Dear Raven

It was only about 4pm, and yet it felt like it had already been a very long day.

We had arrived late at the Arches National Park in Utah. Or rather, to me it was late. See, I had wanted to get there early and be able to spend the whole day adventuring and exploring the park. Like most of my good intentions, it did not go as planned. However, I have learned that that is exactly how most great adventures come about.

My boyfriend, service dog, and I were on a week-long vacation to visit my parents in Grand Junction, Colorado for my birthday. We currently live in South West Missouri, but my dog and I are originally from a small mountain town in Southern California. My parents just recently completed their big move from So-Cal to Grand Junction, which greatly cut the 36-hour yearly road trip out to see them down to a measly 19-hours. We hoped to cut this distance down even further soon, as we dreamed of the day that we would be able to pack up our things and say goodbye to Missouri for good. Our goal for a few years now has been to move to Colorado, but the pressure was growing stronger now that my parents were out there waiting so eagerly for us to join them.

But a big move across states like that, as we had come to realize, is not the easiest feat to accomplish for two kids in their mid-twenties with low credit scores. We were caught between trying to be responsible adults with a carefully constructed plan of efficiency in which our every step was clearly mapped out, and the taunting wanderlust whispers in our hearts urging us to throw caution to the wind and simply take the leap.

That particular day had me feeling more torn than usual. This particular road trip hadn’t been the smoothest so far, after all. I had gotten terribly sick the day before we were set to head out from Missouri, and had heavily questioned whether or not making the trip was even still a wise idea. The adult thing to do seemed like it would have been to use my planned vacation time to stay home, rest, and get better so that I wouldn’t risk having to miss any work. But had we canceled the trip, it would have been the first time in twenty-six years that I had not spent my birthday with my mother.

The drive itself from Missouri to Colorado had been especially treacherous. Normally we sailed across states with ease, our all-wheel-drive vehicle handling any and all terrain and weather without so much as a quiver of hesitation. This time an ice storm almost immediately ripped our roof rack to absolute shreds, our windshield wipers froze and were rendered useless, and we inevitably ended up having to pull over every thirty minutes to air up our tires. None of them had any actual holes that we could perceive, and they were all relatively new; for some reason they just would not hold air. It was as if bit by bit the universe itself was trying to reprimand us for being out on such a reckless and carefree adventure, and force us into turning back around. Had we made a mistake in embarking on this trip? Feelings of uncertainty and doubt had become a constant bubbling discomfort in the pit of my stomach, leaving me questioning everything and feeling very lost.

Our arrival at my parents house was an overwhelming relief, and yet, I was still sick and nothing felt quite right. Still, we laughed and joked as usual, and enjoyed simply being together in each other’s company. After a few days of basically just laying around in effort to combat my sickness with sleep, on a day when both of my parents would be working, we were left feeling too cooped up. Our restless souls craved adventure. So we embarked on what was meant to be an hour long drive out to the Arches National Park in Utah, a place my boyfriend had never had the joy of experiencing and one I hadn’t been to in at least ten years. A wrong turn onto one of the old backroads inadvertently landed us out in the actual middle of nowhere, unable to turn around and stuck with no option but to keep slowly crunching forward along a snow-covered and scarcely marked ATV trail.

Four tedious extended hours later, we finally arrived at the entrance to the Arches. The sun was already sinking fast in the sky, and our intention to have embarked on the grandest hiking trail to maneuver our way out to the best spot in the park for sunset-viewing was promptly dashed. We would never make it in time now. The dangerous trek through the snowy Utah wilderness had been quite an adventure, and ended up being an experience we both were thankful to have gotten a chance to experience and survive, but we couldn’t help the air of disappointment that it had served to delay us so much from our original plan. Still, the Arches is extra amazing in the way that it is one of the few places I have been that is just as waiting up and enjoyable to drive through as it is to get out and hike the trails. So we set to driving on through, wanting to make the most of what sunlight we had left. We desperately try to make the best out of any situation, after all.

