FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD

It's a soft day here on Sunshine Hill, one with a lavender haze, cool air, and the background sound of birds. The little bushtit re-visited my window, still fluttering to enter, several times this morning, and last night a hawk rode the air currents so close I could distinguish individual feathers in his wings. Afterwards, sleeping, I dreamed I flew just like that, my first flying dream since my thirties when I experienced that exhilaration often. In the same dream, however, my legs had collapsed leaving me helpless on the ground. Joyce, the ministry coordinator at the parish, tried to help me but failed. Then I just rose up, slowly, slowly, and I thought, "I think I'm about to fly," and with that thought I went higher and higher until I spread my arms and floated like the hawk.


Lately I experience connections becoming interpenetrations. The membrane between the individual and the wholeness is a veil so fine and permeable it's barely there at all. Breath passes right through. Prayer passes through. In the mornings I whisper your names, one by one, and there is no distance between us. It must be God, I think – the Breath within and beyond the breath, the Word within the whisper, the Divine Current lifting us up when we are helpless, lying on the ground. Hildegard calls us feathers on the Breath of God.

It's Memorial Day and so I watch with love each feather that floats in memory on this Divine Breath. The metaphor is stretching now almost to the breaking point. But I do have feathers, actual ones, some of which go way back to a gull on the shore of Lake of the Woods. Feather-down that filled a bird's nest in a Christmas tree Pat and I once had in the house in St. Paul. Tiny blue feathers from a trip to Ireland. Brown feathers edged with gold on the Indian flute John found for me at the Grand Canyon. Tiny feathers P.J. tied in the ribbon around a gift.

Words come to memory, "i turn my face,and hear one bird/sing terribly afar in the lost lands."

ee cummings, visiting my mind again, saying it all perfectly, when I cannot. I pick up his book to look for that poem and find this one instead, placing it here for memory's sake.

in time of daffodils (who know

the goal of living is to grow)

forgetting why,remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim


the aim of waking is to dream,


remember so(forgetting seem)






in time of roses(who amaze


our now and here with paradise)


forgetting if,remember yes






in time of all sweet things beyond


whatever mind may comprehend,


remember seek(forgetting find)






and in a mystery to be


(when time from time shall set us free)


forgetting me,remember me