Site menu:
Feathers and Bones
Took place July 10, 2008by Jeffrey Pierce
A very good friend and past life sister, her Craft name is Little Rabbit, had sent me some feathers and bones from a reclaimed turkey farm on the East Coast of the United States. "I was told to send these to you," she informed me. "You'll know what to do with them."
Preparing to teach class tonight, I was straightening up the office, putting things away rather than simply setting them aside, when I came across the feathers and bones. Little Rabbit had also sent me some loose feathers in a box and I figured it made sense to keep all of them together. The instant that I picked up the Ziploc bag containing the larger of the two bones, it was immediately clear that it did not like the idea of sitting in the box. Sometimes the shift in energy is pretty subtle, but this was very intense.
Ripening cherries hang from one of our cherry trees.
Thinking that it might like things better if I removed it from the plastic bag and let it rest loose among the feathers, only to once more be hit with the overwhelming sense of wrongness" regarding leaving the bone in the box. I suddenly saw a vision of a freshly dug hole in the ground lined with feathers. Knowing better than to question such things, I picked up the bags of feathers and bones and headed out for the yard, feeling myself directed toward one the old cherry trees that grow in our backyard.I didn't have a shovel with me and had no idea how I was going to dig a hole without one, but I've been learning to trust in Spirit and simply allow things to manifest. Of course, a small gardening trowel had been left in my path (presumably by one of the children), the tool waiting in the grass in a direct line between the cherry tree and our back door.
The hole and the gardening tool that had been conveniently left in my path.
When working with the fae, you have to let go of your boundaries and work almost exclusively on a symbolic level. You'll miss half of what they have to share with you if you don't. In the photo above, you'll notice a nice pile of loose, dry earth beneath the blade of the hand tool in the upper right corner of the photograph. All of the dirt came out in that fashion, loose and crumbling, with the exception of one large solid piece that you can see in the left of the picture.And you can see it's "face" clearly in the photograph below.
The dirt face that emerged from the hole.
What isn't apparent (I'm having some challenges with close-up photography since I broke one of my camera lenses on our honeymoon) is that the outline that you can almost make out around the "eyes" and "nose" forming the "face" is actually raised and extends from the rest of the earth. And the "nose" is actually an almost perfectly round piece that extends above even that. Had I been able to photograph it from another angle (instead of standing on a chair to get far enough away to capture it with my remaining telephoto lens) is that the face is just as obvious from every angle. It's three dimensional.While it can be tempting to dismiss this sort of thing as mere coincidence, being open and accepting of it is imperative when working with the fae. It's how they interact with us, how they communicate. And think about the mathematical chances that all of the soil would be loose and crumbly except for this particular piece, completely with nearly perfectly circular, deeply carved eyes and a button nose.
An interesting and symbolic stick that simply appeared on its own.
The very interesting, dark shaped stick that mysteriously appeared in the hole after it was dug was the key to what I was supposed to be doing. Noting how you can imagine that it's a tower of connected pieces? Having worked with the fae on numerous occasions, I've learned to understand them to a certain extent (with more than my share of missteps along the way) and this was their way of saying that I needed to integrate the energy of the bones and feathers into the faerie energy of the Pacific Northwest (the bones came from approximately 3,000 miles away) rather than burying them in the earth and releasing their spirits into the afterlife.
Feathers and bones.
So I placed the bones and feathers in the hole, tying their energy together, the bones teaching the feathers to connect with the earth and the feathers enabling the bones to emerge into the air, and prepared to bury them. It was then that I was told that I needed to ritually sever the energy from it's original location, a continent away."I hadn't brought tools of any sort with me, but I've been learning the beauty of simply doing the work, being open, and allowing things to manifest. The previous tenants of our rental home were pretty rough on the place and we're still cleaning up both the yard and the house. I looked down and there, about a foot behind me, rested a pair of scissors in the grass. I used them to ritually cut the energy that held the bones and feathers to their old home, allowing them to integrate with the energy of the fae near our home.
Finding scissors when you need them the most.
The scissors went into the hole and were followed by a walnut shell half, nearly identical in shape to a "fae mask" that I'm crafting that's sitting on my desk in my home office. The dirt "face" went in as well, each item blessed and thanked for its part in the rite and then the hole was covered with loose dirt and a feather from the box was left on top of the mound. (Leaving a feather behind is sort of a tradition of mine when I bury something - I did the same thing when I laid the fossilized dog bone to rest back on Summer Solstice 2005.
Half of a walnut shell.
Then it was back inside to do some more work and to prepare for tonight's offline class.And, believe it or not, that's a fairly typical afternoon in my little corner of the world.