🪶 Trauma, Grief & Mental Illness: Condor Medicine to the Rescue

I Used to Be a Crow, but Then Life Happened While I Was Making Other Plans

📝 NOTE: This article is adapted from my artist memoir about painting and bodysurfing on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina’s magical Lowcountry, MUSINGS FROM A SMALL ISLAND …

There’s one type of bird that isn’t native to the island but that nevertheless lives here: a single condor. You can see him sometimes waist-deep in the ocean dancing with outspread wings. I know him well because, well, he’s me.

I used to be a crow. Crow was my power animal, an indwelling spirit utilized for numerous purposes by a plethora of indigenous cultures as well as those of us “civilized” folk willing to humble ourselves enough to learn from them.

If you’re one of those fortunate enough to have been energized by power animals, you know just how potent they can be: for healing, protection, and inspiration.

Power animals come and go. When they leave, it’s not a personal judgment against you. After all, they’re just animals. They get bored easily. Their moving on simply means it’s time for a new one. It’s possible—maybe even common—to experience many power animals in a single lifetime.

Crow came to me in my twenties when I was suffering from a mysterious illness similar in certain respects to fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. The spirit of crow taught me how to make myself well again, as I describe in my way-outside-the-box nonfiction books on “ener-genetic” healing. I also credit crow “medicine” with shepherding me through a number of dangerous situations and turbocharging much of my creativity over the past couple decades.

Anthropologist Michael Harner writes extensively and eloquently about power animals—how to get them and how to work with them. Dr. Harner taught at Berkeley, Columbia and Yale, discovered Carlos Castaneda, and started a worldwide shamanic renaissance basically all by himself.

One of his most fascinating stories (told in CAVE & COSMOS) is of a perilous river crossing in the company of a group of Shuar men when he was conducting field research in the Upper Amazon rainforest of Ecuador.

Harner relates how he became exasperated—to the point of accusing his guides of cowardice—when the group, who had become lost, spent days stubbornly refusing to cross a raging stream in order to find their way home.

Finally, on Harner’s insistence the group constructed three log rafts and crossed the river—but not before Harner’s raft was overturned in the rapids and he and two of his companions almost drowned before reaching the far shore.

“That was a pretty close call,” he quotes himself as saying. “I guess we are lucky to be alive.”

When his companions exchanged glances but made no reply, Harner, a typically know-it-all Westerner at this stage, accused them not only of being cowards but of falsely “playing it cool,” as if they’d never been scared in the first place, now that the crossing was a done deal.

“Well, you see,” explained one of the men, “we were not really afraid to cross the river because we cannot die. But we did not know about you!”

Translated: we had power animals to keep us from harm, but since some people don’t, we weren’t sure if you did.

“At that moment,” writes Harner, “the perilous Amazon river crossing opened a door to important spiritual knowledge. After that I gradually learned from the Shuar that they were protected by spirit power … I also learned that such power can leave one. Thus unprotected, people do indeed die.”

Nearly a year to the day after we moved here, a gut-wrenching tragedy was visited on my family when Leigh’s older brother, Byron, killed himself via carbon monoxide inhalation. For nearly as long as we’d been on the island, Byron, who lived two hours away in Columbia, had suffered from schizoaffective disorder.

Just before his final depression (which was made worse, go figure, by antidepressants), Byron experienced a wacky manic phase in which he heard the posthumous voice of Steve Jobs telling him to stop being a PC guy and buy a MacBook Pro instead.

After he complied, he heard Jerry Garcia instructing him from beyond the grave to pay Carl Sagan’s widow a visit in Upstate New York in order to improve global relations—at which point he temporarily disappeared and reappeared in the mental ward of a New Jersey hospital.

Byron’s death knocked the wind out of my family’s collective sails. Leigh was doubly devastated by losing her brother and having to watch her parents come to terms with the death of their eldest and only son.

Our son practically went into shock. He was never quite able to wrap his mind around how his beloved uncle could be so mentally ill he couldn’t stand living anymore.

For my part, though I was never extremely close to Byron, I was also traumatized by his passing—particularly by the way it impacted my family. Before long, feeling empty and uninspired, I began to experience anxiety that only got worse as the months went by.

One day when I was feeling especially anxious and vulnerable, it occurred to me I’d lost more than my “brother-in-law”; I’d lost my power animal! Apparently, trauma—not just boredom—can prompt power animals to abandon their hosts.

When I booked an appointment with a shaman who had trained under Harner, sure enough, she confirmed that crow was no longer with me. The unfunny irony was that Byron was an uber-materialist who pooh-poohed anything remotely woo-woo … yet here he was responsible for endangering my wellbeing by spooking my indwelling spirit!

The shaman performed a ceremony to attract a new power animal to me. Typically, we don’t pick and choose our power animals; they select us. Crow will always have a special place in my heart, but this time around condor chose me.

I felt condor’s energy enter me like a menopausal heat wave during the ceremony. I soon started sweating and became extremely lightheaded. Afterwards, I was instructed to go “dance” my new power animal and continue doing so twice weekly so that condor would stay with me.

I’ve danced condor hundreds of time since, usually in the ocean while waiting to catch a wave. I’m sure I look crazier than Byron to people who manage to glance up from their devices long enough to watch me. Maybe I am, but at least I’m alive and inclined to stay that way, with a tremendous creative energy lighting me up from the inside again.

Condor medicine has to do with a number of things but especially with death—or rather, with life that emerges from death. Condors feed on carrion and in so doing help the earth “recycle” the dead so that new life can come into being.

While dancing, spiraling on imaginary thermal currents with arms outstretched like giant wings, I chant snippets from a song that came to me after condor did. I call it “Condor Song.” I’m aware that condors technically have no voice box and mostly communicate through body language. Make of that what you will.

Here are the lyrics:

Condor’s ridin’ high
Black against the sky
Oh black against the sky
Black against the sky

Condor’s ridin’ high
Black against the sky
Oh black against the sky
Black against the sky

Oh we live and die
To be free
Oh we live and die
To be free
Oh we live and die
To be free
Oh we live and die
To be free

Old boy’s ridin’ high
Black against the sky
Oh black against the sky
Black against the sky

Old boy’s ridin’ high
Black against the sky
Oh black against the sky
Black against the sky

Oh we live and die
To be free
Oh we live and die
To be free
Oh we live and die
To be free
Oh we live and die
To be free

Old boy’s ridin’ high
Black against the sky
Oh black against the sky
Black against the sky

Old boy’s ridin’ high
Black against the sky
Teaches us to live
Teaches us to die

Oh we live and die
To be free
Oh we live and die
To be free
Oh we live and die
To be free
Oh we live and die
To be free

Freestyle

Freefall

Freebird

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