In the Journey, who is your companion?
Who is your guardian, your guide, your icon, your shepherding guide?
Me? Raven and crow, telling.
We’ve noted in an earlier blog study, that we’ve been involved in the Lone Ranger, as designers, in the past — the current, lightly letter-spaced treatment of “Lone Ranger” isn’t a Girvin font, nor the brush-washed rendering isn’t a Girvin rendering of a raven winged spanning. Still, we have deep history with Disney, as consulting designers, and Bruckheimer. My first direct work for producing director Hollywood types, along with Tony Scott was for Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer.
Top Gun, that opening collaboration.
Still, it might’ve been.
We love, write about, those birds.
For designers, they’re perfect, all black spatter, like the haboku wash of one of Girvin’s paintings of ravens in flight, like gestures of spilled paint, the cast of blackbirds flying by. Being one known as a corvid-lover, a perpetual admirer of Crows, Ravens and Jays, friends often presume that anything to do with crows, I might have done.
I believe in something else:
That crows, ravens and jays are the new, ancient smart birds — they’re the ones that live, and live on, and on. And in a manner, it’s that tough, smart, resilient even playful character that we all need now. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the ancient corvid class are seen as spectacularly intelligent, mythic light-finders, warrior partners, co-hunters with wolves, the tricksters of the forest —
they’re here, they’re not — they are seen, then they are shadow, like much of life. It comes and goes — in a blink. I have my own tellings, the Raven Stone.
What I wonder is — for you, what is your animal icon —
what do you carry with you?
When you think of your dreams, your attractions, animalic alignments, you are —
lion, jaguar, peacock, dog, bull, frog, or snake?
Or?
What I find is that there a calling, something pulls you to one, and it keeps calling, that journey drawing you nigh — to yes, what, that answer?
Moving to the garage, I heard this kaw, cawing.
What was that, calling?
Again, the call — a crow, inside a building structure? Impossible.
It was under my car, calling out.
So I whispered to this little bird, baby crow.
A swish, swishing sound, a whisper.
And she looked up at me, moving closer.
Then closer —
and, KAAAWWW!!!
I jumped, she was disarmingly loud.
And talked to her, a little baby,
calling my daughter to come over with some food for her.
She came, we talked about this little bird.
Meanwhile, a grouping of crows flew by, screeching.
I studied her, talked to her, held her.
She looked at me, blue-eyed.
I wonder about the idea of animals, their link to us, how we connect with them, what we think of them — how we hold them in esteem.
Icons, dream spirits, Gods, companions —
and the touch of this little moment.
A point of momentum — that could change a life, forever.
I contemplate the relationship of
the corvids to me, and they offer in their resolute seeing —
the cawing call: “pay attention.”
Right now, this moment, there are a string, watching me — one close,
studying and
looking at me.
They look at me, as I do: them.
In that sharing, the reflectivity, I learn something, hold something of them, a leaning in to their world. And they lean into mine.
What is your icon, who do you lean into, listening?
TIM | GIRVIN DECATUR ISLAND STUDIOS
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