My parents' old back yard. A big black bumblebee floats by, slow as a rowboat. No, wait, it's feathered. A raven chick no bigger than a bee!

Then the mama raven swoops by, and lands in the uphill neighbors' tree. It's an odd one, spangled with rectangular fruit: packs of playing cards, twig-skewered. She steals a beakful of cards, and as she flies off, Raven Mom projects (onto a round shimmering thing--a floating mirror?) a humanish face expressing the moods and situations that the cards symbolize in Tarot--although it's a plain card deck, this raven's scholarly--knows all their meanings, even without the classic neo-medieval images.

I creep to the hedge and peer through, curious. Raven plucks more cards, tries on more moods--or archetypes, based on the cards? Speculative expressions, goofy expressions! Like testing new hues of makeup in an oval mirror--"does this work?" Her reflected face is mobile--beak smiles, brows semaphore, eyes colored somehow, unravenishly revealing where she glances and if they're narrow or wide instead of their usual black on black. Flutters two long mammalian lashes. Sexy. Winks.

The neighborhood wolfdogs growl at me, hedging as I am. I snuffle as though I'm a dog too, and they promptly calm. It's only humans you gotta beware.

My own autistic raven-face may not express it well, but... I know how they feel.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• The Tarot without its classic images: The classic Waite deck is neither ancient nor by Waite, but painted by Pamela Coleman Smith; Waites, Yeats and others in the Order of the Golden Dawn researched what needed to be there. That is, the "ancient" Tarot was designed by a team of modern wizards to represent a full spectrum of archetypal moods and situations. Independent of Jung, but quite parallel in worldview--and not much earlier than him. Or cars, or planes!
• The mirror: "You don't convey your feelings well, you need feedback to see how to express them better, and you HAVE that much-needed mirror [dreams like these, I bet]... but it makes it hard to see what's riiiiight in front of your beak." Funny, painful... true.
• ACTION: Admit I'm more raven than human, I guess. Though all my friends can see that. And... fly with caution, I guess. Since, lost in oracles, trying to figure out what I really feel... I'm half-blind. Raven the trickster often tricks herself.

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