Tag Archives: things with feathers

belong

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Maybe it’s the sunbeams I stared into through my camera lens yesterday, as our band gathered into the staging area, or the pollen in the air, or maybe I have something in my eye. Pretty sure I’m allergic to backlit sun-drenched brass sections looking like angels are bending from the sky to kiss their foreheads.

I had the privilege of chaperoning the NHS marching band to the Starlight Parade in Portland yesterday. I love our band. I love watching them embody something Glennon Doyle says: “We belong to each other.” I love watching them lift their chin to let a friend reach in and close the clasp at their throat or adjust the chin strap on their shako (that’s what the hats are called). “I trust you,” they say, exposing their vulnerable soft parts. “I can be trusted,” they say, with their helpful hands.

I loved looking into the eyes of each student with a squirt bottle in my hand and saying silently, “Trust me.”

“I trust you,” they say silently. They open their mouth.

We used to call it “baby bird style” when Quinn was in second grade and we’d squirt water into the open mouths of the kids on field trips. I realize/remember when I watch another band mom, Carol, hydrating them, that our mouths open, too. It is so human, so motherly. Here comes the airplane. Ever since we started squirting things in their mouth as babes in arms, from breasts or bottles, spoons or fingers, we’ve opened our mouth when we want them to open theirs. We are mirrors.

Speaking of they/them. Happy Pride. I know one reason the band room is home to many kids is that they don’t exactly fit the regularly sanctioned acceptable categories of high school. The band room is home to the neurodivergent, the nonbinary, the nonconforming. Which is why I like taking them to Portland, where the 2023 Starlight parade Grand Marshal is Poison Waters, a drag performer and social activist. I like the exhibit behind us in the parade being TriMet, the bus I rode to work while I was pregnant with Quinn, with the slogan All Are Welcome. I like the Portland crowd with their rainbow light sabers and their heart-shaped glasses and their clowns on bicycles and their llamas on leashes and their boy children in tutus and their girl children in dinosaur crocs and all their children dancing and wielding guns that fire nothing but bubbles.

I like that their band teacher introduced so many of the end-of-year awards at their spring concert using they/their as he talked about each student, however they identified. I like that they can be boys tucking ponytails up into shakos with bobby pins and girls with pixie cuts or pigtails and nonbinary young people being whoever they want to be.

I like how kids from a rural coastal town go to a city fair. When told to be in groups of no fewer than three, their threes adhered to each other like Velcro and grew into fifteens, wandering under huge, gnarled city trees, venturing together into the dust-mote-filled sunbeams to hop on carnival rides, then congregating again under the boughs to loan each other cash for slushies and elephant ears. I like how they belong to each other.

They all have doubts and fears and preoccupations. I know I did as a teenager. I want to tell them… I still have so many doubts and fears and preoccupations, most recently upon my return to being a band mom who barely sees my son. The last Starlight parade we attended, I had a sixth grader who lived with me half time. Since then, a pandemic pulled us apart. We are coming back together. We are still here. We are not the same. But we still belong to each other. The band room is still home. I want to tell them to keep reaching for what they love, and especially for the people they love.

A beautiful mural featuring a blue bird up at the top of a tall building on SW 2nd and Salmon caught my eye, and I felt sure it had not been there four years ago on the parade route. Sure enough, this painting, called Inheritance, was created just last year. In it, an elder’s hands offer a bowl to a younger set of hands. The bowl brims with fir cones, trilliums, and butterflies.

I want to tell them: Look up, little birds. Do not let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t look up.

Also, there will be school bus fender benders, anxiety, garment bag chaos, missing shoes, forgotten backpacks, mood swings, vomit, blisters, dying phone batteries, and body odor.

There are enormous bands before us and behind us, with military-level discipline and polish and prestige, plumes spearing from their caps in waterfalls of sparkle and glitz. The band behind us filled at least four buses, maybe more. But I’ll take these kids, these coastal sardines packed into one bus, the ones who worked for their uniforms (the sophomores through graduating seniors remember the many nights they haunted the haunted house in 2019), with their proud plumes of blue feathers. I’ll take them and I’ll tell them silently with my eyes: Soar.

~thankful thursday~ collecting butterflies

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11/1/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 1

Today didn’t have any obvious things to set it apart from other days. Coffee and eggs. Handling gross fish guts. Then coming home. Coming home is something I am keenly grateful for, having spent quite a bit of time away from home recently. I’ll say more about the away days in other posts, I’m guessing. But hand in hand with coming home, is who I come home to/come home with, who I sit down and read voter guides with over popcorn, who still builds me and the kitties a wood stove fire every November day. I am grateful for my partner in all of the things, including road trips that are not vacations.

 

11/2/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 2

When taking trips that are not vacations, I am grateful for my camera, which gives me a great excuse to take breaks from non-vacationing to collect images of butterflies. Collecting butterflies while not vacationing is a lot like practicing gratitude. You start with an intention. You have to pay close attention. You find them if you look, sometimes in unlikely places. You can’t hold onto them, only notice them. Gratitude and butterflies seem to both teach about letting go. I have been grateful for butterflies in past years, I was grateful for them exactly two years ago today according to the data, but I have been looking hard for butterflies during this season of our lives and they continue to appear and appear.

 

11/3/21

~30 days of gratitude~ day 3

Grateful for this human and honored to be his mama.

~rainbow mondays~ smolder

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“How many fears came between us?

Earthquakes, diseases, wars where hell

rained smoldering pus

from skies made of winged death.

Horror tore this world asunder.

While inside the bleeding smoke

and beyond the shredded weeping flesh

we memorized tales of infinite good.”

