Twenty Years In

Circling Crows, as an idea, an inspiration, a name, has been part of my life, in various manifestations, since about this time in 1999.  The idea came to me in a hypnopompic vision I had, an image of crows wheeling in a desert sky, revolving black brushmarks against the pale ochre hues of a dusty, cloudless dome.  That image has come to be associated with a series of activities related to art, creativity, music, and the nouminous.

The name Circling Crows was first attached to what I had planned to be a company that would produce a creativity workshop series I designed in late '99 and delivered once in early '00 in New York City.  Together with a handful of graduates of that project, my co-leader and I made a valiant attempt to build a sustainable and scaleable business plan for a training company based on that course, called the 10,000-Fold Path, but could not find a structure that met our resource parameters at the time.  It is in my initial notes for the 10KFP that I first wrote the words Circling Crows.

The steadiest manifestation of Circling Crows has been as a blog, of which there have been two.  The Internet tells me that Blogger started August 23, of 1999, so the first Circling Crows blog seems likely to have existed from about spring of '00, probably as an outcome of the 10KFP.  I believe its content was a largely unthemed mix of stream-of-consciousness, commentary, essays, and poetry.  I maintained it spottily for a few years, perhaps through the mid-aughts, when my irregular posts waxed to full-on neglect and, probably sometime in '06, blog was taken down by its host.  Later, I think in late 2010, for reasons I don't now recall, I was inspired to seek access to the old posts and perhaps to restart the blog and so began negotiations with Blogger to do so.  Although those efforts were ultimately successful in regaining rights to the name, I was unable to retrieve any content; with the exception of a few notes in my journals, those writings have returned to the cyber-ashes of random 0s and 1s scattered across the terra incognita of endless server warehouses.  I've been archiving this iteration.

In the last year or so, I've been increasingly active in reconnecting with the creative parts of myself, especially memories and states that buoyed so much of my childhood and youth.  The latest project to bear the Circling Crows moniker is a consequence of those efforts:  I am now publishing the sonic works I create under that name.  In retrospect, it seems a long time coming; as the image of crows circling in the sky represents a foundational part of me, the vision in which they first appeared is an apt context for the artistic explorations I engage in.  I am already working on the next collections to be shared as Circling Crows.

Going forward, I expect the projects under Circling Crows to expand in number and in kind.  This year I finally splurged and purchased the domain names circlingcrows.com and circlingcrows.org and I hope before too long to point them at something(s) useful and artful, including a porting and consolidation of this blog.  Other projects I hope to fold into what may become Circling Crows Productions would overlap with my clinical practice and some would be new but long-dreamt of directions, such as musical instrument making and collecting.  Time will tell what I have the capacity for, but whatever I accomplish, I will always be tripped to reconnect to my childhood, to wonder, to magic, and to music when I look up and see crows circling in the sky.