knew it only by color and feel and he felt he needed the color and kind of light that the Sun seemed to have.  The Sun had so much of it, he thought that perhaps he was a big thief that needed to be taught a lesson. Maybe the Sun was the whole cause of this problem with people bumping into things and not being able to look into each other’s eyes – ever. It was the Sun. And he was a big thief.

So he concocted a plan. He jumped up onto a passing asteroid and went straight towards the sun, pretty unnoticed until he saw a piece of the most perfect light he could find, in shape, smell, size and song. He grabbed it as he was passing by!  But it was sticky, which he did not expect. His cloak stuck to the sun piece and he was pulled off the asteroid like a bad accident swirling, to find himself floating in the sun realm, all without direction or paddle or anything. The sun piece was like glue…or lava… it certainly was not a piece of anything but rather a blobby, fluid, unmanageable thing. The more he tried to manage it, the more it changed shape on him.. and the more he just got it all over himself. What a mess.

Oh what a mess. And on top of that, he was hot! Ooooo so getting so hot ooooohhh!! OOOHHHHHH!!! And he burned, burned, burned, the sun liquid burned all the way through him until it reached his stomach, where the Elixir of Compassion was still from his morning drink.

The combination of the two golds sent a shock through him and at this moment he thought he was going to die but instead he heard the voice of the Sun saying, “Son. What in the world are you doing?”

“Thief! Thief! I am teaching you a lesson and returning the light to the naked people!”

“You funny man, you, Raven being. You have spent so much time in the Darkness that you have forgotten that one does not have to steal any light from anyone. One only has to ask. And one does not have to cross great divides to find it. It is found everywhere inside, outside, alongside and inbetween. This sort of light cannot be stolen, only given. And just because you amuse me with your antics again, I will tell you another secret; it is in it’s nature to grow when given. HOW COME DO YOU THINK I GOT TO BE SO BIG?!?”

And Raven was tumbled back down to the earth, feeling all fried and a bit broken from landing on a protruding root at the bottom of the Tree of Life.  Stars were whirling around his head but he batted them away, annoyed that they were not the kind of light he had ventured off to get.

He lie there for a long time, dying, singing about dying, getting bored with not dying, until he heard a sweet song from beneath him. It was the lady of the Cauldron of Compassion, singing to him. He crawled, dramatically, to her entrance, until he found it easier to just walk in and find out what she was doing. She was singing, sweetly, as I said, and smiling at him all at the same time.

She dipped a ladle into her pool and served him a nice cup of golden elixir broth. As he reached out to accept it, it turned into a bowl of delicious elixir broth. He almost dropped it in surprise and that made her giggle.

She said, “You see?”

And he GOT IT and said, “Oh yes. I knew that.”

Which made her giggle again.

“Would you like a ‘to go’ lid for that?” she said.

“Well.. yes. I was just going to say that.”

So she bundled up the elixir of love and compassion for him. When he handed it to her so she could do that, it grew a little bit so she had to go find another container. When she handed it back to him, it happened all over again but she knew that was going to happen and had put it in a container with extra room in it just for that reason.

Raven was beaming now, all beamy and smiley and unable to think of anything to say, (especially anything smarter than she probably had to say) so he did a little bow, quirked a Raven quirky noise and traipsied out the door….to make his way back to the darkened cavern. Where his naked people friends were.

But on the way down there, he kept thinking of trouble. The trouble was that the darkened caverns were suppOSed to be dark and if he brought light down there, there wouldn’t be any place for darkness to be anymore.

So he came up with a beautiful plan. He snuck down there really quiet with his ‘to go’ container all covered, slipped back into his Raven Beauty warrioress healer clothes and then … then she ladled out the dinner soup of the night with little drops of compassion in each bowl. Not too much to blow the ceiling off or even brighten a hovel but enough to lighten the hearts of his little naked friends and show them the way out of the caverns to another place. Their time here was done and she knew it was wise and best for them to take what they have learned about being in the dark and find a tree somewhere with bright sky and sun overhead.

After dinner, she set some dim sconces up on the walls, fifty feet apart, so people could find them, one by one, wooed by the self-love in their hearts to the love in the guidance to move to a new place. It was really, really fun work to do. Gold meets gold and things just grow. Naked people come but naked people gotta go at some point, y’know? Momma’s gotta make room for more naked people comin’ in!

As the people gradually made their way to the higher tunnels, where the light leaked down, they went into a state of shock, stumbling a bit for not being able to understand the things they saw and match them up with what they felt. But then they remembered their night ‘vision’ which was not something that had anything to do with their eyes, but with other senses they did not have names for.  When the sun finally hit their eyes, if you had been there you could have seen flint in them, a permanent mark of passing through the dark, a knowledge that would never wash away, ever, as they held each others hands as they used to in order to find their way…as they walked into a brilliant golden sunset.

One night, to discover the glories of fireflies and singing night birds and moon flowers before the full intensity of what was to come, came – and it sure did come with the next morning.

The people learned that connection could be warm, not only from survival. They learned that if they gave, then the giving made what was given even larger than it was before. They learned that they could not control or shape or bind or hold what was given… they learned lots of other things too that could just go on and on.

And the Raven walked back into the darkness. There was much work to be done in there.. and a whole lot more space to do it in. She smiled and cackled and played with the sconces as he gathered them all up to return their light back to the Lady of the Cauldron. What would he do with all that stuff anyways?

The next plan at hand was to spy on the people in a fortnight and find out what in the world they were doing.

by Tasara

Raven

She swims under the ocean, goes where I go.
Pulls canoe through the stars, to where I don’t know.
Her back, steaming mystery, hard-coded resolve.
Jeweled eyes marble black, into which I dissolve
Glints of forge-fire, emerald, yew
Pools in the darkness, deep chasm blue.

She’s lodged in my body, strong, loud and unshown
a monster of chaos, black feathers explode
ca cawing with laughter, “make sense, discard,
make sense, discard, discard, discard, discard”
old friend, my heart, my guide by my side
without whom my life would be calmer but blind.

by Tasara