Remembering the Gift

I grew up in the suburbs of Virginia.  While we were close to the city, there were hundreds of acres of forested land surrounding my neighborhood.  I loved to walk the streams, catch snakes, look for feathers, collect bones, and meander the rolling hills.  

One day I found a pink featherless bird on the forest floor.  It’s mouth opening as I got closer, whole body moving as if one of those dashboard dolls that shake when the car moves.  Inside its mouth was a universe.  I was drawn in.   I looked, but didn’t see a nest nearby.  Without hesitation, I picked up the bird and brought it home and made a large nest in a box.  I soaked some dog food in water to make it soft, and began to feed the bottomless belly of a bird.  

For weeks I fed the premature fledgling.  He became my companion.  Feathers mysteriously grew into our world.  The speed of growth matched my consistent tending.  We talked often.  I was young, so was the bird.  We got along great.  

Soon, it was time to introduce him to the outside world.  The world of wind and weather, sounds of other birds and danger.  We would go into the yard and I’d lift him in my hand.  It wasn’t time for him to fly.  Then, those perilous moments inevitably came, as it does for us all, when it was time for the bird, now identified as a Blue Jay and not so creatively named BJ, to follow its own nature.  Like a lump of clay with a hundred freshly painted feathers it leapt from my hand and gave its wings a test.  

He painted everything with a thunk here, a dosey doe there, and a whipty do in between.  It didn’t take long before he was flying short distances, learning his wings, tiny talons, and curiously looking at the world at every perspective possible.

After a few weeks of BJ learning to fly, there was a moment when he flew off and didn’t return.  An hour later when I went outside and whistled, and he landed on my hand.  Something stuck.  We were companions.

Spring turned into summer and summer into fall.  BJ remained around my home.  Winter came and I didn’t see him anymore.  That is until spring, when he returned. 

Blue Jays can remember between 3,000-5,000 different food caches that they have buried.  While I wasn’t feeding him anymore, he remembered exactly where I was.

It was a few years of BJ coming and going.  I never did find a nest.  I’m not sure I ever looked.  Then, a spring came and I didn’t see him anymore.  

Life continued its movement, I grew into adolescence, we moved houses, the river took me downstream.  I slowly and entirely forgot about my experience raising a Blue Jay. 

Fast forward to more than 15 years later.  I am guiding an international trip with young adults in Guatemala.  By that point I had an undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology, and was on an extended and self initiated break from a masters program in the mythology of initiation.  I had fully devoted myself to following earth-based spirituality, involving ancestral skills, ritual, and community.

We had been traveling a few weeks.  Our students were staying in home-stays, taking language classes, and learning the local crafts and culture of that region.  In the evenings we would gather for council, share our reflections, and sometimes go out and see what was happening in the cafes.  

We walked into one that had turned into a thriving social scene with music and other young international travelers.  The air was dense with high mountain jungle air and foreign languages.  I noticed a huge mural of a majestic bird.  The blue feathers took me in under their wing.  As if in a trance I peered into another world; a moment of remembering something I had forgotten.  Like waking up in the morning and recalling the dream a few hours later.  

Memories began to flood into me.  Feelings absorbed my attention.  Youthfulness began to walk the hackneyed, forested trails of my childhood.  The memories focused and stillness came.  BJ!  I stood there transfixed as my whole being began to fill with joy.  

For days, poetry flowed through me.  A rightness with the work I was doing.  A remembrance of the deeper truths of my connection with the wild and with guiding those out of the nest.  Something in me was seen.  The otherworld made a claim.

I later reflected on the experience, astonished that I had forgotten about the Blue Jay that I raised and returned to the wild.  Flat out perplexed.  

I began to wonder how many people have forgotten memories from childhood that contained within them the flower from the ancient seed of the soul’s path?  

I had stumbled completely into that mural.  It was as if life was hammering through some kind of communication and I was open to receive the information that night, in a cafe, in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.

Do these memories come once we have found the thread of our life?  When we pick up the phone from the constant ringing of the soul?  

Is the soul-directed life guided by what we already know, but have just forgotten? 

I have found that inside these memories we pick up the breadcrumbs of our gifts and piece together a quilt that then we give to those around us.  It keeps them warm, I’m sure of it.  We develop a life that stretches a long muscle into the future generations.  

For the past decade of working with people, following the gift and genius that lives inside of me, I have noticed that everyone has these memories.  They are all unique and if we abide by them a nobility arises that is not forgotten.  The gifts then, speak for themselves.  

Lewis Hyde writes, “A gift is not fully realized, until given away.”

What would it look like for you to spend the time with a gift that you carry, fully realizing that it has a destiny of its own and your job is to get out of the way and let it sing through you? 

I imagine if you follow the memories long enough, you will find that life is a miracle.  A gift that must be lived into fully, each day, even if it’s messy.  Just like migrating monarch butterflies or humpback whales finding their way across thousands of miles, if you set your intentions towards home and the remembering of your gift, you will discover there is a place for you to lay out your blanket, pull up a chair, and break bread with the world.  

I will meet you there.