Birds Of A Feather . . .

. . . flocking together.  In time of need – heck, at all times.  Because need may strike any body, at any time.

Need darkened my door recently – and companionship and support descended in a flurry.  Need darkens that of other friends – and companionship and support is imminent.

Wazeau is a dear blogging friend living with two luscious cats and two whimsical parrots.  Companionship and support arrived from her yesterday, in this envelope:

Bits of Bandit and Merlin.  So beautiful.

I’m glad to say neither cat quite knew what to do with them.  This is all the further Fang got.

Bugs was really not sure.

He did jump around with it a little bit, but he quickly lost interest.  He preferred this item (a gift from Kim).

I’m glad things worked out like this.  It means I get to save these exquisite feathers.  As a tangible memory of beauty, companionship, and support.

There’s nothing like need to bring home gratitude.

And this gratitude is strange, in my world.  I feel unsettled, deep in my unconscious, at this outpouring of abundance.  It is not the way of the world as I was taught it.  This abundance challenges my deepest-inculcated belief, knowledge, nay, certainty:  The world is a deeply unfriendly place.

Deeply unfriendly?  I don’t know how to put that, really.

I have in mind the unfriendliness that was, that is, that remains, stuck in my awareness like a burr, a cactus spine, The Holocaust.

Elie Wiesel says:  “Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live.”

That’s the kind of unfriendliness I’m talking about.

In my world to date, then, best not to count on abundance.

But – today – I find abundance.  It’s taken me a lifetime to realize it.  But abundance is present.

This, friends, is what your support and companionship means to me.

There is a magnificent post oak standing at the southeast corner of my little house.  I call the house mine.  But really I rent it.  Like I rent this body.

Post oaks are so called, it’s said, because their bodies are tough enough to become fence-posts.  In our little human, circumscribed world.  That chops down the mighty oak for things like fence-posts.

I want my mighty oak to stay tree.  I want that its tiny acorns continue to give birth to new life.  That its old life, so old its trunk is half-hollowed-out, yet it still stands proud and tall, despite tons of ice descending in winter, despite season after season of punishing drought, I want that its old life be noticed, be cherished, be venerated.  I want it to go on being a roost for the birds, who perch waiting to plunge into the dogs’ water-bowl.  To drive my cats mad.

I want that this great oak go on sheltering all life, life that embodies the principle that we are all connected.  Literally, through the air we respire.  Figuratively, through a friendly universe.

May it always be so.