Sometimes Connections are in the Feathers and Steam

if you have a little faith

Yeah, I totally found a close approximation of Yin Yang floating in my cup.

There’s something about a feather that’s always full of meaning. You see one fluttering along the ground and you notice it. What kind of bird was it? Not that it matters, but I always wonder. How long has it been drifting without the rest of its body? Who else has seen this one feather journeying along on the wind?

Even if you don’t think it’s beautiful, you probably put some meaning on it, like the old Polish woman who used to watch my brother and I before school, who absolutely forbid me to touch feathers because she was certain that birds only lost feathers when they were diseased and dirty. Then again, she also had a lot of things to say about the lovely young Black family who moved into the house across the street, something that confused by 5-year old self just as much as her overblown fear of feathers. But you see what I’m getting at. It's full of meaning.

That’s kind of the backdrop to the past week. I work a bit at my wife’s community acupuncture clinic and apothecary when I can – sometimes running herbal healing workshops for community groups and teen programs, but mostly just simple stuff like mixing herb blends and straining tinctures. I also spend a few mornings a week sweeping up out front, cleaning the glass and cigarette butts blowing in from the parking lot next door.

Early this past week, I noticed a feather hanging out near the front door. It was a cool late-summer morning and the sun was doing that thing where it sharpens the corners of everything, which had an extra-striking effect on something as soft as a feather. So I left it there. It just didn’t seem like something that needed to be cleaned away. I mentioned something about it to Nicole in passing. And then I did pretty much the same thing a couple more times over the next few days. Breeze and foot traffic and everything else aside, the feather hung out in front all week. Nobody seemed to want to disturb it.

But on Friday, a couple of regular patients came by for acupuncture – a great pair of people who we see at community environmental activism things, both deeply-tied to the work of protecting the water and the land. On the way back from work, I ran into her out front of the clinic and we chatted for a split second while I stopped in and grabbed the car keys and headed off to run some errands.

As I drove across town to the coop, Nicole texted and said that one of the couple had picked up the feather I’d been talking about all week. It made me smile because I knew he would appreciate finding such a grounded and natural thing on the dirty city sidewalk. But then I came out of the store and ran into the patient I had already chatted with again. When I mentioned that I heard he had picked up the feather, she told me that finding it there at that exact moment had been really moving for him. They’re both native folks and he carries the beauty and spirit of birds in his name. So when he came to the clinic, the feather stopped him for a second. It spoke directly to him, offering a sign that this was the right place to be. He felt grateful to her for making him an appointment that day, and for the connections that he felt through that small soft thing.

It made me laugh out loud. It was perfect. I had been leaving that feather put all week long, not sure why – not even thinking explicitly about the fact that I was leaving it there for any real reason. Suddenly, it seemed so clear to me that, without knowing, I was saving it up for him to find exactly when he needed to. I like this guy a lot and it made me feel as if I had done something for him, but in the most fluid and unintentional way.

I almost wrote that we connected or shared a connection, but the reality is that we became aware of the connection that was already there, that couldn’t not exist. Things being what they are, it’s probably important for us to notice those subtle little strummings of the strings linking us.

As a writer, of course, I think a lot about connecting with people – it’s kind of the point of splaying this over the internet every couple weeks, but there’s also this abstract kind of experience, where I throw an essay or a poem out and it flutters in a more or less straight line away from me, and who knows where it touches down, who reads it, how they respond. I got a chance to sit down with Martín Espada for an interview about his very fabulous new book Jailbreak of Sparrows last week (excited to share that when it comes out – stay tuned!) and he made a really compelling point about throwing our writing out into the unknown.

“You have to be satisfied with the reality that if you write and publish a poem you're putting it into the atmosphere we breathe and you have no way of knowing who's gonna breathe it in. It's paradoxically an act of faith. No one, as an individual, is going to change world by themselves. But we all have to do whatever it is we can do. This is what I can do. You know, if I could impeach the president, I would impeach the president. I can't. I can do this. And you're here talking to me now and you take my poems into your classrooms. There are kids I will never meet in my lifetime Who will take those poems in, and their perception of the world's changed.”

It's true. I don’t know if anyone’s reading my writing when it goes out there. I don’t know how it strikes them, or if they snap a quick photo of it and text it to a friend. I don’t know if they think “man, this guy’s a woo-woo bozo.” I don’t know if they pick it up and think “this is a clear sign that I need to be where I am at this exact moment.” But like Martín pointed out, you just have to kind of have the faith in that possibility. You have to do what you do in the world with a conviction that it might float on the air until it lightly brushes someone else.

To follow this idea down the path a bit more, it seems important to do what you do sometimes without pushing too hard, without assuming you can know the impact of your actions. That’s tough. I don’t know that I’m too good at it, really.

But it seems to be at the heart of the whole “doing not-doing” thing that I’ve been trying to understand for a while. It’s not about not-acting. It’s about not assuming that you can always know why you’re doing what you’re doing or how it’s going to turn out. If a neighbor shows up on your porch and needs soup and a quiet ear, bring the bowl and sit down next to her without thinking about anything except that soup and sympathy feel good when you need them.

I mean, as fascism continues to rise, with so much at stake, I’m going to act. We all have to. But I’m trying to figure out how to do it in a way that leaves open the possibility of finding surprising proof of connections that of course are always-already there, but just muted under the tinnitus of terror in all our ears. It feels like that’s gonna be the place where we make progress – where we find each other.