I read a friends accounting of her meeting with an artisan named Calisto, a traditional Hawai’ian woodworker. He drove up to her house one day to buy a wheelbarrow from her. Both she and Calisto immediately knew that their coming together was for more than a financial transaction and they spoke of things well beyond words and mundane “accountings.” Their friendship burgeoned. Recently, he surprised her with a beautiful gift lovingly made from some tamarind wood she’d found and given him the day before. So moved, she gave him some bundled sage and a most auspicious feather she’d kept with her for years. As she watched him drive off in his truck, a beautiful owl came to roost on a fence post nearby. Intended for him, he returned the tamarind wood, sculpted and inlaid with a mirror. He gave her something formed from his own heart in which to reflect. And he took with him something quite dear to her heart.
I am moved by the story. I am moved by the gentle intersections of human paths. The transience and the eternity. What we remember is the flare of the flame as the flint of one strikes the frizzen of the other. Even after this, even if the flame returns to the sun, we are left living in the present with the persistence of its warmth and light. We become the effects of our engagements if we nourish ourselves in the graceful orbit of encountering objects.
Everything is a love affair and we often attach this to notions of the transient and carnal. And this habit of attachment causes us to miss the real Truth of love because we become caught in the gravity of falsity and we reason around illusion. One cannot wash away mud with mud. Whenever I meet a beloved, I am somehow breaking the binds of illusion. Love is water for the earth, sun for the leaf, air for flight.
She gave him a feather that she kept as if her own for so long. The falling feather has been a reoccurring omen and talisman in my life. And while I hold no idols for God, I do believe He manifests messages in all things that fall to earth. So I see everyone and everything as the word of One ultimate true Being…even idols.
So we give away what is loved the most. We return a golden fish to the river, a bird to the sky. The ocean is in the pearl we find in each oyster, we can remove the pearl from the shell, but never posses its greater essence. Each plume belongs in the wing of love… it is not ours to keep and does little unless part of that which allows us to fly. I’m grateful to meet people who let things go… truths given for greater truths.
So when I see an owl fly, a fish swim, or a beloved drift on, I am reminded of my indissoluble presence with the universe. She and Calisto are each feathers in the wing, and the wing is within each of them. Even me now.
=)
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