How I Got My Wings, Part 3: Ceremony
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On January 29, 2021, I took the dead cardinal wrapped in the dishtowel and plastic bag out of my freezer. It was afternoon and the impulse to do something with the body came suddenly and strongly.
I gently unwrapped it and began the work. Standing at my kitchen counter, I started plucking out breast feathers, feeling both certain and uncertain at once. Thankfully, Knowing helped me to overcome all the messages that have kept me in unknowing for so long. There is still so much unknowing to shed.
Soon after I started the process, I stopped. What I was doing was sacred work and deserved to be treated as such. This was ceremony.
Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote, “Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm. These acts of reverence are powerfully pragmatic. These are ceremonies that magnify life.”
I lit sage and palo santo, blessed the body, blessed myself, and allowed myself to feel the heaviness of what I was doing. I shed tears, perhaps as much to commemorate the life no longer in this body as to commemorate the beauty of the moment of reverence I was living in.
After the blessing I resumed the work. I pulled as many soft, downy breast and back feathers out as would come easily and paused. What now?
I broke the wings off, tears still rolling.
I broke off a leg.
The unknowing asked as it had the previous week, “What are you doing?!?”
Knowing answered, “What needs to be done.”
After removing these parts, it was clear that I was finished with this part of the ceremony. I placed the feathers and leg in a bag, the wings carefully on top. I still didn’t know what to do with them, only that I was to keep them.
I asked Spirit/God/the Universe (these feel like different names for the same Oneness of which we are a part) what I should do with the body. It didn’t feel right to simply throw it away. The answer was to put it in my yard, not buried, but simply placed on the snowy ground, trusting that Nature would finish the ceremony in my absence.
The next day I went back out and something had begun to eat the body. By the third day there was no sign of it.
Life circling death circling life.