See the feather?

I don’t want to write a Gratitude List today.  I have a cold.  Not a bad cold, but the second one in two weeks, and it makes me grumpy, and it fills my head with cotton fluff.  But these are the days when the list is tested.  I could make this all about the cold: I’m thankful for cough drops and warm blankets and that I felt good for two weeks in between colds and for elderberry tincture and brandy.  But somehow that comes off sounding more like a complaint, and part of the point of this practice is to get me working a little more deeply.  To get this Sanguine Leo Seven to look at something beyond herownself.

(Sanguine refers to one of the Elemental Types based on the medieval humors–are you Melancholic Earth, Sanguine Air, Phlegmatic Water or Choleric Fire?  Leo is my Sun Sign, a little bit self-absorbed.  And Seven–again self-absorbed and focused on personal gratification–is one of the nine numbers on the Enneagram.)

Gratitude List:
1.  Listening
2.  Yesterday’s feather.  Almost every day I find a feather, like a message.  I noticed it sometime late in August, and for a period of about three or four weeks, I did find a feather every single day.  Small grey feathers, charcoal with white tips, brown feathers, little white downy feathers.  I think tufted titmouse, nuthatch, perhaps some mockingbird.  Yesterday’s feather is a translucent and elegant ecru, touched at the base with charcoal.  It seems a little larger than most of the songbird feathers around here.  Perhaps a mockingbird.  There’s a divinatory practice whereby someone holds an object and determines from its energy signature who held it last.  I want to do that with this feather, to hold it in my hands and open my heart and my inner sight and then see the bird who wore it.  I want to say it’s a cedar waxwing, but we’ve never seen them here in the hollow.  Of course, it is the season of migration, so who knows who was passing through.
3.  Yesterday’s fun at Flinchbaugh’s Fall Fest.  Good, simple, outdoor fun for kids.  Lots of support for a local family farm.
4.  Carrots.  The smell of carrots in the washing bin.  Lover’s carrots twined around each other.  The taste of the sweetness under the earth.
5.  Finding faces in the branches of the trees.  This morning, there’s a smiling cat outside the window.

May we walk in Beauty.