The Beauty of Being Alive

New feathers start out as little nubbins below the existing feathers, beginning to push out the old ones. Birds help the process by preening. In a similar vein, I used to think that for us the process of letting go of old things, beliefs, traumas, attitudes, and such was the most important thing a person could do to be able to fully embrace life, to let new “feathers” replace the old.

But our new “feathers” don’t always just grow in by themselves. So just as important as letting go is letting in, welcoming the the unexpected, perhaps overwhelming and frightening new and bigger things, especially the beauty of being alive.

Raven Gives Tongue to Frog

The long shaft of the green Amazon Parrot feather leant itself nicely as a frog’s tongue, helping this story along. The color green in parrot feathers is often an unusual combination of yellow pigment in the feathers with the way the surface of the feather is microscopically structured to reflect blue light. Blue + yellow = green.

Rough Wing?

I sit for hours in the spring watching several species of swallows sweep, swoop plunge, and soar across the skies over my field. Occasionally among them are Rough Wing Swallows. Their name comes from their leading outer edge flight feathers. The curved barbs there cannot be seen as the bird is flying but if you have one of these feathers in hand, they are rough to the touch if you slide your finger across it.

Mother Kiwi and Egg

The Kiwi bears the largest egg of any bird in relation to its body size. The equivalent for us would be to give birth to a four-year-old. The bird usually lays two eggs. For the lower egg containing the embryo, I couldn’t find any illustrations of a Kiwi embryo so I made some assumptions which may be wrong—taking out the developing wings (adult Kiwi wings are about the size of the tip of your pinky finger).

See-through Feather

Fog Swallow, 7 x 9 inches

The swan’s feathers are translucent, some more so than others, like this one from the underside of the wing of a Mute Swan. In the Skagit valley where Trumpeter Swans winter, they fly like white ghosts over the foggy fields. While the swallows have found warmer weather to the south.

Ribs

turkey feathers

Love is where the heart is. Our ribs protect us. Feathers also protect birds from bumps and scrapes, but they still need their ribs.

How to See

We usually see what we think something should look like instead of really seeing what it is. Like this rabbit. Oh, I mean this duck.

Beginning drawing class students often realise this when their first sketches turn out poorly. This is because they are drawing what they think something should look like, from past experience. When they really look at the the lines and shadows and spaces of the object in front of them, their drawings improve dramatically.

This is a good lesson for life: like really try to listen rather than pre-think what a person is saying. Like setting aside assumptions, notions, and prejudices and instead look, listen, and be with a person, a cloud, a tree, or anything.

You never see these tiny feathers

All birds have these tiny feathers that help them arrange their feathers just right. The long shafts act like levers to enhance the sense of movement in the feather’s shaft that is buried in the bird’s body next to sensitive nerve endings. They let the bird know when and how to adjust their flight feathers to different air currents; fluff out their feathers to stay warm or cool, and probably tickle a bit when a bird mite moves around.

Abundance

Mute Swan feathers

My garden harvests leave me with an over-abundance, so does my creativity. Apples on the ground, baseball bat-sized zucchini thrown into the compost; more lettuce, beets, figs, kale, chard, and tomatoes than I make time to harvest and use. For anyone in the vicinity of swans when they shed their feathers, the plumes are plentifully found on the ground and floating in the water.

Producing creative ideas for new pieces is like that for me. I feel blessed with abundance and yet I am able to gather only a portion of the opportunities, making them into art. Is it a waste perhaps like the garden produce? Or, like the unused fruit and vegetables that go back into the soil to nourish next year’s plants, do unused creative ideas somehow nourish future creativity?

One Idea Leads to Another

How is it that one idea inspires another, inspires another, and on and on? One could continue making creative iterations on a theme. When does one stop to pursue something different? I think that is when the juice, the excitement wanes.

Commission

I am super excited about this piece on commission. It is for a birds of prey rehabilitation center and i am using shed flight feathers from a number of birds from outside North America. Some of them are Lanner Falcon, several species of Eagle Owls, a Kite, a Buzzard, and a Vulture.

Bird Dreams

This time of year is still cold and dark, as light returns in the northern hemisphere. This piece has a fantasy feel as I think of birds dreaming what is coming with the Spring.

