Feather and Prayer

I visit an owl roost, past the end of the driveway, down on the edge of the river where the water gurgles around a small cut bank that is crowned by Russian olive and willow.  The roost is a power pole I resented for a time until I deduced an owl was using it.  Then that man made object became dear to me, it became the owl roost, something useful and lovely in its own way — I had a change of heart.  I have never seen the owl that roosts there but I know it is frequented by an owl because I often find her feathers caught up on the sharp prickles of tumbleweeds and the blades of bunchgrass around the base of the power pole.

I collect those feathers of hers and I carry them with me further downriver as I walk with the dogs in the evenings.  I hold them in my hands and absentmindedly stroke them and straighten them as I stroll.  Whatever invisible things I carry with me are carefully pressed into those feathers.  And I walk.  I walk.  Eventually I reach a bend in the river where I clamber across boulders to be above the water and I hold the feather out over the current.  I do the last of my praying and thinking and then I set the feathers on the wind where they drift erratically, as feathers will, moving on invisible strings of time and air.  Eventually they touch the Snake River and slide toward a set of rapids to be folded into the froth and fizz of living waters and I turn and make the long walk home in the gloaming.

Last night, in a rugged wind, I set out walking.  I made my way down to the river, down to the owl roost and I looked for a feather and a prayer and there were many feathers.  There were too many feathers, more feathers than prayers.  I knew immediately what had happened.  My owl had perished.  I believe she was electrocuted while on her perch and was found on the ground, spent and burnt by high voltage, by the coyotes who made a midnight feast of her.

I gathered all the feathers I could see and walked with them pressed against my chest where the wind couldn’t rip them from my grip.  I reached the boulder strand and stood out over the water, felt the mean wind punching at me, spoke my prayer and released the feathers into the gale.  They flew one last time — tugged and pulled by the canyon air until they dropped into the teal blue of the river and disappeared into the madness of the whitewater.

It was a viking burial with wind and water instead of flame.  I’ll miss that owl.  Her feathers led me one by one into contemplation, awareness and prayer.  I like to think that in the end, we set each other free.

Journal Entry: June 12

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I’m trying to find my pulse now.  I keep pressing two fingers against the opposite wrist, trying to locate proof of life, trying to get a sense of my natural rhythm.  I’ve started and stopped a handful of projects in the studio.  The inspiration only lasts for a couple of days or hours before it fizzles out and I toss the project aside — out of sight, out of mind, into the scrap heap.  I’ve never needed to cleanse my palate so repeatedly.  So redundantly.  So obsessively.  I’m like a person who needs to wash their hands every five minutes.

My soul wants to gargle salt water, spit and repeat.

I need something deeper burning.  I need something longer lasting.  I need a fine fire instead of bursts of untamable sparks.

I talked to a creative friend about idea making, about dreaming up ideas, choosing from those ideas and how to actually go about following through and making good the commitment to a project — for me, seeing an idea through to the end, to completion, is one of the greatest and most terrible aspects of creative work.  I want to commit myself and my hands to the ideas that sink the deepest and plague me the most, the ideas that keep me awake at night, torn between the indolence of sleep and the loud, blank pages of my sketchbook where it sits on the travel table in the front of the Airstream.  Those are the ideas that need to be exorcized, exercised, pulled out like thin threads from the silk of my mind and released into thin air.

Ideas need freedom.

In this in-between time when my own pulse seems lost to me (or rather, misplaced), it’s a time for dreaming and taking stock and building thoughtful momentum.  I grow impatient with that kind of work, I want to see the tangible fruit of my labor and I want to see it now.  I act spoilt.  I rebel against the notion that there are creative chores that hold hands with the beauty and bounty and productivity of creative work.  I cannot have one without the other.

It takes work and concentration to rise up into a space of clarity.

This week, I find myself wondering if my ideas come out of me as victims of over-gestation due to the long breaks from the studio I have been forced to take over the past couple of years.  I have a sense of being ridden under tight rein, constrained by a tight cinch.  I’m desperate to take the bit in my teeth.

Can an idea be over-mature, past a point where I can intuitively muddle my way through it, step by step, rabbit trail by rabbit trail?  Do ideas have expiration dates?  I sometimes imagine that by the time I make it into the studio my ideas are falling from me like over-ripe, wasp-bitten pears from lofty tree branches…like babies born with size fourteen feet and wisdom teeth.  The bright birth of idea and concept can seem, at times, delayed, wizened, too-grown-up.

When I tinker, play, grow and create, I want to toy with seeds that are thirsty for sunlight and rain, tiny things that hold promises of aliveness, fullness and the story of growth, development and evolution.

Perhaps the thing to do here is to step out in faith, over and over again, fight my way to the new surface of things, kick and pull past the old rot and up into the lively place of thrumming and gusting possibility.

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