"Evershifting Shorelines" - Common Raven - Vinyl Sticker

Highly intelligent and adaptable, ravens can be found in diverse habitats across the world from rugged coasts to harsh high deserts to dense ancient forests. Ravens uniquely bridge realms, effortlessly shifting between the land, sea, and sky of various biomes. 

When I think of ravens I picture the cold, foggy fall and winter days I’ve spent alone on the coast, hiking the craggy bluffs as the salty mist whipped up from the churning sea below. Skeletons of Sitka spruce trees crane their spindly limbs over the headlands, slowly being shaped by the rough winds as they grow. Often ravens perch in these branches, tattered feathers waving like defiant black flags, a striking symbol of the rebelliousness and resilience required to endure a life as a coast dweller. Ravens of the coast exist in a world of shifting shorelines, hunting and scavenging the wealth of food present in intertidal zones, riding the thermals with the gulls and vultures, calling out from on high with croaks that punctuate the steady breath of the sea.

First peoples of the Pacific Northwest have many tales centered around Raven. Raven as a shapeshifter, a trickster, a harbinger, a creator. The Makah peoples of the northwesternmost edge of the US called their land The Beginning of the World and believed Raven created the region. The Haida peoples of British Columbia share stories of the earth once being an endless primordial sea that Raven soared above. Tired from this ceaseless flight, Raven found two stones and dropped them into the sea where they instantly expanded into the land of the PNW as we know it today. Finally Raven and Eagle and others had solid land upon which to rest. Several other cultures have variations of this story, including some where the land wasn’t created by magic stones but by the strong wingbeats of Raven as she flapped across the region.

Here Raven sits on her throne of Sitka spruce branches, cradled by salal and ferns and a cloak of thick fog. She reigns over these lands as a tattered and wisened seer, forever witnessing the ceaselessly shifting shoreline shape and reshape her home at the beginning of the world.