walking to my brother's house in memphis with a few people that i did not feel particularly close to. i look into the sky and see hundreds of birds swooping down and landing in the trees around me. they were mostly woodpeckers and blue jays, but there was a small group of crows. among them was a huge crow (raven?) i identified as colleen. i stopped and watched in awe. the people i was with kept walking, as if nothing was happening.
once i started walking again, i saw a small, tight circle of people gathered around a low-laying branch. when i got closer, i saw that there was a HUGE bald eagle on the branch. it was immature, so it had not gained its distinctive coloring. instead, it was striped with the most beautiful and subtle tones of honey-amber-umber. its eyes were also huge, and looked like hunks of amber set into its skull.
a woman stepped towards it, getting a bit too close. it lashed out with its beak & talons, and instantly disemboweled her, feasting on her entrails. once it finished, i stepped (cautiously!) towards it, and held out my right hand. it grabbed onto it with its talons and ripped it open. i shrank back and sort of bowed or felt respect and fear, and i looked at my wounds.
the deepest was on the back of my thumb. when i studied it, the gash became an eye, and as i watched, the eye formed a spiral galaxy around it. when i looked up, i was in a room that was covered floor to ceiling with these tribal sort of paintings (very pacific-northwest). in the center of the room, there was a naked woman with the same paintings on her body. all of the painted forms were sort of cellular, made of sections within sections. within all of the forms, there were thousands of eyes, looking in all directions at once. this felt very comforting and familiar. i knew that the crow had painted these images.
