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 very life itself. It seemed a crime not to take lengthy hikes among the enchanted places. My hikes took at least three hours, and often on those hikes I saw no other persons. This left room for very deep, meditation walks at cliffs’ edge, over mountains, alongside roaring rivers and skirting the blackened strands of a turbulent sea. Along those trails in those years (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 could a person conceptualize what they wanted, speak it and write it often enough, so that by posting the thing on their mirror or refrigerator or steering wheel that wanted things would actually happen? Also, I had learned that a person had to specify exactly what it was they wanted. 

Coming from a toxic family cult, I was on edge, only beginning to realize it’s okay for us 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 at the ocean. I needed time to absorb the weighty matters about which I had written. I wrote to recover. 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. As I climbed a hill along a remote cliff’s edge, I felt a snarky attitude rising. I was sick of seeing only white feathers. 

I was going through hell and utter solitude in order to heal. Not that I would, but there were times I’d thought of quitting the vital inner work and rejoining the family cult. I thought of returning to toxicity, embracing the madness, and tossing aside the rewiring work I’d painstakingly completed. The work back to myself was just that exhausting. The beat of my feet on the trail drummed holes through my thoughts and emotions until I was stretched thin. 

Finally, I put my hands on my hips and glared heavenward and the sky was pewter. “So,” I said to the Greater Good. “Is that all you’ve got? Zero birth family, a lousy divorce, little support and a bunch of crummy white feathers? Tell me, please, Greater Good or whoever you are, what I’m supposed to do with stupid feathers? I want more. Give me the whole enchilada here. How about sending me a big white bird instead? I mean, I don’t know what good a whole white bird will do but send me the whole darn thing and, no seagulls. And, while you’re at it, make it fast. Just to let me know you are there.” I was on a roll. I hadn’t been struck by lightning yet, so I continued, emboldened. “You hear me? I’m talking about a live white bird here. Let’s see if you’ve got one of those!” Now, I was taunting. “But I doubt it.”

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. Two hundred feet below, the ocean crashed against the shore. No one was around. Perched at the cliff’s edge was the unusually enormous eagle which hung out there daily, say, four feet tall. I looked heavenward.

“An eagle. Huge, yes, but not what I asked for. What I specified was, a big white bird, remember, pure white. So the eagle—doesn’t matter how big—doesn’t count.”

I walked on, muttering.

“See? No white bird. That’s what I thought!”

In spite of the clouds, still, the beauty of the place filled what little unmad space left in me.

As I rounded a bend in the trail I stopped short, right there in the meadow, the outline of the eagle in my periphery distantly supporting the cliff’s edge. 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 was an umbrella cockatoo, fully two feet tall. It was pure white.

That is all.