She Had Feathers

The greatest truth about my tribe is that we are a fearful people. Our chiefs and elders teach us to make that fear our strength—performing the rituals, and weaving our greatest triumphs from the familiar shadows cast over us all. Fear is benevolence, and fear is safety. Fear makes us who we are. I was a child by the fire, shivering to the sharp-fanged creatures conjured in winding spirals of smoke rising through thick forest canopy. My wide eyes absorbed everything—the must nots, the shall nots, the fear, the pain—and sometimes the bite of a switch, a thoughtful partner ensuring the story sank in. Our signs are proud signs. Our gods are proud gods. Gods of great love and abundance, but also of great caprice and fear. In our tribe, we all have our place, whether by the fire, in the hunt, or in the telling of our story. I heard so many times growing up—hair tousled, black soil caked underfoot, “The Story is the Story”. The Story comes from the Beforetime, and as the elders say, keeps us safe in the forest, and will see us through the dark nights from the evil that lurks within. 

There are a million tales told in the crisscrossed corps-à-corps of dancing shadows across one’s skin. The Dark has many names. Fog rolls in across the earthen floor where filtered light fades to a glow one isn’t to trust. I perceive it still, though I stand here by an old stone fence, running my fingers across its ridges and mossy valleys, glare reflecting from the mildewy chrome of a dilapidated Pontiac. The sun shines high upon the river bluff where I grew up. It’s hot. It’s always hot this time of year, even when one expects it not to be, and moreso every year. The leaves are changing—but later than most recall, as if the trees’ lusty breath itself is held longer season by season. The clouds roll back over hours. Sweat drips in my eyes. My shoulder muscles complain like the crows overhead. The earth yields her tawny dirt and shallow roots shovelful by shovelful, dry and impoverished. 

Thermos emptied, I wipe my sweat on my sleeve; my heat-exhausted gaze falling to an old candy wrapper.

There are two times in a man’s life when he becomes who he will be: first, when the instruction takes its first test as the boy grows physically into a man. Second: when the instruction is tested again and again against the roaring of life’s insubvertable realities. The first is a trial of the body, the second of the soul. In my tribe we are trained well against both evils—The Story is the Story. 

Far beneath the penumbral canopy, walls are built around my village—palisades and sentinels for the dark unknown beyond. It is always waiting. Lurking. Evil does not think, but it hungers to destroy. Against this destruction, we retreat into our teachings—The Story is the Story. Against this destruction we build walls—within and without. And against this destruction we perform our rituals—of celebration, of violence, of coming of age. Rituals of blood, and of ash; of smoke, and of plenty. Fireflies bob in the dusk; heavy air carries the fear in our songs, murmured low to avoid what might perceive. 

The tribe is not the tribe without the sustaining shadows we are born into—we are always reminded by the elders: It is the old ways and traditions that keep us safe. Accept the nourishing fear into your heart—The Story is the Story. My mother carefully swaddled me in that protective cloak; nurturing her child in the ancestral powers of safety and protection from that which lurks within and without. Across seasons of cicadas, oak roots, and the yawning of the great magnolias, I grew strong. I grew in strength, in education, in cleverness—and in fear; great among my tribe—one day perhaps chief among our carefully manicured groves, where Earth’s vivacity is tamed, and only ivy wanders furtively. 

She was there too.

In cascades of light diffusing through the mud-bottomed waters we were hatched into, hailstorms and tornado sirens marked the solstice in our pond. There is a voice, great and insistent, that calls a dragonfly to climb from the safety of the waters high onto a rush and take flight—abandoning all comfort and undergoing divine transformation to experience the meaning of what it is to breathe air, to ascend—to dance in esctacy of all of the freedom of a world wider than imagination could possibly provide. We were playing on the old bridge, wrapped in our cloaks, drawing straws for divination on what the future would hold. I asked the blue-eyed creature: “Do you think we’ll still know each other after we leave the pond?” She considered this thoughtfully, and looking back at me, answered in the slow undulations of her glittering tide and rolling waves of quiet fondness across time and distance.  

We turned about in orbit of each other in this way, our own lives lived playing at the banks and eventually the forest palisades themselves, sometimes to the chagrin of the elders and sentinels. In my own time a captain, my ship sailed the high oceans far from that bridge, bow practiced in crashing over breakers. I rode the winds, and went to all the corners- buffeted, but drawing tight my mother’s fear for protection from the storm within and the evil without. From atop my crow’s nest, and through nights of moths and of frost, I witnessed the banners on the parapets high above changing, but always with the same echo—The Story is the Story. 

