The Feather

For the past couple weeks a memory has been pushing against the threshold of my awareness. Today it broke through. I think it's calling me back to an important lesson I learned long ago about finding a blessing in hard times.

In the spring of 1992, while I was a young hippie treeplanter in the open clearcut spaces of B.C., I met a Cree woman named Kathy Jacobson. I've always felt an affinity with Cree people because my grandmother was Cree, and therefore it's a part of me also. Sometimes I think Kathy was put in my path because my grandmother had passed on when I was young, and therefore was never around to teach me the important things I needed to know in order to receive guidance on my journey. If I ever catch up with my grandmother, I'll have to ask her about that one.

Kathy, who referred to herself as 'Wandering Spirit', was only in my treeplanting camp for a short while, eventually deciding that planting trees just wasn't as enlightening an experience as she thought it would be. But in the short time she was with us, we were very close. I managed to arrange that we treeplant together while working, using the excuse that I could mentor her on her planting technique. Instead, she was really mentoring me. We would drop our planting bags in the middle of our piece once the foreman was no longer in sight, and lay flat on our backs, looking up at the clear blue skies of springtime. 

Wandering Spirit told me about sacred messages. She said we are constantly being given guidance, but we just need to listen. She also told me that when your soulmate is nearby, things appear in two's. At that exact moment, two blue-winged butterflies flew together to touch briefly before our eyes, then departed again. It didn't seem odd. The world was a different place when Wandering Spirit told me things. Needless to say, I didn't get a lot of trees planted when we were together. But that didn't matter.

One of the things she said that always stayed with me was that sometimes a special feather will be put in our path. It's a sacred feather meant to signify that a great blessing is being given. Since she told me that, I had come across many feathers over the years. Among them, there was one that was very special.

I found this feather four years after I last saw Wandering Spirit, in the summer of '96. It seemed like a lot had happened in the years since I had seen her. I had moved to Bella Coola, bought property there, and started building a home with my partner at the time. But the discovery of his eventual affair shattered the foundations of what I had built my life on. I felt eviscerated by the force with which my previous beliefs had been torn from me. I was so raw that it seemed I had no skin to protect me from the elements. As I was processing the rush of pain like tiny shards of glass, I drove my car down the country road towards my home, the passing farms a hazy vision as I sped through the open valley.

I clenched the steering wheel and drove faster and faster. The summer wind whipped my hair into my stinging eyes while parts of me felt like they were flying out of the open windows. I let out one big sigh as if it were the last breath I had left in me. I stared straight ahead, trying to numb my thoughts until I could arrive home. I quickly approached the Saloompt River bridge, beside which I often spent afternoons fly-fishing on much better days. Those days had now seemed like they had belonged to someone else's life.

And then there it was. The feather. It was right in the middle of my car's path - the largest eagle feather I had ever seen. On any other day I would have stopped my car and picked it up. Feathers are blessings. But not that day. I ran it over. And while I drove away, I looked in my rearview mirror and saw it float up on the wind of my wake, dancing high in the air. "Fuck blessings", I gasped.

I pulled into my driveway minutes later, turned the car off, and sat silently frozen to my seat. I stared at the towering mountain across the valley. The rest of the pain I had been sheltering myself from in order to make it home seared my eyes like fire until I was blind. I didn't have the energy to get out of the car, and so I sat there for a while.

It wasn't long before I heard something at the foot of the driveway. I looked in my car's side mirror and saw that it was my friend Rosalind. I hadn't seen her in months. She had no idea of what I was going through at the time, and I didn't feel like telling her. I also didn't want her to see me in that shape, so I quickly dried my eyes and put on a smile as I emerged from the car.

The first thing I saw after we said hello was a large eagle feather in her hand. "I found this on the bridge back there", she told me. "Here, it was meant for you". And as she passed the feather to me, something shifted. She didn't know that something special had just happened, but I did. After she eventually left I sat in my yard, holding that feather and staring out at the mountains, wondering. I knew that the feather, which I had initially rejected in blindness, was a message showing me that somewhere in all this suffering was one of life's great blessings. That feather wasn't going to let me get away from what it needed to show me. As I sat there holding it, I didn't know what the blessing was that I was supposed to see. But I kept looking, and in time, I saw it all very clearly.

Then, I needed that feather. I could no longer see. I had become lost. But that feather showed me something. It was like a tap on the shoulder that said, "This is not all for nothing. Your suffering is only the shedding of your old skin as you enter into the new. This is a lesson. So listen carefully". And so I listened, and gained some wisdom. I learned how to see pain differently. With new, unpracticed wings, I learned grace for the first time in my life; how to rise above, how to be stronger than I thought I was. Though I still bumble along in my clumsy flight through life, this grace comes through every now and again.

Whenever I go through a hard lesson like that one, I think of that feather. I go to my room where it sits on my shelf amidst stacks of books and scattered sea shells. It doesn't look as big as it once did. But it doesn't need to anymore.