I've started showing up at the Windstorm Campus around 6:30 or 7:00 pm to watch the crows. Or ravens. I'm not sure which they are but they're huge, black, loud and breath-taking. They show up just before the sun disappears past the horizon when the sky is blue-gray or indigo. Year round. A whole flock, like I've written, a murder of crows. They call to one another, deep, baritone calls, and the normal sounds of Blue Jays and Flickers and Junkos are suddenly absent. It's as though the other birds huddle in the dense trees, silent, allowing the crows to reign for their twenty minutes of so, until they vanish into the shadows of the encroaching night.
I was sitting on the edge of the raised planter around the base of the courtyard clock. The giant sunflowers (fifteen feet tall) and the teddybear sunflowers (eight feet tall) were tumbled down around me. I'm silent, head tipped back, watching the sky. Watching the silhouettes of the crows move across the circle of sky bordered by evergreens. In black Levis, black, steel-toes boots, and a black T under my black leather riding jacket, I feel a little bit like one of those inky crows. The wind blows my dark hair around my shoulders and I can almost imagine flying with them.
Who is the God of the future? When we get to a point where we can map our minds and create smart, self-adapting programs, clones of ourselves not encased in skin, what then will be our God? How will we know our souls? If the deciding factor of "life" is the ability to reason, to be self-aware, to be protective of the self, who then will be granted "living" status?
If I can gaze at an empty sky and conjure from my memory crows, conjure from my memory the awe and power and loneliness that I feel when I watch them, then project them across my own field of vision. Will I then be seeing crows? If I can feel the wind across their wings, will I then be a crow?
To know God, we must know ourselves. Those Big Questions -- what is the soul, what is the meaning of life -- the ones that are written off as impossible to answer, become mandatory prerequisites. If we map our minds do we map our souls? Is the soul required? Is the soul empathy?
Who will answer these questions before the future is upon us? Is it now?
E.J.
