This Feather

"I will tell them, 'This feather may look worthless, but it comes from afar, and carries with it all my good intentions.'"

-The Joy Luck Club

The next piece that I am working on revolves around the idea of mothers. I have used a bird/deer as the animal symbol for this particular piece. Birds have been on my mind lately. I have used an image of a mourning dove, specifically because of what it symbolizes and because of the word play..."mournings" and "mornings".

To me, mornings are the best part of the day, just when the sun rises. The stillness in that time is something not found at any other point during the waking hours; there is an unreal quality. It's like the Horizon is taking a really big breath before she starts living again. So, needless to say, the sun is important to me, it's important to my mood each day. I love waking up early and catching that stillness, and the new beginning.

And mothers are always a consistent theme for me; the importance of mothers, and understanding who they are/were. Understanding their hopes for us. This is why I think that I have chosen a hybrid of an animal again. I have been thinking about that 'girl with a bird' (see post with same title), and the bird has resonated within me since that point. I wondered what else the bird could tell me. I wondered what the bird/deer has already told me.

So I was trying to figure out the tie that I had personally, between the bird, the deer, the mother, the sun, and the gods. It was no easy feat trying to get to the bottom of it and have it make conscious sense to me. I was stuck for about a week on the magnitude of it all, and how to link it. But the last post I wrote about song and The Color Purple jogged something subconscious for me. So I went looking, and this is what I found....

In some of the remaining minutes of the film, The Joy Luck Club, the main character is finding out an important portion of her mother's past. Before June was born, her mother had two children that she 'abandoned'. It was always an unknown for June, her mother's past in China, what happened to those babies. After her mother dies, she finds out from her father what happened, and gets a much needed message about hope, as well. June really needed to hear who her mother was, and she had always needed hope and a sense of worth from her mother. She finally got it in the form of a bird feather, painstakingly saved in an envelope for her, for years. Mothers are the wise little helpers of the universe sometimes, even if they aren't there anymore. Sometimes all you need is a nudge (or a feather, or a deer charging you off the road).

Here are seven gut-wrenching minutes of The Joy Luck Club that explain it all....the bird, the deer, the mother, the sun, and the gods.

(click the above link please)
This is what has been 'flying' around my head for weeks.