The Comfortable Room

Day 64. Wake-up feel: 6.

I woke shortly after the birds began — 04:24, their morning ritual already underway. A restless night. Cool for the end of May, the sky cloudless.

A Flower day — the Moon crossed into Libra at 23h last night, an air sign, and in this calendar air is what makes a flower day. Tomorrow it moves into Scorpio, water, a leaf day. The day after, it comes full. The month opened under a full moon; it closes under another.

I keep a calendar, based on the studies and work of Maria Thun — the Moon's passage through the constellations, every day given to root, leaf, flower or fruit, to earth, water, air or fire. A gardener may take it as a guide — when to sow, when to leave the soil alone. I read it for something closer to location. It does not tell me what the day means. It tells me where I am standing in a turning that began long before me and does not need me to keep it going. That is most of what belonging to a place is — knowing the time it keeps, and keeping it too.

The evening before, just as the light went, they came down at the edge of the garden. Ravens, or crows — I couldn't tell, and I couldn't count them. A flock. They landed and made noise, all of it at once, the way a room sounds when everyone has something to say and no one is waiting their turn. It went on for a while. Then it stopped. Then they were gone, and the garden was quiet, and I did not know what had been decided.

Corvids gather like this at dusk, sometimes hundreds in a single roost. Researchers study these gatherings as places where the birds share what they have learned.

Older eyes read them otherwise. The Norse gave Odin two ravens — Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory — and sent them out over the world each morning to return by evening with everything they had seen. In old European folklore a gathering of crows was a court: the flock convened, a sentence was passed, and one bird left changed, or did not leave at all.

I have spent a life keeping a room from ever sounding like that.

That is what I saw this morning — not a discovery, a thing that had been in plain view, finally holding still long enough to look at. The skill is real. I know how to keep a room comfortable. I know how to be the one who lowers the volume, smooths the moment, sees to it that no one leaves uneasy. I have shown the version of myself that earns approval and kept the other one back. Be pleasant. Take what is offered. Disturb nothing — not the family, not the work.

No one made me sign it. I signed it anyway, long ago, and I have kept its terms ever since.

A question arrived this morning on its own, unasked.

If I had a tick on my back. Who would take it off.

Day 64 — Phase 9 — Hearing — Pericardium — Amethyst — Psalm 46 + Gospel of John
Gut Nisdorf, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Baltic Coast
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