I want to start by saying, there are no coincidences. We live in an elegant universe. If something resonates with you I would be tickled to know how and or why.
June 2nd 2007
I sit among the pebbles of an early summer, sunny isolated beach; between the driftwood and the sea contemplating the skiddish love affairs of birds.
The meaning of commitment
My own mortal loneliness
The sunshine on my sole
The sand between my toes
The man who catches fish with his bare hands, smiles at them with glee ~
With as much delight for the fish as for his own speed and agility.
A hint of intrigue prompts me to rise wobbly to my feet, to inspect a piece of driftwood that reminds me faintly of a guitar's fretted fingerboard. My eyes sparkle as I turn it over in my hands and imagine dear friend’s gentle love affairs and tender caresses of such beautiful things as frets, guitar strings and sunshine – how this moment amidst sand and sun would make their heart grow two times bigger. Make their breath quicken if they were here.
If they were here…
But they aren’t and I sigh – to breathe in the sunny sky. I am alone here - in a relative sense. The wind and sun console.
My ass grows numb as I hasten to write this tale.
I’ve been looking for my eagle feather since this year has began – contemplating constantly when this change and transformation in myself would come. Some have tried to help me find this feather. I looked myself, in shrubs, under eagle’s nests, on walks and around docks – searching also for that which would transform my life. In a moment of solitude, looking for nothing but the air to fill my lungs, and noticing that I am changing and becoming all that I am, at all moments; today without even realizing, I had sat down no more than a few feet from a feather. It lay between me and the ocean. To be discovered only when I recognized that I was a feeling soul, at all moments making choices. At all moments changing with each half and quarter breath, and that I can find what I am looking for – without looking for it. It took me turning over with love, wonder, delight and a bit of sadness a piece of a long ago broken guitar to see why and how I am becoming all that I am. We walk through this life alone if only because no one else but us can know the journey we are on.
No one else can fully know what lesson we have taken with each breath, what beauty we have glimpsed on distant beaches.
Few others can share the feeling of turning over warm, textured stones, weather worn wood, or hearing an ancestor’s song in a strummed string in a warm room quite the same way we do.
Who knows whether the mortal fear glimpsed in a father’s brown eyes as their life and death runs through their mind – is something that can be universally felt?
Few of us know of each other’s creaking bones, sagging skin and aches and pains in any deep or meaningful way – as we ourselves feel the passage of time.
Non-the-less. We are not alone. Not with our sadness, not with our madness, not with our lagging memory or forgotten dreams. Living and breathing in sinc – we do this with innumerable others. We live in the visions and footsteps of those no longer with us and those yet to come in the unquantifiable future.
We are of this earth and this earth is of us. We begin to die the moment we forget this. The moment we regard our existence profanely, without respect, without a sense of awe for all that is.
Though there are many things we alone may consciously carry and experience of this world – there is much that we share and learn from each other.
Much like my life this feather starts out a little rough around the edges, a little tattered and torn, not possessing the most elegant and smooth of beginnings. Gradually with each rung of its feathered plumb it becomes smoother. Towards the end it is more aerodynamic, carving a path through the air with sophistication and grace.
Everyone’s feather is different. Some having been kept close and sheltered by the wing, have it rough at the end and are ill prepared for the turbulence of their future flights.
Some feathers are ruffled all over, others remain pristine and smooth all their live long blessed days.
I’ve known more than a few tattered and torn ruffled feathers. A few of them in my own family.
Holding my father’s hand in one of several emergency waiting rooms this week, I found myself thinking deeply about the bonds that tie, our connections to each other as human beings.
Some connections are merely skin deep
Other’s share the same rivers, tributaries and oceans
Running through our blood
Some bind us through custom
Some by common understanding
Others bound by duty, others chained by work
Upholding laws and values
Sometimes held in place by nothing more than fears, and force
Some by the souls we live to see shine
Our connection to the divine
By the spirits we love
By the land that feeds us
By the earth we share
Blood though thicker than water isn’t always enough to sustain our commitments and connections to each other. On the wall of the emergency waiting room was written the following:
Commitment: There is no wavering to commitment, no uncertainty, no hesitation. Your actions are there for all to see. When you are called upon and committed ~ nothing else matters. Dedication becomes like the air that sustains you. It is only when your actions match your values that you gain strength and power.
It takes great commitment and love to heal the earth and those we love.
It takes great faith to believe those we love will learn their lessons in their own “good” time.
It takes great depth of character to know you are not alone as an autonomous human being ~ infinitely connected. To have empathy, yet know where you end and other’s lives, choices and karma begins. To set boundaries gracefully with love for yourself and those who cross your path requires depth, compassion and strength...the stuff of massive and great characters. Such people are all around us, their heroicism passes quietly with each day as they call you from their call centre jobs, serve you dinner at your favorite restaurant, or asked you for change on the street. You can hear the dedication in the kind words of strangers, and when someone is really listening.
Holding great big love for someone sometimes includes letting them go. Allowing them to struggle alone in the world – to learn their own lessons – going on faith that they may be ok. That they’ll find what they need, learn what they have to. And if it is to be they’ll find a way to one day show you how much you meant to them.
In the midst of much confusion and misguided desperate searching - many terrible violent things are done in the name of love and justice. Love is not an easy thing to define or put words to. The closest I've come to understanding it clearly is in appreciating the fact that love is about vulnerability. It takes tremendous courage to love and be loved in a world built on violence and where few things are made not to be broken. Love requires a lowering of our arms and defenses to reveal our beauty, and vulnerability, our fears and fragility. To be loved is when someone sees your humanity as fully and as clearly as they are able and want more than anything else in this world to be kind and close to your precious existence. Feeling loved is that of feeling the strength and warmth that comes from being able to show yourself as fully as you are able.
We live in an elegant universe. Let yourself be loved and cared for.
Forgive me these are the morals of the story not the story. That will have to come later. As noted at the beginning this is only a work in progress...patience.
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