He looked at me blankly. "Richard? A blue feather ?"
"You said anything not a lady something little. "
He shrugged. "Fine. A blue feather. Imagine the feather. Visualize it, every line and edge of it, the tip, V-splits where it's torn, fluff around the quill. Just for a minute. Then let it go."
I closed my eyes for a minute and saw an image in my
mind, five inches long, iridescent blue to silver at the edges. A bright clear feather floating there in the dark.
"Surround it in golden light, if you want. That's a healing thing, to help make it real but it works in magnetizing, too."
I surrounded my feather in gold glow. "OK."
"That's it. You can open your eyes now."
I opened my eyes. "Where's my feather?"
"If you had it clear in your thought, it is even this moment barreling down on you like a Mack truck."
"My feather? Like a Mack truck?"
"Figuratively, Richard."
All that afternoon I looked for the feather to appear, and it didn't. It was evening, dinnertime over a hot turkey sandwich, that I saw it. A picture and small print on the carton of milk. Packaged for Scott Dairies by Blue Feather Farms, Bryan, Ohio. "Don! My feather!"
He looked, and shrugged his shoulders. "I thought you wanted the actual feather."
"Well, any feather for openers, don't you think?"
"Did you see just the feather all alone, or were you holding the feather in your hand?"
"All alone."
"That explains it. If you want to be with what you're magnetizing, you have to put yourself in the picture, too. Sorry I didn't say that."
A spooky strange feeling. It worked! I had consciously magnetized my first thing! "Today a feather," I said, "tomorrow the world!"
"Be careful, Richard," he said hauntingly, "or you'll be sorry . . ."
15
The
truth you
speak has no past
and no future.
It is,
and that's all it
needs to be.
I lay on my back under the Fleet, wiping oil from the lower fuselage.
Somehow the engine was throwing less oil now than it had thrown before. Shimoda flew one passenger, then came over and sat on the grass as I worked.