Yesterday I did a meditative weeding walk around my front yard. I'd started by mowing the back lawn, then coming to the front to return the mower to the garage and noticed all the weeds between the bricks on stairway to the front door and thought, I should make that look more welcoming.
I commenced to weed the bricks and hard brush off the accumulated sand and salt that had been sitting since the spring thaw. Then I noticed the ivy that was overrunning the edges of the walkway and started to creep up behind the house shingles. I trimmed along the stairs, walkway and up the concrete foundation until just below where it met the house frame. The whole time I wasn't thinking very much. I was simply receiving what ever was before me. Weeds, vines, salt and sand. Just moving and meditating like a monk in a pebble garden with a rake.
After I'd cleared all the debris I created, I turned my eyes to the flower beds. Weeds and deadheads everywhere. Found a pair of sharp scissors and deadhead all that needed it. The butterfly bush especially, which was alternately covered in bumble bees, butterflies ( more kinds than I can name) and humming bird moths (two varieties this year). The fragrance of the flowers put me into a deeper level of non-thinking and just being. When I finished the house side of the driveway, I crossed over to the far bed of flowers that abuts the full length of the driveway.
It was covered with the pine needles from the giants that stand above it and some of their fallen branches from the windstorm two weeks ago. The weeds were minimal, I guess they don't like pine pitch. So I started to collected the other fallen branches and twigs in the yard between the bed and the woods.
Halfway down the hill I found the first feather - a long striped blue jay tail feather. I stood up and looked around and thought one word: blue. I then noticed two more small blue jay flight feathers several yards away, toward the sidewalk. I stood up again and thought: blue. Over the course of the next 15 minutes and perhaps covering a 15'x25' piece of land, I had collected 37 feathers. They weren't all obvious. The rain, needles, mud, dust, mulch and so on had darkened and hidden them. But they were all there for the finding.
Why, you might ask, did I collect all these feathers? Why do some people collect beach glass or heart-shaped rocks from distance shores? We just do. I've collected natural objects as totems since I was a kid. I know many native cultures assign memories to objects, the Hawaiians to shells to remember various rights of passage.
The blue jay feather, however, took on a new significance for me the weekend I decided to divorce my wasband three years ago. For six months I'd tried to be intimate with him: emotionally, physically, spiritually, intellectually and sexually. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. When for the 7th time in as many months, I asked are we ever going to be intimate again, instead of his stock answer, "of course", he finally spoke the truth, "I don't now." I knew that was as much of a reality as he could bare witness to at the time. When I said I wanted a divorce, in the next breath he asked if we could "have an open marriage." I now realize he'd been telling himself that was what he already was living. I was not.
In that instant, I knew my marriage was over. We'd been talking in sunroom and the dog had been growing impatient for a walk. I turned to the wasband and said, "tomorrow you're going on the dog walk with me and we'll talk this out." At that moment I went on the dog walk alone. I remember the light filtering through the trees and knowing deep in my bones as I asked the question, "when do you know your marriage is over", that it was NOW. I wasn't shaking. I was at peace.
The next day we did go for the two mile dog walk I do every Sunday. The last time he'd accompanied me was on Mother's Day when the whole family came as one and we found lady slippers blooming all over the top of Great Hill. But this day was temperate, windless and clear. After not being able to get him to speak to me about anything meaningful for over a year, and only having necessary parental conversations, he was spewing at the mouth. These are the words I remember: Lone Wolf, Not Domestic, Urban, Loner, Not Worthy, Life is Short, After My Father's Death, Not Built for This.....
As we walked along the trail I'd found three perfectly formed blue jay tail feathers. He was not done with his torrent of tidy tacking points, so we proceeded to walk the trail again. About a third of the way round, I found a fourth blue jay feather. A flight feather that should have been longer than the other three I was holding, but it'd broken in the middle and was bent, damaged.
He saw me pick it up. He knew how I was about signs and symbols coming from nature and my dreams. He knew it was the fourth feather. He knew it was broken. He knew it didn't belong with the rest, even though I would usually says something like "birds of a feather stick together" around now. So he said, "Don't make too much of that." It was too late. I already had and the feathers message would later prove to be true....which is why he protested too much.
So finding the collection of flight and tail feathers from a blue jay yesterday was a reminder of how much has changed since three summers ago. I'm much more at peace. I've weeded out the bits that didn't allow my children to grow strong and fearless. I'm getting ready to start entertaining again, and now my walkway is welcoming once more!
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