The Feather

Sometimes when I sit in front of an empty page, I don't know what is going to spill out from the keyboard. There usually isn't much of a plan. Just a blank page. But today is different. 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I found this feather 4 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 something had happened suddenly that shattered the foundations of what I had built my life on. I felt eviscerated by the force with which my 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 just a hazy vision as I sped through the open valley.

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I clenched the steering wheel and drove 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 make it home. I quickly approached the Saloompt River bridge, beside which I often spent afternoons fly-fishing on much better days. Those days had seemed like they had belonged to someone else's life.

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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 on the wind of my wake, dancing high in the air. "Fuck blessings", I gasped.

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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.

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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.

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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 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.

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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. Though I still bumble along in my clumsy flight through life, this grace comes through every now and again.

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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.

Resurrection

Snow and ice quickly recede under the strong, sunny spring tides of Yellowknife. Water drips from my roof, rhythmically gathering in shiny puddles. People walk outside on dry roads wearing sunglasses to shield themselves from the intensifying sun. The effluence of trash, previously trapped and held in the clutches of winter for eight months, is now transiently making its rounds through the awakening city streets.

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Every day now, life is resurrected from winter hybernation. The garden pots on the deck begin to emerge from their icy prisons, igniting anticipatory daydreams of when I will sit quietly next to them to revel in my growing herbs and flowers. I look forward to the peaceful times I will spend outside in the months to come, listening to small, chatty birds sing the rest of the sleeping world awake. I will lay in the sun like a lion, basking in the sun's heat and letting the wind carry my thoughts away as they lazily unravel themselves.

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Today I stood by the barbeque on the deck, turning smokies and closing my eyes momentarily to feel the fresh cool breeze on my grey winter skin. The neighbor's bamboo windchimes clunked hollow in the breeze. Busy ravens called to each other, their voices muffled in the distance. There wasn't anything else going through my mind. It was a perfect moment.

The Date

I have no idea what's ahead, but last night's conversation with a friend of mine had me sputtering over my fears of being a single woman.
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This friend of mine had gone out on a blind date with a guy recently. As soon as she said that, I was cringing. Those of you who are familiar with the show "Sex and the City" know that these stories never seem to end well. Apparently my friend and this guy had exchanged pictures and correspondence with one another before ever meeting. Her pictures were recent, and she was pretty up front about who she was. She had assumed the same about him. She was really eager to meet this incredibly handsome guy (who apparently spends all his time exercising and certainly looked that way from the photo). He sounded outgoing, adventurous, creative, and very sensitive. A bit of a rough-and-tumble guy and an intellectual all wrapped up in one little burrito. Over the course of a week while they corresponded online, she had conjured up a distinct image of who this guy was, and became increasingly excited to meet him. He seemed just as eager to cut to the chase and meet up, which she interpreted as a sign that he wasn't hiding anything. So they made arrangements to meet up for coffee as soon as possible.

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She arrived early at the coffee shop because she was so nervous about meeting this fellow, and sat there sweating it out over a cup of coffee while waiting for the big mystery to come walking through the door. He had told her what he would be wearing so she would know for sure it was him. When he did make it through the door, she knew it was him right away. But had he not given her a description of his clothes, she said that she would never have known that he was her date. He looked old enough to be her grandfather.

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She told me she had been in shock, but being too nice of a person, decided to plow through the date politely. He was a nice enough guy, it seemed. While she sat there, she could see a shadow of the person who was represented in the picture he had given her. She told me that she couldn't decide what was more disturbing: the process of seeing someone age 20 years instantaneously just by simply walking through a door, or the fact that she was blatantly deceived by his misrepresentation of himself. She watched him go up and get a coffee. All he had talked about prior to meeting was how athletic he was. But the man before her had too big of a ponch for that apparently.

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When he finally sat down, he did all the talking. He never asked her one question about herself. She asked all the questions to fill the space. He eagerly answered them all. And in between his animated sentences, she said, he eyed her voraciously like a hungry wolf. She quickly understood why, in all likelihood, he didn't really care about what she had to say.

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When she got home, she was in shock still. She called me, and with a deadpan voice, told me about everything in fine detail, saying that she was too shocked to even know how to react. "I feel like I just came off a date with my dad", she said. "I feel gross". I told her never to go on another blind date. I suppose that's all the advice I could give to someone so momentarily shattered and fragile. When I finally put the phone down, I felt her experience hovering close by like a shadow in the corner. It was that "oh god, what am I in for" kind of feeling. It was the recollection of all my past dating experiences, and the trepidation about the ones to come. Listening to my other girlfriend tell me only days ago that she found the love of her life after being single for only a month was easier on the ears.

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I suppose the wisest thing to do is move forward, step by step, without any expectations whatsoever.

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But I'm just not that kind of girl.

Sweat

Another good day. I had some laughs at work, held my head high, and focussed on positive thoughts. I felt open. Not so raw.
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In the afternoon I fell asleep next to the cat on the livingroom floor in a patch of sunshine. It felt warm against my dark clothes. As the sunbeam made its passage further west, I awoke and decided to go for a long walk.

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I felt a bit like Forrest Gump out there, the time when he just decided to take off running from his driveway and kept on going through several states. I just walked and walked and walked. Thoughts came and went. Little barky dogs tried to accost my ankles as I trundled by their snowy driveways. I passed people on the sidewalk who gave me half smiles. I felt clear, relaxed. When I came to a point where I usually turn around and come back home, I kept on walking further. I felt like I could have kept walking right out of Yellowknife, down the highway and into Alberta. Finally I looped around through some neighbourhoods to come home. But I seriously almost just did the whole route again.

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Instead I came inside the house, and shortly after, I hopped onto the elliptical trainer. I cranked the music and pumped away on that machine like I was never going to stop. I actually had to mentally intervene with my desire to just keep exercising into infinity. But when I got off the machine, I lifted weights, I did crunches. It was like I was still trying to fill this new empty space with something. Something alive and agressive. Sweaty.

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I had to laugh then, because I recalled a memory of when I was single a number of years ago and living with one of my best friends. I rode my bike for an hour every day. Then I would come home and do at least 200 crunches. I kick-boxed in the garage. I went to the gym. I was unbelievably fit. I had six-pack abs for the first time in my life. Finally one day she said to me "Dude. You need to get laid".

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I'm not sure if this still applies, but it sure made me laugh.

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p.s. I know what you're thinking.