"FAITH WITH A NAME," and, the crows my role models

a poem for Chad; crow inspo for you

Hello friend! New here? Welcome! This is a newsletter to explore and cultivate everything growing in the rich, broad boundary between science and animism. Every full moon there’s an essay, like are you a scientific animist? And every new moon there’s a poem. Like this one! And sometimes, we even try to make Scientific Animism happen in-person.

Now onto the post ↓

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Every year, right before Halloween, the crows descend on my city.

Literally the day before Halloween. And we often see them in the cemetery/arboretum nearby, roosting in the bigger trees.

Whole rivers of crows, pouring through the sky, 20-30 birds wide and 10? 20? 30? minutes long, leaders and stragglers lost beyond my attention span or ability to notice.

They choose a tree. Or several. One year, they consistently chose the tree in a friend’s yard. He learned to scare them away before bringing out the trash, as to not scare them while directly below. Better to have their startled, pre-flight poop underfoot, rather than as a shower.

They must come from all over. Their annual convention. Old friends and friends of friends, whole extended families, wintering together, telling stories and catching up.

I appreciate crows. Hemingway said that cats are the best anarchists, but I think maybe it’s crows. Or at least, theirs is the more aspirational anarchy. Cats are a brawl in the streets; crows a leaderless society.

No flying V here. No point-crow; no falling in line. A chaos of flapping, charmingly human in its crowd-through-a-train-station directed disorganization.

And can I tell you my favorite crow fact? The too-on-the-nose metaphor for how to resist oppression through direct action and mutual aid?

Driving through north-central Pennsylvania on our way to the eclipse, I saw four birds ahead, flying in the direction of traffic, too far away to make out. They looked big. Only 10 or 20 feet (3 or 6 meters) above the cars. There were three in a tight cluster, and one above and to the right. As we caught up to them, I saw that they were, yes, of course, crows—but also a bald eagle! The cluster of three was two crows, dive-bombing the eagle, which was tumbling and swerving to try to evade them.

Did I see this correctly? Is this… a regular thing?

Yes, it turns out.

Eagles are bigger and stronger than crows. One-on-one, the eagle would win every time.

But eagles are loners. Do they even language? They might not even language.

Crows, though. Crows talk. Crows convene. Crows scheme. And sometimes, if there’s a threatening eagle nearby, or maybe just if there’s a fat-cat eagle squatting some prime real estate in Crow Country, crows will chase. Or harass. Coerce that eagle right outta town.

Eagles can fly longer, so the crows work in shifts. Some chase, others rest. Then they swap.

An eagle would wreck a crow, if the eagle could get above. So a backup crow stays nearby, in case of a fallen comrade (that’s what the above-and-to-the-right crow was doing, in the group I saw).

And yes, sometimes they don’t even need to chase and dive-bomb. Sometimes they just harass; make such a racket that the eagle gets fed up and leaves. They again do this in shifts, a group shouting and shouting until tired, then swapping places with the resting crows.

What jerks. What icons. What absolute mirrors.

The “birds with black bellies” mentioned in the poem below were NOT crows. This poem was written for me this past summer, in California, with black-topped, blue-bellied Stellars Jays flitting about, making their own racket. (Maybe the poet thought “black-bellied” worked better than “blue-bellied”?)

By Ingrid Taylar from San Francisco, USA - A Caching Steller's, CC BY 2.0, Link

Regardless, now that I’m seeing rivers of crows multiple times a week, I wanted to frame this poem by telling you about my own beloved black-bellied birds.

Coelti

wrote this poem for me. We were at a conference/camp together that, in its own way, mirrored that chaotic flapping, that directed disorganization. It was p anarchist, is what I’m trying to say. This is the conference that helped birth my Scientific Animism journey, in 2023, which I linked in my first post.

This past summer, during the unconference day, Coelti hung a banner on a tree, “Come Get A Poem.” They write poems a lot. As a job? They are a street poet. Passers-by sit with them, have a conversation, and Coelti writes a poem. I witnessed two of these, each impressively different from the other; each appropriate to the conversation that preceded. Coelti is a more practiced poet than I.

They asked me why I was at the conference. It is nominally a work conference for me, but I’m more interested in the side conversations, especially those (which I mostly start) about Scientific Animism. So Coelti and I talked about Scientific Animism, and Stellars Jays, and how having the name, “Scientific Animism,” helped me start seeing it all over the place. They typed this.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

They ran out of space to sign it on the front, so here’s the signature on the back:

Typed version, for screenreaders & bots & copy-pasters:

FAITH WITH A NAME

a poem for Chad

birds with black bellies
 don't mind what you call
  them, as their call is not
necessarily for you: but when
 you know a name you begin to
   relate to the elements
 around you: constellate what
   is stellar about the earth
spinning in broad sky, space
  for you to be more than you:

one alone must die,
 a sacrifice required for
  futures to form from foam
 oceanic and mycelial, never
    naïve enough to believe
 that the center is just
   one thing, and yet

oneness flies and floats and
  cries and grows and we,
      (yes, we) can call it
whatever nonsense we like
  if it brings beauty closer
to the honor it deserves

Find

Coelti

here on Substack (they told me their page may be reinvented as typewritualist soon) and on Instagram at @typewritualist.