A house came to be built on the mist that winds itself between marsh and river, and I came to amass a great deal; my life an abundance of possessions and concerns. I had much to be proud of—I practiced the fear to the satisfaction of my people, and indeed many of the elders were approving of me, and even jealous of my fortune. I had grown in curious ways from my explorations that I was quite afraid of, and though I didn’t let it be known to my tribe, had noticed for a long time that from ravages of exposure, my mother’s cloak was a bit ragged, and also no longer really quite fit my changed form. It would be of great shame were this to be perceived, so in deference I filled the gaps and frayed edges with shadows. It was a time of ominous stories circulating among my people, and never wanting to deny my mother the comfort of her own great fear, I grew to assuage her increasing unease that was rising along with the rest of my tribe. As was known, what walls keep out cannot hurt. Homes nestled more tightly together. Owl and cricket hushed as rising chants and murmurs of “The Story is the Story” coalesced to build new protective borders. Torches were lit. Trees were felled. Palisades were sharpened. The elders’ faces became gaunt against the rising threat of darkness spilling over or creeping beneath; clutching the wisdom and teachings ever tighter to keep the tribe safe. 

Silent footfalls bring a visitor. I’m happy to have the company as a wandering white-socked tuxedo comes to survey my progress. Building a new structure as robust as this one is hard work, and I’m glad I at least remembered sunscreen this time. Cursing at another screw stripping, I set the drill down and fumble for my tool pouch. A persistent gnat investigates my face. Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone wafts distantly across the hill from someone’s open window. It takes a few tries, but I fix the corner, examine the boards, and consider whether they should be sanded or have additional fasteners added before painting them. It has to carry a lot of weight, you know, and people separated from the process of growing and tending to life underestimate just how much care and labor has to go into nourishing a community. It doesn’t help that we’ve been working against ourselves for a long time. There’s a certain resilience that comes from simply doing a thing that we’ve lost in broad ways from our pursuit of convenience and the extractive systems that position themselves to provide it. I look back across the freshly laid soil in consideration as a merciful breeze rises from somewhere. I close my eyes and inhale the aroma. A mockingbird’s warning alarm calls out upon notice of my fuzzy interloper and is repeated somewhere deeper behind the treeline. I was supposed to have help today, but it’s alright. My mild huff of frustration is noticed. “Are you my help?”, I ask the taciturn feline as my leg is headbutted for pets, which are gingerly obliged. It will be time to eat soon anyway. I pause, wipe myself off, and as my friend detaches to tend to cat business, set off down for the creek where I left my backpack. 

I had traveled far from the gloom of my misty shoreline when I felt the waters lapping at my ankles. Before I knew it, it had risen to my knees, then my chest, and finally I found myself floating in pleasant waters beneath sunlit skies of purple and wisteria. It was just so nice to be here, and it seemed so long since I had felt anything like it. There was such a comfort and familiarity about this place, like I could be here forever. It felt almost as though I could just… let go, and surrender to this serene pleasure. “What is this?” I pondered to myself, turning about left and right, splashing playfully with a sort of childish joy in the deepening cool of the lagoon. Her azure eyes flashed open, meeting mine with their soft and genuine laughter, and all at once I realized I was sinking. Down… down… down. 

Down to the bottom.

My smiling possessor, looking back at me expectantly. 

My mother’s cloak, tightening around my chest like a knot. 

I…

Oh no. 

A lake, by its nature, knows to search for a basin in which to be poured; a robin which song to sing. She was as a spring of all living waters that might sustain my fields and see fruit borne from flowering branches. In her was the terrifying vastness of spirit that could play and dance across my whole tapestry: in watercolor, arrayed in magnificent disregard; tearful laughter without qualification; the immaculate peach of a conch’s innermost porcelain; treasured books read aloud with all the voices; and the horizon whirling while rolling down a hill and dizzily picking the collected fuzzy burrs from each other. 

A glance shared out of time holds all of the secrets of the universe. 

When I at last found the way to the temple of my soul, your footprints were in its dust​​—so long after you had filled me with your color and become everything there ever was to me. In days without hours we skated the fields of stars together. Hawks alighted along our path in dreams stretching to infinity, the only beings in the world. In you I learned who I actually am. In you I learned that home only truly lives in the eyes of another. 

But only in those briefest crystalline moments of light that I allowed to filter through the slits in the walls and shadows.

I didn’t believe it when you left. 

I didn’t know how. That wasn’t part of the fear. That wasn’t part of the Story. 

How could everything that mattered be strangled by the very cloak woven to protect it?

You were so sad that day you finally really did spread your wings. I didn’t know it was possible. After all that time, I’d never really learned to fly myself. 

