feather

Sunlight and Feathers

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

There needs to be a word for that moment
when a particular slant of light
hits a golden butterfly wing just so
as it flutters through the hollow.

***

The feathers.  I am still finding at least one a day.  Yesterday there were five.  Two days ago, I found one at school, on the sidewalk between the parking lot and my classroom building.  One day, before I’d left the house, Alicia brought me three she’d found.  As I was pitching my tent at Nancy’s house last weekend, I found a feather.  Right there.  Last year, it lasted about a month or six weeks, a feather a day, beginning in late July.

We construct the meaning of our lives, I think.  I like to keep lots of meanings in my pockets, and take them out to look at, like bright stones.  All these feathers!  It means that I am favored by birds.  Or it’s a message not to fear the fledging, the flight I am about to take.  Or it’s a reminder to rest in the grace of air and light.  Or it means that bird-life in the hollow is healthy and vibrant.  Or it means that there is an owl who chooses my poplar tree for her feasting.  Perhaps it means that something in me is more observant in August, more apt to notice the tiny feathers in my path.  I don’t need to choose one meaning, to sort out the spiritual from the scientific, to hold one above another as the “right” and proper meaning.  I’ll hold them all, let all those pieces weave themselves into the narrative of my life.  Life’s too full of possibilities to narrow it down to one thing.

 

Gratitude List:
1. The August slant of light
2. Tiger swallowtails
3. Wild geese in flight: You do not have to be good.
4. The mysterious promise of another day
5. Baby snuggle time

May we walk in Beauty!

Listening

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2013 October
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.