Why Feathers?

They’re smaller than a breadbox but bigger than a beauty quark.

Some are fluffed, some hooked, some slick as black-ice road. Some hide so deep under plumed layers that even the creatures who wear them can’t see those on the inside. They’re there, though—the small but critical coverings closest to the heart.

Plumes of down. Bladed vanes on a falcon’s wing. Banded tail feathers of pygmy owls. Some for show, some for precision steering. All for one and one for all.

Armor. Insulation. Airfoil. Attractant. Each plays its part.

Emily Dickinson wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers.” She didn’t say it’s the thing with wings or a beak or talons or a gullet that can store prey for days. She could have, but she didn’t say it’s the thing that struts or kills or calls like a ghost in the night.

Instead she gave top billing to highly evolved skin coverings of such ingenious adaptation they help the mother ship stay alive in too many ways to count.

Feathers keep hope warm. They keep hope aloft. Feathers indurate hope so well, she can strike a foe on the wing and barrel-roll out of the fight without a scratch.

Feathers make hope beautiful. They unite for color and crests and more ornaments than you could dream of in a lifetime. Feathers crown the heads of warriors and weave through the locks of our daughters. Feathers possess magic and charm and flight.

No one told feathers how to grow into themselves. Adversity did that. Necessity did that. Without the world changing around them, who knows how far feathers would’ve come from the hollow-tubed, earliest models?

Feathers inspire and haunt us; so much so, we travel the world for them. The birds of paradise, capes of ancient cultures, headdresses on those who revive lost languages.

We cherish them all. We yearn to protect them. Many before us have died for that hope— fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts.

This is no time to forget. This is the time to remember their sacrifices and Earth’s wild nature. The sparrow who rises at dawn to scratch the soil for breakfast, her mantle fluffed against the cold. The crows who call to each other in high winds, bony wings working the storm, resilient as they flock. The improbable, enduring hummingbirds.

Now is the time for feathers. We’re deep into Emily’s “chillest land” and “strangest Sea.” We must take up and wear the feathers. See the feathers. Be the feathers.

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REBECCA LAWTON is the author of The Oasis This Time and many other books. She lives and writes on an ephemeral stream in northern California.

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