That Thing with Feathers

Good Morning -

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me. - Emily Dickinson

Indeed. That's our Virgen - a lovely magazine image of a bird resting during nest building and the Virgen.

I'm doing lots of building right now and I have a sense of hope. The little caged bird in my soul is singing, singing, singing (how about all these layered literary bird metaphors?).

Sometimes, though, I think of the saying I learned while I lived in Texas, "Well, why don't you wish (hope) in one hand and spit in the other and see which fills up faster?"

When I think of that, I think that hope is no good, that it's a waste of time. This quickly bounces me to all the metaphysical new agey types who talk of living in the now, in this moment, where the addictive and damaging drug of hope has no part.

Then I think hope is a wholly bad thing and I should poison the little bird in the cage or at least open the door and push it out till it flies away and stops perching in my soul singing its pretty song.

But it is a lovely tune, and studies show that those who incorporate music into their mental noise experience less stress, so perhaps this little bird is okay after all.

Tweet.

The cats who aren't Boris. :) This is Squeak. She's fierce and comes from a broken home.
This is Autumn. She is inherently grumpy and seems to be able to hold the aspects of sloth, shameless, and sensuous in a balance you would never anticipate.
Owen, for whom there are many prayers. Notice how he chose the empty food dish as his shot location (that dish is actually the dish Boris gets his canned food in before his insulin shot. Around the corner and out of shot range is a full dish of dry for Owen, but he's choosing to focus on what he doesn't have.)

Notice, too, the scabs on his nose from him putting it somewhere it clearly was not welcome (he's been bathed in tomato juice before for putting his nose in the business end of a skunk, so this isn't entirely surprising...).