~Aberjhani

 

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~summer shorts~ molting

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I passed the tub of paid-for veggies to the outside of the sneeze guard and the customer turned sideways to me to pack them into her bag. I dipped my gloved hands in bleach again, looked around at the customers standing six feet apart, the colorful fabrics of their face masks. As I turned back towards her, her earring caught my eye – a beautiful piece, rose colored stones, the kind of earring with a tear drop shaped central stone and many little jingly bits of metal and beads dangling, like a musical feather. “What beautiful earrings,” I said.

“Thank you, they were my mother’s. When I was little, I would hear the sound of them, so now when I wear them, I hear that sound and feel surrounded by her, and by those happy memories.”

Hearing of mother connections is especially poignant as I grapple with separation, and her story came as an unexpected gift. I feel surrounded by my mom’s love when I am wrapped in one of her quilts. I have been delivering care packages in my own attempt to wrap my love around Quinn as well, as we approach five months of separation. Snacks, books, a box of seeds to grow, feathers.

It’s molting season for the birds. Every few days I look down during our bayou walks and discover a new feather shed by one of our local jays and once even a raven! This ritual shedding of items that are no longer useful seems apt. Mom and I have been talking about how we both base a lot of our worthiness on our usefulness. I am underproducing for work and powerless as a parent, so my usefulness is quite diminished. Perhaps it is time to molt, to let go of old ideas about worthiness, like feathers that need to retire from service. These feathers have done their gravity-defying work and have performed valiantly, but their ragged edges are no longer streamlined, no longer serving to decrease resistance to the flow.

The day I found an owl feather, I had really been missing Quinn, and it was a small comfort to find a trace of his favorite animal that I could pick up and hold in my hand. Its softness and lightness brought a lift I was needing. I held onto it for a week or so, but when the time came to deliver another care package, I tucked it in a ziplock bag with the latest stash of feather finds.

That same afternoon on my walk with Rich, I found one more owl feather, in the very same spot I had found the first one. This one I think I’ll keep.

Quinn will be the first to tell you that birds are dinosaurs. I would fill his care packages with live baby dinosaurs if I could, but feathers are the closest thing I can surround him with, my nestling who has fledged too soon. Of all the ephemeral things, a feather, when as a mother so much of my energy has been spent striving to overcome impermanence for him. He is a sensitive person who was a bit devastated when the peep we microwaved could not be reconstituted into its previous form – things that are fun for other kids cause him grief. He explained that he did not want to study the woolly mammoth, one of his all-time favorites, because he really wishes he could see a live one, and their extinction hurts too much. Change, transitions, extinction, impermanence. Throwing anything away is a struggle for him, so every week he went to his dad’s I carefully removed detritus from his room just beneath his limits of detection.

I have been realizing that my mom did this for me as a child, too. Thinking of birds and dinosaurs and peeps just reminded me that she once learned how to poke a pinhole in each end of an egg to blow the contents of the egg into a bowl, leaving a pristine egg surface for decorating that would not spoil. I have a feeling she might have been wishing she could just put her feet up, but she strove to overcome some impermanence for me when I grieved the demise of my colorful easter eggs.

Part of the devastation of this time is there is no protecting our children from these losses they are enduring. However, protecting our children from learning how to handle loss might be another idea that is ready to be molted, replaced with some new plumage. We will just have to trust that it will grow in brighter, stronger, readier for streamlined flight than that which it is replacing.

~summer shorts~ firebirth

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My friend just went through breast cancer surgery and we are on the phone discussing poop colors and whether medical waste is incinerated, and unexpected emotional devastation even when all the decisions we’ve made have been absolutely right. I am not a good phone friend, but if you are going to call me, it’s likely going to be about something raw and gritty like this. In my imagination I am allowing fire to be the outcome of where breasts go when they are removed because there are powerful metaphors in fire. Inked across the shoulder and upper arm of this friend is, rather prophetically, a phoenix. We forget fire can be a creative source of energy when we see it cause so much destruction, but the phoenix dies engulfed in flame only to be reborn out of the ashes. There is so much about our current moment that feels devastating and destructive, an inferno threatening the best things about this world, and yet if I summon the courage to look into the fire, this little thing with feathers is poking its head up out of the ashes, getting ready to be reborn. Creative plans will hatch to make a way, through art, to integrate having been utterly torn down and the work it will take to be reborn, feather by feather. The other day as she noted that her breasts, or the breast-shaped spaces they used to occupy, were burning (a good, albeit painful, sign that she is told indicates healing; mothers understand about productive pain when it comes to birth), we planned a future campfire photo art session. Like a grappling hook tossed a long way out ahead of us that we can climb to if we keep putting one foot in front of the other, this tiny plan gives us a target, a rope to grasp, a direction out of the furnace. Though the flames haven’t even subsided, and the hatchling may be weak and covered in all this ash right now, she will eventually emerge powerful and courageous. In my life there is a son-shaped hole, while her kids are there but she can’t really be with them, and it hurts; these are the people we carried in our bodies, pieces removed from us with great pain and at great cost to ourselves, more than we ever expected. Your baby is born, and you need so much more absorbent cloth than you realize to soak up all manner of fluids drawn up out of you by the gravitational force of their orbit around you. You were expecting a swaddled bundle, not a planet with its own atmosphere and trajectory. What to expect when you’re expecting a phoenix: there are expectations and then there is reality, and that book title seems to be out of print, or maybe it hasn’t been written. Yet. For now, it’s DIY phoenix midwifery. Birth and rebirth are messy, painful, intense, productive, and creative. Our children, too, are being devastated by this fiery time, and they, too, will rise, powerful, from the ashes, stronger than before, better for it. Inked on the lower part of the same arm as the phoenix is the one word calling to mind that thing with feathers, the one being reborn from these ashes, the one that never stops: hope.

see also: water metaphors