Demand For a White Bird

I believe that in and around us moves a Greater Being who does care. They want to help us if we ask. 

During my six years of solitude, I moved to a place where primordial beauty permeated all aspects of my life. This kind of environment was necessary for the work I was about to undertake. It seemed a crime not to take lengthy hikes and let the enchanted places help with my reintegration. My back-to-me hikes took at least three hours, and often on those hikes I saw no other persons. This left room for very deep, meditative walks in the mountains, alongside roaring rivers and skirting the blackened strands of a turbulent sea. Those ysix ears (which I fondly call the Great Meditation), I spent hours rewiring the thought synapses of my brain. It needed to take that long, and the rewiring continues to today, necessary for my continued survival, recovery and well being after leaving my toxic family cult. 

Along my meditative journey, I’d read about the idea of manifesting a good thing into reality but was skeptical. How can a person conceptualize what they want and speak it into existence? If they speak it and write it often enough, or post the thing on the mirror or refrigerator, can the wanted thing actually happen? Also, I had learned that a person had to specify exactly what it was they wanted. Be specific is what I read.

Coming from a toxic family cult, I was constantly on edge. I had only just begun to realize it’s okay to want anything at all! Forget manifesting!

Around the same time, I’d read that if a person found a white feather it was evidence that an angel was near, watching over them. Honestly, I had found many white feathers in such random places as churchyards, parking lots, cemeteries, and various unexpected locations in and out of town, but c’mon. Who doesn’t? 

One late morning (I’d been writing since five AM), my gorgeous Rhodesian ridgeback and I hopped in the car for our usual hike. Today we would hike along the cliffs oceanside. I needed time to absorb the weighty matters about which I had written. I wrote in order to recover my autonomy. Then I had to hike to recover from what I wrote! 

I was thinking of the white feathers I had found yesterday in a churchyard. Along a remote cliff’s edge, I felt a snarky attitude rising. I was sick of picking up white feathers. 

I was going through the utter solitude of hell in order to heal. There were times I’d thought of quitting the vital inner work and rejoining the family cult (not that I would). I was tempted to return to toxicity, embrace the madness again, and toss aside the rewiring work I’d painstakingly completed. The work back to myself was that exhausting. The beat of my feet on the trail drummed holes through my thoughts and emotions until I was stretched so thin, I could have easily ripped in two.

I put my hands on my hips and glared heavenward. I said to the Greater Good, “That's it? You leave me with Zero birth family, a lousy divorce, and a bunch of crummy white feathers? Tell me, Whoever you are, what I’m supposed to do with stupid feathers? I want more from You. I'm complaining but I don't care. How about sending me a big white bird? I don’t know what good a white bird will do but send the whole damn thing. Seagulls don't count. And, while you’re at it, make it fast.”

I was on a roll. I hadn’t been struck by lightning yet. I continued, emboldened. “You hear me? I’m talking a live white bird. I doubt you’ve got one of those!” Now, I was taunting.

The footpath dipped down to a place where the land flattens into a tan meadow before rising again to the edge of the cliff and it was a windy day. Three hundred feet below, the ocean crashed against a rocky shore. No one was around. Perched at the cliff’s edge was the unusually enormous eagle,  say, four feet tall, which hung out there daily. I looked heavenward.

“An eagle. Not what I asked for. I specified a big bird, remember, pure white. The eagle doesn’t count.”

I walked on, muttering.

In spite of the clouds the beauty of the place filled what little disquieted space left in me. I rounded a bend in the trail and stopped short in the meadow. The outline of the eagle in my periphery supported the cliff’s edge at a distance. Around the perimeter of the meadow cedar trees grew tall and broad. A grazing deer looked up, then another.

Before me stood a middle-aged man. On the man's shoulder perched an umbrella cockatoo, fully two feet tall. It was pure white.

That is all.