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I found a crow's feather this morning. Just happened upon it. My brain was immediately obsessed with it. There are so many folk, mystical, superstitious, and spiritual meanings attached to the crow through various cultures. I'm not sure what it is about that bird that so fully captures our imaginations. I walked passed it, but my mind kept going back to when I was a kid and my dad stumbled across a similar feather.

It had been a really trying time for our family, but encountering the feather just settled his soul somehow. He went to the library to read about crows and what they symbolize to different people (hey, I get it from somewhere). He spent an entire afternoon parsing through vast and conflicting mythologies. He realized, at the end of the day, its meaning was his to decide. It had blanketed him with a calm reassurance, so that's what it meant.

But that conclusion was his responsibility; it was the product of his intention. I went back outside to find the feather. The last three years have been dark and incredibly challenging. I just wanted to capture this moment of serendipity. To keep it and make it mine. It was gone, just disappeared.

I felt a small amount of panic when I couldn't find it. As I searched, the detail of my memory became richer and deeper. I took a moment to evaluate how ridiculous this whole thing was, but I didn't concede to that idea. The moment was important. Connecting a dot in my present to a dot in my past. Remembering the nature of humanity, how things become imbued with meaning.

Possessing the feather was unimportant compared to acknowledging the responsibility of intention. I turned to go back inside, and there it was. Sitting in my path.

I would like to tell you that I left it there, evidence of my full grasp of what I had just learned. But I picked it up. I brought it inside, and rested it in the glass jar on my bedside table. A small but mighty talisman. A reminder of our human capacity to divine what we need from the ether and our duty to know these trinkets are just pieces of ourselves.