I felt everything all at once when that door closed behind you—every wasted moment and misplaced priority of a life as a thunderclap bursting open the borders of my soul; her effluence washing through me as a hurricane, a flood, a cleansing deluge. That great voice, the one that demands all creatures obey their purpose, rising in a paroxysmal scream of “NO!”, reverberating, reverberating, reverberating.

But you were truly gone, leaving behind a single cerulean feather circling slowly to the ground; the only thing with color left in all the world. 

Silence fell in the forest, and darkness with. Darkness of the choking kind. The kind of darkness that seeks to destroy; the flavor of which I am sure is what the original Story had warned of. But we are made of stronger things than the fear lets on. No matter how dark those nights were, my light, however wavering, never went out. Breath by breath. In time, I learned to retrace your steps to seek guidance from the temenos garden at the center of my being where all thought and unthought meet. I kept your feather close; sacred—and learned its feeling, using that feeling to learn the form of all other things that shared its hues. The shadows and the chants of the fear slid to a distorted two-dimensional background, as a muffled chorus sung upside-down in another time. They were nothing when I had already lost everything. Wholly elsewhere, my body mimed my duties. I was living as a candle hiding the color of its flame, trying all the time to trace the trail you left in the sky. I searched among trees, through glades of ferns, and down steep valleys of mud and lichen. I followed all the rivers I knew and many I didn’t. Pieces of me fell away as I toiled, some large, some small, shedding what was not needed for the purpose. I became stronger, sharper-eyed, and more focused. I labored, wandered, and in my searching, grew in the ways that the great voice had been whispering for me to heed all along. 

Eventually I found myself standing in a most peculiar place: I had walked right out of the forest entirely, and a sun I almost did not recognize was beaming directly onto my face. I reached instinctively for my cloak. It wasn’t there. To my surprise, I was not covered at all—neither for safety, nor concealment; not for shame, or for fear. There were no shadows here. It was bright. Overwhelmingly bright. I blinked—a realization. Here. It was here. Crouching down, I caressed the delicate blades of grass in my hands as heavy drops crept from my eyes to nourish them. I laid on the grass and wept, knowing that this is where you had left for. I thought of my tribe, of the elders, of my parents; those others I had so much love for. Didn’t they know how beautiful it was here outside of those walls they were so feverishly building? Folding my wings, I sat on the speckled ground beneath an old sweetgum, fondling one of its spiky creations between my fingers. Butterflies flitted from flower to flower. Of course they didn’t. I didn’t either. They had no one to teach them, and wouldn’t have listened if they did—because they’d been trained their whole lives not to, just as I was. It wasn’t safe. This part also wasn’t in the Story.  

The yeast doesn’t know that it’s making wine, nor does it know that the alcohol emitted by its own feasting will be the end of it. Yeast just knows that there is abundant sugar that someone left for it, and abundance is there to use. Galileo said that “Wine is sunlight, held together by water.”; each appellation ultimately telling a billion tales of fungal hubris. “Also true is the aphorism that a glass bottle might last a thousand years until it is shattered in an instant.”, I think to myself as I carefully collect the jagged shards and toss them into a dirty bucket to dump later. This garden is really coming together, and considering the blighted falling-down structure and old tires that used to define this little patch of land, is something I’m actually really proud of. It’s amazing what happens when you start learning and living with the soil: life has a way of forming connections wherever life is involved, mirrored in all of its sizes, forms, and complexities, inward and out—whether in lush understory, or the terrified longing of a trepidant boy. My litter-fueled meditation is interrupted by a familiar elderly drawl from across the property: “Hey boss! Miss Kathryn brought biscuits. Thought you might wanna know before Pete eats them all again.” I turn, smile, and waving to a betrucker-hatted and clearly delighted Mike, shout back my thanks. 

Swirling kaleidoscopes of orange-red and sunny yellow crunch underfoot as I make my way along familiar forest pathways to Thanksgiving dinner with my family. I know fully well what will be discussed by my tribe in voices both hushed and furious—always with zeal underpinning all, and an almost childlike need beneath it to keep the tribe safe. I don’t know if I will ever again see the blue-eyed creature, but if she does happen in her winding travels to land in my garden, I know she’d be fond of it; something that surprisingly after all this time, gives a warm feeling despite the November chill. After all, I’ve put so much of myself into it, and many of the truest pleasures come from our truest selves being seen and understood. A pair of squirrels quarreling in a branch overhead pause to complain about me. I’ve met so many wonderful people on the other side of the forest wall now, connected by a common thread of pursuing life in life’s own voice, regardless of mantra, fear, or ancestral shame. It’s as if without instruction they just know: The Story is Ours to Tell.