What’s important to you?

As I pull into the access road to our home, I’m thinking of tasks to be accomplished before the end of the day—meeting the deadline for all my materials for my session on Trauma-Informed Care for the Portland institute for Loss and Transition; final edits to an email to send to a group of colleagues for training in September about trauma informed teaching; an appointment, that while brief will conclude a long-term relationship with an organization, and lastly, learning to help my husband get comfortable with a procedure for administering his own medication. I step out of the car, walk the few steps to the mailbox for Saturday’s mail (that was not a priority among all that’s going on), and I look down and see a beautiful bird that is dead. How this Blue Jay died is not obvious to me, nor how he came to lie at the foot of the three mailboxes at the side of the access road.

I flashback to the woodpecker I found just over a year ago. He had fallen on our doorstep after striking a window. At that time, I stopped my work mid-afternoon and created an altar. Now, over a year later, I find myself asking the same questions as I pondered then: What’s important to me? (How am I living my values?) I think of the list I just made of things to be accomplished and I look at this beautiful bird. I don’t want to imagine what will happen if I leave him by the roadside. So, I park my car in the garage, get my gloves and shovel, walk to the mailbox, and carry him carefully to our backyard…

It will take me a good half hour to gather materials, handle them with care, and find a place for the Blue Jay at the edge of our backyard (as we border a wetland/wilderness). Honestly, I’m used to taking my time and making thoughtful decisions when I step into creating an altar. Yet, I shifted easily into a slightly faster pace—in part because flies were beginning to gather, and the reality is that there were not a lot of materials in the yard at this point in the year. I held the competing priorities lightly in the back of my mind, yet most important to me was making the time and space to honor this being’s death.

While I do love symmetry, over the past several months, I have found myself building memorials that focus on assigning meaning to each element of the design and its colors. It is part of the journey that I began in Greece, researching land artists around the world to develop my own voice. I think it’s an area of growth in my practice. I was initially drawn to the beauty—especially the symmetry—of Day Schildkret’s/Morning Altars’ designs—and, of course, to the ritual and to being in nature—and yet it has become an evolving practice for me… I love it!

*written on Monday, and then the week got complicated