threads
jaguar and the floating feathers
“To reach your heart, as every indigenous tribe I know has told me, you must first remember your Divine Mother... Your Mother is alive and very much conscious... Earth is not a rock, she has a name and a personality in the cosmos. And believe me, she knows your name.” - from Serpent of Light: Beyond 2012: The Movement of the Earth's Kundalini and the Rise of the Female Light, by Drunvalo Melchizedek
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
Even though my daughter and I swept and mopped the floor, there are still a few feathers floating across the corners of the room near the wood pile, flying up in the air like summer seeds as we walk by.
Certain threads continue to weave through this life of mine.
I have a few old cardboard boxes, full of small and large sacred items, mostly gathered from Arizona, some from Oregon, some from here. Various rocks and herbs, rolled up pictures, things of significance. When I open these boxes, inevitably, small speckled feathers come floating out, like dust or dandelion seeds, softly landing on the floor near my feet, moving by the delicate and imperceptible winds of earth.
The feathers of this morning are from the chest of a bird, very light-weight plumes and downy feathers, with patterns that remind me of a jaguar. The light brown and black shapes, streaks of white, all with the glorious, unfathomable perfection that is the Creator’s mastery.
I had no newspaper to lay the bird out on, so Amara, my daughter, loaned me some pages from her animal coloring book: a family of lions, a few frogs sitting on lily pads, a jaguar hanging on a tree branch, a chameleon. We spread the papers out until it was big enough to receive the large winged one.
“This is something really special,” my three year old said, as we laid the bird out on the papers on the wooden floor near the fireplace of this old, creaking house.
“Thanks for sharing this with me Leah,” she said, calling me by my first name.
In the bird’s talons was the half eaten body of a rabbit. Really though, it was just the back two legs of the final feast of this sacred bird. It had a delicious meal and then was brought to death by the whirling wheels of some northbound car on the highway. Beyond tragic. I think I will adorn the bird, eventually, with a necklace of turquoise and a pouch of rose petals and tobacco, return its majesty, through art, back to itself, honoring Life in that way.
I lit some sage, filled the house with smoke, put some cedar on the stove.
We looked at it for a long time. Amara wanted to pet it with her plastic gloves on, so she did, petting the belly of the bird, holding the legs of the rabbit, exclaiming how soft it all was. So fresh, I thought, its left eye still open, still juicy.
We found the bird after driving headfirst into the first real snowstorm of winter. Heading for the healing waters, I managed to not look at the weather at all. We found ourselves in white-out conditions, driving slowly through invisible landscapes, beneath glorious winter spruce trees, heavy with fresh snow, and eventually steaming in the hot waters beneath the starry sky, Amara riding me through the dark singing waters like a turtle on my back.
We entered the storm, played in the storm, prayed in the storm and the next day, we drove home.
As the storm alchemized, the sky turned pink and gold and a heaviness was lifted. It was then that the bird appeared, like an omen of completion, like it was taking something out from this world and into the next, something deeply personal, something tragic yet beautiful in its aliveness, in its existence.
It’s like that sometimes: how the mere existence of something creates beauty, just because it exists, it’s here, in Creation, manifested out from the infinite. And it’s beautiful, even if it’s tragic and painful, triggering, humbling or brilliant. The light of existence, the miracle of participating in this boundlessly mysterious universe with unimaginable complexities and subtleties; the miracle of being alive, really, of existing, of birthing out from the Silence, again and again, here and now, dancing with these sound and life and light waves, weaving our origins from the holy, being in the vast matrix of Creation, weaving our lives, our baskets, our lessons.
“We are definitely not alone,” a dear friend said to me, after placing her hands on my feet and closing her eyes.
These are the threads, the grasses in our baskets, the coiling clay.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
Thank you for reading this edition of Wild Leaf, an undulating landscape of meaning, poetry and what it seems to be a mother in these times. Please click the little “❤️” at the bottom of the page here so more readers can find this publication. Paid subscriptions support these works in a big way, thank you.
You can also always: Buy Me A Coffee.
♥️🪶