Finding Feathers.

Remember this: The smallest seemingly non-valuable object can speak volumes to you if you only listen to what it says to your heart of hearts.

**I wrote this Nov. 27, 2012. I thought of sharing it because it's interesting. Trust me...it leads to somewhere else.**

Last night. I was canning some broccoli leaves in wide mouth mason jars. I was thinking about this website I had read about finding a feather. it says you are put on the path. I can't lie, I feel like I have fallen off the path hard, or maybe it's my righteous indignation and blatant unwillingness to move forward. For the past year, I fell like deja vu is eating me up and I am looping back around in some weird Groundhog Day event.

As I was canning, I had a bright green stink bug fly up onto the white piece of plastic I was using for a cutting board. I thought that rather strange, it being November, and stink bugs are suppose to be gone. Here it was. The nature of the stink bug is to mind its own business. When something comes along and tries to mess up the stink bug's life it puts off this rather smelly odor akin to the taste of an unripe persimmon. Then again, it could be that smell from the chemicals put on tobacco in a curing barn.


This morning, I decided to go to the park for a morning walk. I stopped and spoke to my son as he waited for the bus because it was late. I walked on. As I was going up the dirt road to the short cut, I was mentally in the crapper. I looked down in the ditch I was crossing over and there was this black feather. It looked like a crow feather. I picked it up. It was really pathetic let me tell you. The shaft of it was all torn and stripped. It kind of repulsed me that it wasn't beautiful. Then I thought.....that feather is just like my attitude: all battered and uncomely. I pondered this. I decided I just needed to change my attitude. I could change that if not the feather. I didn't want to carry the feather with me because it was all out of juju but laid it on the fence to remind me before I leave that my bad attitude needed to stay with that out of sort feather.

I walked around the park and saw this really bright red bunch of leaves from a faux pear tree. The leaves were flaming red. I would later draw them to pass the time. I at least created something. I walked on to see the water tower covered with crows. Crows really run their mouths. They never shut up, run in packs, and menace society. They can remember your face. Yet they have their place in life. They moved to a tree. Eventually the crows disappeared.

I finally decided as I walked that I felt like I was shrinking into the ground. It really felt like under my feet was a strong magnet pulling me downward into the Earth. I thought about sitting under a tree but everyone had ant hills. I wondered if I were to have a sacred place to get right with the world that this wasn't it. Later it wouldn't leave my mind that I should take spray paint that glows in the dark and make a medicine wheel around my deer stand in the pine woods. I know that sounds weird but that was what my mind is tell me to do. I was looking for stuff to make a pipe because it would seem someone thinks that is needed but that's Sioux. I am not Sioux. Not everyone has Sioux blood.

I know how that whale feels. The one called Hertz 52. I feel like there is something I have to do, but I am not sure what it is. As I was walking home, I was traveling down the road that I was still on the right path, even though I had a moment of bad space in my head. I also feel like someone, or something has left me, and I don't know what it is, but believe that it should come back to me, but I am not sure that it left? How confusing is that? Without guidance, I am going to do all this ritual and ceremonial stuff to get to the bottom of what the universe is actually trying to tell me that I am to inept to decipher. I have felt like this past year has been one looping deja vu trip. There was one person that I really did want to connect to but other people just have to butt in when they should butt out.

I was sitting shaving a gourd to make a rattle or something else. I scrapped it and all I could thing of was this person. I don't even know them that is the strange part. Maybe there is something about this person that is like me? After I shaved the second one down to the hard part like deer horns, I finally looked at the sky and said, "I give up on this." I then went in the house. I figured that this being some illustrious mystery placed on me to let it go and see how it turns out. I thought as no one is here to glare at me with stern eyes to say anything about what I am doing, I am going to write about it. Besides it's supposed to help you heal and the people. As far as I am concerned my small wad of friends are my people so learn something from it. If it gives you something you best take it with a smile and be glad you got 'the message'.

~Written by: W Harley Bloodworth

~Courtesy of the AOFH~