What to Do With Limited Resources

All I had to work with was one whole peacock display eye and a bunch of them with damaged unusable eyes.  So I fiddled with what I had. Limits provide a central theme to my art. For each piece, I must find creative ways to express a theme to end up with a unity of design because feathers only come in certain sizes, shapes, and colors.

Limits are also a central theme in my life because I only have so much reach, so much influence. How do I help make the world a kinder place within my area of control and not waste my time and emotional energy on things I cannot influence? I’m still figuring this out and am open to your thoughts. 

Lighten that Load

We carry so much. Too much. Find satisfying work, find the perfect partner, make the world a better place, stay healthy, make a name for yourself, live up to society’s expectations, pay the bills, take care of everybody, produce, and keep busy.

I was traveling in southern Georgia and came across a rural church, Our Lady of the Lake. The sign by the road read, Come Rest with Us. It was the middle of the day, middle of the week and they were closed, I dearly wanted to go in there and lay down my burdens, give them to someone stronger and more capable to carry for me.

What’s this have to do with feathers? For me, at least in this blog, everything. Some of the happy feeling I have when working with, holding, and thinking about feathers is that they hold a bit of my burden for me. I feel lighter. I feel freed up, released.

To Write

To write is to attempt to capture a reflection of the real thing the writer is trying to describe. But the real thing always evades capture. In this piece, the feather “pen” is writing “PLUME” backwards while the bird silhouette is flying off, spelling the word the right way around.

Plume, Plumose, Plumules -- Feathers and Plants

Grey-wing Trumpeter

We often associate the word plume with wearables such as hats and costumes. Sometimes, a bunch of these plumes might be referred to as pumules. As an adjective, something that looks feathery is plumose. Ornithologists might occasionally describe a bird as plumose but more commonly I hear it to describe things that look like feathers but are not feathers—like plants and ferns such as the asparagus fern whose latin name is Asparagus plumosus.

Things Are Not As They Seem

When they can, birds like to dive straight down on top of a fish in part, because in that position, the fish is mostly where it seems. At an angle, the fish is not where it seems because light bends when it enters the water. So, when diving at an angle, fish-eating birds like Kingfishers and Ospreys understand that they need to adjust their perceptions. 

I attended a challenging two-day dance workshop where we were asked to choose our dance partners based on different themes. For the first dance, we picked a person who we were afraid of, then danced with them for an hour. Then we chose another partner based on who we thought we would be the least happy with, and so on. I was surprised that my original perception of each person was completely off-base. It was another learning to hold my beliefs and perceptions lightly because the fish is not usually where it seems. 

Eagle Feathers Found and Lost

Eighty-eight Bald Eagle wing tip feathers were on the beach on tribal land. They were placed in a circle only to be washed away an hour later and redistributed along the tideline. I think only the wingtip feathers were there because someone had picked up the wider primary and secondary feathers as they were beach-combing along the shore.

Nude Human Feather

I am intrigued by Angelo Musco’s  photograph of a feather called Aves. It is made out of hundreds of human bodies. “I call it the ‘Paradox of Lightness’ because there is this strength and power that comes from this community of thousands of interwoven bodies, yet it is a feather,” said Musco. “Ironically it looks effortless and elegant but it is the result of a coordinated and painstakingly long process.”  “The image seems so light and effortlessly floating in the air,” he said. “It is a quiet, suspended moment you first see, but as you get closer and go into the piece you find a complex and completely unexpected world.”

I like how he describes the human body feather because there is complexity, strength, and power in feathers that comes from eons of evolution. Yet feathers appear light, elegant, and effortless.

As Above, So Below

As my garden provides an over abundance, so does my creativity. Apples on the ground, baseball bat-sized zucchini thrown into the compost; more lettuce, beets, figs, kale, chard, and tomatoes than I make time to harvest and use.

Producing creative ideas for new pieces is like that for me. I feel blessed with abundance and yet I am able to gather only portion of the opportunities, making them into art. Is it a waste perhaps like the garden produce? Or, like the unused fruit and vegetables that go back into the soil to nourish next year’s plants, do unused creative ideas somehow nourish future creativity?