By Dana Stovern
Written April 21, 2021
Pitkin Mesa, Paonia, Colorado
At the first-year anniversary mark of living with COVID-19, I was experiencing one of the most powerful and profound voids of my life. My existing business platform for The Magic of Somatic Money was dying a long death. Bob, my then-husband, and I were continuing to practice our quarantine, creating a continued deep lack of community connection. My Spirit Team (the lighted Divine counsel I work with), who usually gave me regular guiding updates, had gone MIA shortly after the January 6, 2021 insurrectionist attack on our nation’s Capitol and was giving me very little informational guidance to work with. I had launched my book “Are You Present in Your Body with Your Money?” on sheer faith. It did not help that I was living through another financial low in my life. I was experiencing the least amount of income in over a decade. By spring of 2021, it was clear to me that I was being required to live through one of the greatest voids of my life and do nothing. It was one of the hardest realities to which I’ve ever had to surrender. This piece was one of my saving graces.
About a year ago at this time, COVID-19 let air into the network of humanity’s water pipes woven throughout the global house, and a new rhythm sounded, kunk-kunk-kunk-kunk-kunk. Our homes shook with air in the pipes, echoing the change.
As this rattling looseness happened in the greater world, our little neighborhood churned with its own spring changes of wildlife. Deep in one of the ravines leading up to our mesa, the birds made new decisions about pecking orders. Who knows why the congress of neighborhood ravens rumbled with the gang of magpies, but they did. Who knows why the vote tipped in favor of the ravens, but it did. And the ravens ousted the magpies from their hidden tangled mess of wild fruit trees, Virginia creeper, elm, wild sweet pea, and tamarisk. In one shell-shocked swoop, with black plumage shimmering iridescent emeralds in the sun, the ravens kicked out the tuxedo birds. The magpies, insulted by the takeover, exploded out of the ravine and raged into the neighborhood, looking for new homes.
Of course, the humans were clueless to this fowl drama because, you know, COVID was playing its air-pocketed jam session in humanity’s water lines, kunk-kunk-kunk-kunk-kunk.
It was a ripe day when the magpies arrived. The tonal quality of eerie light filtering from the sun tipped toward a different sky. This light change with a subtle new cliff edge was like a twilighted eclipse at noon. It leaned in, even though the sun, moon, and earth were not collectively hi-jinxed in light and shadow.
The magpies hovered in the air above our yard, a roiling tuxedo-plumaged bird gang, pillaging nests from other birds that homed in our great pine trees and the other nearly forty trees in our yard. They attacked, dumped, and cleared the nests of an entire generation of eggs and fledglings from the trees to the ground. They raucously exclaimed their horrid triumph, wreathed in beautiful plumage, as only magpies do. My husband, Bob, and I watched in horror, unable to do anything to stop the destruction.