About six weeks before my daughter’s wedding I came upon a dead crow on my walk. As I walked by, I acknowledged its death and said a prayer for its safe journey and walked on. The further I walked the more I felt the urge to return to the crow, as if it was somehow calling to me to gather it up and honor it with a ceremony and burial.

On my walks I often pick up bottles, cans, papers and other debris to help keep the earth clean. I often find plastic bags or other containers in which to carry these items. Such it was that day. As I turned onto Old Chicago Road, there lay a large plastic bag. Interpreting the find as a call to pick up trash on this day’s walk, I picked up the bag and walked on. However, on today’s walk I didn’t come upon any trash, a rare experience. As I returned to the crow, wondering how I might carry it home to bury it, I realized that I had such a container, the large empty plastic bag that I had picked up earlier. I reached down and pick up the crow and placed it in the bag. I was surprised to notice how soft it felt. It hadn’t been dead long.

I finished my walk. When I got home, I decided to bury the crow in a landscaped area at the back of our house where I often do sacred ceremonies by making a Mandala-Sand Painting. A sand painting is a ceremony is an ancient ritual from Peru that you do on the earth to engage the spirits and elements of nature to assist in bringing into manifestation your prayer and intentions.

I opened sacred space, dug a hole, conducted a brief ceremony, buried the crow, and marked it with stones and flowers. After a few weeks the flowers wilted and died and I cleared the area, placing stones to mark and honor the crow’s burial space.

I had noticed that since finding the dead crow, there had been no crow activity on my walks or around my home. Typically, I would often see crows and hear their caws. But nothing. Complete silence since finding the dead crow. Were the crows upset, unhappy with my removing it and burying it? Or had they migrated on? I didn’t know.

A few days before my daughter’s wedding, I decided to do a Mandala-Sand Painting with prayers and intentions for a good, beautiful, and perfect wedding ceremony, knowing how much planning and work had gone into the wedding. Originally, the wedding was to be a destination wedding at Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. However, COVID hit and with travel being prohibited, those plans were canceled, and the date moved from June to October with a new location in Greenwood, Indiana.

I built the “wedding Mandala-Sand Painting” over the place where the crow was buried. I finished creating it, putting in all my prayers, good intentions and hopes and dreams for the wedding of my daughter’s dream and walked around to the front of my house. As I did, I was greeted by the caw of crows, screaming as if to get my attention. And there, sitting on the roof tops of the houses across the street were three crows. The awareness of weeks of absence of crows with their sudden appearance and outburst of their familiar caw at this particular moment was greeted with great excitement and joy. It was as if the crows had returned to honor both my tending to the dead crow and to the Mandala-Sand Painting I had just done for my daughter’s wedding. And to add to the magic of that moment, according to crow lore, when a trio of crows appears, plan for a special event as they indicate a wedding, festivity, or the arrival of a new-born baby on the way. In any scenario life will be full of joy and fullness. And such was my daughter’s wedding. This painting, Crows, Ravens, Weddings and the Magic of Life: The Father-Daughter Dance is my way of capturing one of those magic moments.

P.S. My daughter and I have a long history with crows and ravens. Many years ago, the raven appeared in a shamanic journey as my daughter’s power animal. Crows have appeared to me on occasion to alert me to situations that I needed to pay attention to. To read of a humorous experience with the crows, read my blog The Caw of the Crow at https://www.sheldonshalley.com/blog/2015/02/19/the-caw-of-the-crow-ctwpz