Large Fierce Mammal

Still Life With Feathers and Tincture (Mrs. LFM — click to enbiggen) Read on for more on this.

The elements of the picture at the top of tonight’s Dark Sentiment combine thoughts placed here seven years ago as Dark Sentiments Season 8 — Day 3: Of Mini-miracles, Odd Synchronicities, and Sublime Messages, and more recently in On the Weihnachtsjäger Trail.

The feather gifted to me, and spoken of in the former, is the longer of the two. A jar of tincture made from the Monotropa Uniflora (Indian Pipe in the vulgar tongue which we will employ from here) spoken of in the latter provides the support all else rests upon, and brings us directly to the story of the yellow feather with its black tip and white quill.

That feather is from a Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus), a species of woodpecker common to my environs. Notwithstanding the common nature of its source, this specific feather came into my possession by the kind of uncommon circumstances that most would consider coincidental, mildly unusual perhaps, but otherwise in no way representative of any form of “Communication“. But I am not “most”.

My discovery of Indian Pipe, and equally its discovery of me, is a story for another day. The matter of the Flicker feather came from the second year of my studies into the Nature of its Medicine and my finding that unlike the previous year, it had begun appearing in  the woods very near my home. Leaving there to walk straight into the woods one soon found a well worn path that went at first straight from its start for about 30 paces, then made a 90 degree right turn to run straight another six paces, before making another 90 degree turn, this time to the left, and thence running straight through for a distance that has no bearing on this story.

Indian Pipe begins to make its appearance here in July and so I begin looking for it from the first week of that month. So it was that in the second week of that July, and on a whim, I headed off into those woods and just after making the first right turn on the aforementioned path espied a large eruption of Indian Pipe pushing up through the carpet of pine needles directly ahead of me, just off the path where it made its left turn. The plant’s colour and position made it impossible to miss, and drawing closer to examine it, I soon learned that the number of stalks was even larger than first appeared, with many still hidden beneath the loam. Turning back homeward, I immediately spotted another growth nearly as big to the left of the short central path in the dog leg formed by the 90 degree bends, and another very small one — no more than three stalks by appearances at the time and much smaller in height and stalk thickness than the rest — growing about a pace and a half off the path, on the edge of a small clearing where we would occasionally go to picnic.

The following weekend I arrived to check on the Indian Pipe and found both the larger growths were ready to harvest. Turning back looking for the smaller one, which had always been easy to spot although still much smaller than the others, I found that it seemed to have disappeared. Careful not to trample it in my search I resolved to simply stay out of that area for the time being.

And so it came to pass that I went to our kitchen to obtain the necessary harvesting implements, inform my Goode Wyfe of what I was up to, and within minutes was back on the path. I hadn’t even quite reached the first (right) turn when a bright flash of yellow caught my eye and resolved itself into a feather lying yellow side up on the ground where I had just been looking for the smaller growth of Indian Pipe. Watching my step as I approached, the Truth was soon revealed. Bending to examine the feather, and picking it up, I now saw it had been covering the still curled blossom of Indian Pipe, one of the three I had been looking for while trying not to trample mere minutes prior. The small group of three stalks had been hidden with a few dead leaves deposited by the wind or some other disturbance, and the feather had come to rest atop them.

Clearing the leaves I clearly marked the location of those stalks, left them alone, and moved on to harvesting from among the rest in keeping with this principle of which I’ve previously spoken …

A Dose of Reality

By LFM

Who would thrive shall not disgrace
His worthiness for Nature’s grace.
In service of what needs befall,
What he would take, he takes not all.
The first he finds, he moves on past,
So he will never take the last.

Now let’s circle back and consider the factors that take this out of happenstance.

First there is the timing — the Flicker had less than 10 minutes from the time I left to when I returned, to lose its feather and for that feather to traverse the environment from the point of loss to where I found it so perfectly positioned to suit my immediate purpose.

Next, in its flight, the feather had a 50% chance of landing in obscurity. Had it landed on the side opposite the one it did, it would have appeared as this …

LFM photo

Instead of this …

LFM photo

The black side upward with but the yellow quill showing amid the dappled colours of the Nova Scotia woodlands in July may have easily been missed, rather than spotted at the distance it was as a loud splash of riotous yellow.

Most important of all …

“For this to be experienced I needed to be exactly where and when I was. So simple and yet so profound.” ~ Moments of Magick