Chapter 20 - A Murder of Crows

Coincidence Speaks

Jul 12, 2024

Happy Friday friends! Welcome to Chapter 20 of Coincidence Speaks.

Chapters are crafted so they can be read on a standalone basis. For the full experience head this way to start at the beginning!↩️

In full transparency, I’ve been more than a little nervous working through this chapter, because the themes in my writing always show up in my own life, and I find the energies of this particular chapter quite daunting. The line between fiction and reality can be quite thin, at times so thin it disappears altogether.

In fact, the line completely disappeared in the midst of writing this. If you want to see how, please head to the Comment Section at the bottom straight after reading. 😮

Chapter 20

A Murder of Crows

It was supposed to be a routine business meeting.

Cliff was a client Paul had known for years. An older man, a thoughtful man, with a “statesman” type of vibe. Always gentlemanly in both dress and manner.

In fact, Cliff was the very same client who had graciously encouraged Paul to interrupt a previous meeting to take a phone call from Clara on their new home contract, celebrating with him afterward.

“I’ll do the best I can, but I can’t promise anything, plus it’ll take a few weeks to get through Board,” Paul was saying, when Cliff’s congenial face suddenly distorted into something he didn’t recognize.

Spittle flew off his lips. “I need that funding NOW.”

Paul was taken aback. The near manic look in Cliff’s eyes was unexpected. Alien. It was the look of a man who’d been backed into a corner. A man who’d lost control, and would stop at nothing to regain it.

Taken by complete surprise, nothing Paul said from there would assuage the situation, and Cliff stormed out of the office, looking for blood.

Paul sat in his office afterward, reeling. Before before he even had a chance to gather his thoughts, the desk buzzed with the vibration of an incoming text.

“CALL ME ASAP”

He snatched up the phone to see that one of his most complex, high-touch clients was experiencing emergency cash flow issues, and their entire business was at risk.

The rest of the day followed suit. Everything went haywire, as if he had acquired a sudden, inverted form of the Midas touch. Emails were misinterpreted. Higher-ups piled on extra work from the top down. Deadlines were moved up. Everything and everyone screamed for his attention.

And it didn’t stop at the office. The commute home was riddled with traffic, the highway backed up by not one, not two, but three crashes. Luckily they were all minor fender-benders and everyone seemed to be okay, but Paul didn’t care about anything but putting the day behind him.

He finally arrived home late that evening to a distraught, exasperated Clara at her own wits’ end. As he climbed up the front stoop with heavy plodding steps, he could already hear the telltale sounds of overtired children teasing and screaming and crying somewhere inside.

“I’m DONE—your turn to deal with them,” Clara announced before he’d even set foot in the foyer. Noel and Luke were possessed, twin rampaging wolverines, destroying everything in their path, slamming doors, throwing inanimate objects and screeching at each other.

The blissful connective peace of Nature from just the day before had been swallowed whole, commandeered into something spiteful and angry and demanding. Life had made a sudden, vicious about-face, going from sharing its deepest most intimate secrets to ripping the rug out from beneath him, laughing at his expense: “Ha! Idiot! You thought it was supposed to be simple? Smooth? Easy? You thought wrong!”

As more days piled on, no matter how hard Paul worked to recalibrate and recenter himself, something would promptly come up to yank him out. He’d be consumed by the next project needing attention, the next crisis, the next fire to be put out. And there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide—whenever he managed to set aside a little quiet time in the day to calm a highly unsympathetic nervous system, the moment would explode with another urgent call, email or text requiring immediate attention.

The interruptive timing would almost be comical, if it wasn’t so ridiculous.

Paul sat steaming in his car in an empty parking lot, yanked into frustration after yet another contentious off-site business meeting. The impulse landed to grab his journal and re-read the last entry from the night before. It already felt like lifetimes ago:

“Nature is alive. Nature speaks. It’s like I’m opening up to a subtle, universal language of interconnectedness. Of correlation. Everything is expressing and receiving information in its own unique way. Everything.”

“Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face,” he found himself muttering, a timeless Mike Tyson quote landing exceptionally hard.

He fired up the ignition, ready to speed off to his next meeting, which was sure to be every bit as fun as the one that had just concluded.

But something gave him pause once more. Slow down… tune in… He switched his phone to silent mode, preparing to take a few slow breaths.

“I’ve already tried this a million times,” Paul growled. “Every time I set aside a little freaking time for myself I just get ambushed by some new emergency.” But maybe muting the phone would provide a little breathing room.

Within seconds, a fire truck fired up on the road right behind him, its siren blaring so close that it startled Paul out of his seat, banging his head on the car roof. A stream of screaming emergency vehicles proceeded to follow in its wake over the next several minutes, like a funeral procession of paid wailing mourners.

Incredulous and shaken, Paul put on a pair of noise-canceling headphones to counteract the sudden procession of sirens. And that, to his further annoyance, was the moment the headphones stopped working altogether. They had been perfectly fine the week before. Perfectly fine for the entire past year since he’d bought them, in fact.

“What the hell! Why now??”

