The Joy of Feathers
When I first became interested in spiritualism and all things psychic, a medium told me I had a Native American walking with me, that he wore one feather and I had to find the rest of his headdress. I thought ‘yes…’ and dismissed it.
But the feathers came. And how!
The first criterion was that the feathers had to come in an unusual way. Anyone can find them in the street; birds lose them all the time. But do they arrive in a returned parcel of books, trapped between two of them? Or are they leaned up against the step when you go to sit circle?
My first feather arrived in a most unusual way. I got home from work to find a note – and a feather – left for me by my daughter. She wrote that the feather had come in (we have double glazing which opens outwards from the top, not from the side) and was trapped between the net curtain and the glass, scratching against the window…
More arrived, I found them in my car, at the top of a very long flight of stairs, or someone would give me a feather for no apparent reason.
I went to a meeting on Sunday. The medium handed me a carrier bag full of feathers and said: ‘these were all round my garden! I know they’re for you.’
There were 37 feathers in the bag. I had just begun to publish my quarterly magazine, Circle of Light, which has 40 pages. I asked spirit to confirm the number of pages, please, by adding the last set of feathers. The following week a different medium came to take the service. He lived on the mainland and had no idea of my ‘feather’ quest. He pulled three feathers from his pocket and said: ‘I’ve been told to give these to you.’ And so I had my 40 feathers. The magazine is still going, a small miracle in itself in a time of constant changes.
There was the day my daughter walked in with a swan’s feather for me, at the time I was writing with the Archangel Gabriel.
There was the time I found a feather stuck to my wheel arch … and it stayed there all the way to work, a journey of 9 miles.
A spiritualist friend handed me a small cellophane envelope with bright red feathers in it, without knowing of my feather quest, as she had not attended any of the meetings.
The most spectacular feather gift came when I was walking with my (unbeliever) daughter across an all but empty car park under an all but empty clear blue sky. Suddenly a shower of feathers came down, all around me. My daughter looked all around, saying ‘Where did they come from?’ There were no birds in the sky.
The feathers still come. In the beginning, they meant I had achieved something, now it means I am about to take another step either forward or sideways into a new branch of spirit work. Either way, they are welcome and I have treasured them. They are arranged in a fan shape displayed in a box frame which I have on the wall of my study, where all my spiritual work is done, readings, books, whatever. They are a very physical manifestation of a very un-physical world, the spirit world, a link that cannot be denied.