wildaspie

The other morning on my way in to work the hydrants were having problems, spewing water all over the streets (possibly a planned flush, but I didn’t see any Water Dept. trucks or workers around). The one on the next hill up from the office was attracting a lot of sparrows to the flow, which had just started to work its way past the corner as I got off the bus.

I slowed to watch the birds playing, and noticed one of them hadn’t been quick enough and had been flattened by a vehicle not long before. Poor thing … and then I wondered, Will a human spirit guide it to some avian afterlife?

In some cultures, birds (most notably the crow in North America, the raven in Europe, and the sparrow on both sides of the Atlantic) are thought to conduct the spirits of the deceased from one plane of existence to the other (brought to popular media by “The Crow” comic books and movies, and perhaps a lesser extent by Stephen King’s The Dark Half). Generally speaking, the dark birds take spirits from the land of the dead to the land of the living; sparrows take them the other way.

Read more at www.wildaspie.info