Finally he shut off his phone totally and shut down the car ignition, still surrounded by wailing emergency vehicles, and lamented aloud in total surrendered exasperation:

“What in the actual hell is going on? Is it something I am doing wrong? Why can’t I just be in flow all the time?”

There was no response; not that he was expecting one. But at least the sirens moved further into the distance, fading away, until the last remnants lapsed out of earshot.

Finally.

In the blessed peace and quiet, Paul closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and worked once more to calm racing thoughts and a pounding heart.

A cackle from a nearby tree shattered the all-too-brief respite. A beady black eye stared at him with a taunting glint. A single crow was the source.

A second crow catcalled from another branch. Then another one joined in, and another. More and more gathered together in a sudden flurry of roiling black wings, screeches and cackles crescendoing louder and louder into an ear-splitting cacophony.

If this was Nature speaking, he didn’t want to hear it. Screaming roadway sirens had been replaced by an entire tree full of shrieking and flapping crows. It was like that particular tree, the only one in the parking lot, had put out advance invitations and was now hosting a raucous party for the sole reason of mocking his attempt at peace and quiet, and every crow in the surrounding county had RSVP’ed +1.

The harder he tried to ignore them, the louder they got, louder and louder, finally so loud he couldn’t think anymore, and lost all remaining semblance of control.

“You sons of bitches! Shut the hell up!” he shouted back at the party of mercilessly ranting crows.

To absolutely zero effect.

“No wonder you bastards are called murders,” he muttered. “It’s an F-ing crow-cophany.” The Dad humor, at least, remained strong in Paul.

“Why won’t they leave me the hell alone?”

The unholy interruption of screeching black birds was almost the perfect little microcosm of the way his life had been going lately. Just like the sudden procession of emergency vehicles. Just like the headphones that had stopped working right when he needed them most.

And it finally began to dawn on him.

“Wait a second…

If it’s true that life really is happening for me… wouldn’t that mean that the annoying and even the ‘bad’ stuff has just as valid a reason to exist?

And as annoying as they are, don’t these crows technically have just as much of a right to be here as I do?”

He swallowed hard, a fundamental realization landing like a gut punch:

“After all, I’m part of the species that’s cut down half the trees on the planet and covered it in concrete… and here we are in a paved parking lot as big as a football field… this is the only tree left…”

The crows abruptly stopped cackling, and the entire murder now stared at him intently, rows and rows of black eyes glinting in the sunlight, as if they were tuning directly into his thoughts. As if their silence was affirming his new line of thinking.

“What the…” Paul was struck dumb by the timing of their coordinated response relative to his inner inquiry.

That’s when the full truth finally hit him.

“What if my own attachment to things going MY way at the expense of the greater world around me is the very thing holding me back??”

In a massive flurry of blurred black wings, the full murder of crows departed the tree en masse as quickly as they arrived, leaving him alone in full, uninterrupted, blessed silence.

And within the space of that silence, potent intuition dawned within, accompanied by a growing sense of unmistakable truth. A deep inner knowing crystallized into new insights, and he scrambled to record them in the journal lying open and waiting in the passenger seat:

“What if the very situations that bring up my most deep-seated emotions are exactly where I most need to go now? What if the same ‘magical’ flow state I am so enamored with is also creating these challenging situations not bring me down, but to bring to light all the emotions trapped within me, beneath the surface, so I can become conscious of my own blind spots?”

Maybe the flow state wasn’t just to be found walking around in a paradisiacal bubble. Maybe it was always there, and always working to provide active reflections of his inner state of consciousness—maybe that’s the function of life itself…

Paul’s inner compass began to shift as he began to embrace the possibility that the feedback loop of his life was working in two ways—both to show the pathways toward ever more expansive free-flowing connection, and to highlight the inner blockages that were standing in the way of that.

When things didn’t go well, it wasn’t just random circumstances pulling the rug out just for some kind of sick sadistic pleasure. Even though it definitely felt that way sometimes.

The most challenging situations actually held some of the most highly potent forms of feedback—unmistakable signposts revealing blind spots already embedded within him over the course of a lifetime—unconscious conditioning previously unseen and unknown—that had ripened enough to be seen in the full light of day.

These blind spots came in the form of long-forgotten physical and emotional traumas held within the nervous system, solidified and cemented in place by stagnant belief systems and thought loops that had been ingrained by repetitive conditioning during the open innocence of childhood. And once the trapped emotions related to these blockages were seen and felt and given space to breathe, once the truth of their origin was brought back into conscious awareness—completely unexpected positive outcomes would happen all on their own. Creative outcomes far more beneficial than anything he could’ve personally worked to create himself.

Now every time the inevitable rough patch occurred, Paul could simply ask what the arising tension was there to show him, what he was being invited to learn about it—and the clues towards both its origin and its eventual unraveling would never fail to be reflected within the circumstantial patterning of everyday life. The same way the murder of crows appeared as a living metaphor that not only reflected his inner state—but also gave invaluable feedback to illuminate the pathway forward.

All he had to do was pay attention. To listen to what his own life was communicating. Which was much easier said than done.

Because with listening, came the responsibility for action.

End Chapter 20

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Coincidence Speaks

Chapter 20 - A Murder of Crows

Coincidence Speaks

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