As the sun sank lower and lower, we had to make a quick decision about where in the park we would most enjoy stopping to view it from. We hadn’t visited nearly enough spots by that time to make a truly educated decision, and the lack of cell-service prevented us from conducting a Google search to inquire about what the best spot would be. So we studied our map for a few minutes, then blindly picked a spot that sounded cool and started driving. We arrived in a hurry to rush out of the car and scurry along the trail to the focal point, a massive sprawling landscape of circular mountainous arches and cliffs. The orange sky bathed the snow-kissed desert in an ethereal illumination, and made the mountains positively glow red around us. To say it was beautiful would be a vast understatement. Everything seemed so much more vivid out here than it did back home; so vibrant, so full of life.

As we trekked back to the car, chilled quickly to the bone and left shivering by the icy winter winds that would only grow colder with each second that the sun sank lower out of view, I was still harboring an uneasy feeling in my heart. It wasn’t that I wasn’t having a good time, or that I wasn’t enjoying our adventure. I genuinely enjoy every chance to experience nature and travel with my boyfriend and dog, no matter the circumstances. But I had still been unable to shake that feeling of being lost. It was more than just my immediate situation. It was everything. The prospect of our move, the plan to make it happen, the fear of such a hefty life change, to stress of financial planning, the doubt about whether or not I was making any of the right decisions. No matter how I tried to shove the thoughts down and simply enjoy living in the moment, the thoughts just kept creeping back up to the foreground of my mind and weighing me down.

Then, as we approached the car, a flicker of movement caught my attention. I turned to find a massive raven had landed on the fence near me, flapping its midnight black wings indignantly and calling to me with a rasping screech. I was quick to pull out my phone, launching open the camera and beginning to snap pictures as fast as my fingers could tap the buttons. I have an iPhone XS Max, and the wonderful camera was definitely one of the key points in convincing me to purchase this particular model a few years ago. I captured easily twenty or so pictures from a distance, fearing that the raven would up and fly off at any second and I would lose all opportunity to get a truly good shot. After a moment, however, I realized that the raven was not showing any signs of fleeing. On the contrary, it seemed aggravated that I was keeping such a cautious distance and started to grow increasingly louder in its caws as if beckoning me impatiently closer.

I began to inch my way closer, my eyes never straying from my phone screen as I snapped more and more pictures with each step I took. I stopped moving when the beautiful bird was barely an arms length away; close enough that I could have easily reached out and touched him. He finally seemed pleased, ruffling his feathers impressively and tilting his head at me while uttering a soft series of clicks and coos. I was actively speaking to him in a rambling flurry of what surely would have sounded like nonsense to any onlookers; introducing myself, complimenting his beauty, thanking him for allowing me the opportunity to take such lovely pictures of him, etc. Determining that my new friend had no intention of flying away, I finally relaxed enough to take a pause in my frantic and thoughtless photo snapping to start tweaking some of the settings. I turned on HDR, turned off Live Photo, switched the camera from Normal to Portrait, then shifted around until I found the perfect angle. The raven just watched me curiously for a long moment, before tilting his head and posing. I swear he even smiled at me—or did the closest thing a raven can do to smiling.

I’d captured it. The perfect picture. I lowered my phone and just stared at the magnificent creature before me, and in that moment I felt blissfully at peace. All of my prior anxieties, uncertainty, and doubt all suddenly evaporated. Something about the way the raven looked at me, something in his dark little eyes, made everything feel okay. In many different cultures, they say that ravens represent messengers. The most prominent example that generally comes to mind is the story of Poe and how he wrote of the raven visiting him to deliver an ominous and foreboding message. True to such lore, I knew that this raven indeed had put itself in my path to deliver a message. But his was not the dark and haunting scream of “Nevermore!”. No, this raven carried with him a message of positivity and peace. As I stood in suspended silence, I knew all at once that I was exactly where I was meant to be. Despite the unexpected diversions and hitched in our initial plan, everything had worked out exactly the way it was meant to. Beyond that, I was filled with the comforting reminder that everything always works out the way it is meant to, even if that doesn’t always fit in with what we have planned. Everything was going to be okay. Everything was going to work out in time. I just needed to keep pushing towards our goal and not let worries and anxiety get me so bogged down that I forget to enjoy the ride.

Dear Raven, thank you for your message.