Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 21: Two Feathers, Second Feather

............................................................................read about the first feather

Koko stood on the deck, looking across upriver to New York, to the promontory at the bend, but he didn't know why. He didn't...but then he did.

It had been a couple years. A couple difficult, challenging years in every way, except in the ways it mattered most. His work had gone disappointingly, one remarkable opportunity after another had taken a sudden turn south, until it seemed that you just couldn't even make the stuff up anymore. His big breaks had all broken. How could he be put in such unique and impossible rooms, only to have their possibilities evaporate? He worked his tail off, and yet nothing had taken flight, except his capacity for Love, which drew in the sky. His heart was full and open. She was always there. Food was always on the table. They lived a frugal life of sheer abundance, which didn't seem possible to them either. But it all worked out, somehow.

He knew the lessons he'd learned from the river, just sitting and listening to the wind, the songbirds, the bullfrogs, the sundance writing on the passing water, and the eagles' calls from the top of the white pines; it all taught him how to live a different way. An impossible way.

Now, he was being tapped on the shoulder again, by the unseen. It was telling him, the same way it had before, that the eagles had another feather for him. Another feather? Another feather. A different one, for a different reason. Look over there, they whispered in his ear, where you're looking now.

His neighbor had offered the loan of his kayak, whenever, so he took him up on it and set out upriver, rowing against the lighter current close to the bank, and then cutting across to the shallows on the other side. The sheet of water over the smooth river rock field got so thin his butt dragged and hung up on the bottom; so he hopped out, and ported the kayak up to a channel near the far side. New York.

Almost as soon as he arrived at the point, he knew he wasn't going to find anything, even though This is where you have to look for it, was what he kept hearing, with that same insistence as before. He floundered around in the lush, leafy undergrowth on the bank, looking up into the virdant cave trails that the animals had made, but he wasn't going to find anything but deer ticks in his hair, if he was willing to look for those. Or if Suzy would.

Why do they tell me something that's right, but not right? he thought.

About a week later, he repeated the futile exercise again, and then again, until his neighbor asked him what he was doing with his kayak, and all he could think of to say was, "Oh, nothing, really...just going for a paddle..." And now it was loud again in his ear, making him a little crazy, making him walk back out on the deck, peering purposelessly across the river to see what was much too far to ever see. This is crazy, he thought.

Right at that moment, a big female eagle hopped out of her New York tree on the point, and wheeled down south over the river, heading his way. She flapped her huge wings a couple times, gaining altitude and just as she did, a single white tail-feather fell from her fanned tail, fluttered lightly down, and set atop the current in the middle of the river. His heart stopped. There! They silently hollered in his ear.

"Hey!" Koko hollered back.

"What?" replied Suzy, who was planting flowers in the Vole's Garden. "Did you want me?"

He ran in, changed into a swimsuit, and ran down the rock steps, yelling crazily, "Watch that white spot on the river and tell me when I'm close to it!" and he dove straight in.

"Keep going out!" She yelled. "Keep going!" He could see it, when he craned his neck up above the little waves in the river. It was coming right to him, bobbing along, and when it arrived, he was right there for it. He put the quill shaft between his teeth, and swam in through the suddenly cold water, to his big sitting-rock. He held it up in front of his face, fourteen inches of a perfect, snowy white feather, just deposited magically before his eyes by the great female eagle whose awkward, oversized "chicks" would spend the summer learning how to fly out over that same piece of river.

Koko amazed, How and why, in the entire world, could a man be standing where I was standing, looking where I was looking, and see that, if it isn't for me?

The white feather is for having survived the years that so many never survive to see. The years until your head and tail strike pure white. Now, you know just how big this vision of life is. You've learned the lesson of Action and Repose. You can wait for it, and watch for it, but then you must dive in and swim to reach it. Have faith in the unfailing wind, in the abundance of the river, in the heavens in your heart. Now you know how to grow. Now you know how to fly.

Later, at the little town's street festival, Koko told the abbreviated tale to a woman at an Eagle Conservation booth.

"It's against the law for anyone but an Indian to have an eagle feather!" She snapped with authority. Koko could only think, I don't think she understands how it happens...

"My great-great-grandfather was Kickapoo," Koko said softly. He knew it was okay, in his heart. His grandfather tapped the woman on the shoulder.

"Oh...well..." she sidled and smiled a bit, "then it's okay, I guess."

.....................................................................this just popped up the other day

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 21: Two Feathers, First Feather

Koko woke up with a funny picture in his head that morning. Funny, as in different, entirely unexpected. It was a picture of a feather - a single, perfect, chestnut-brown eagle feather. Why it would be filling his mind was a mystery, but almost the instant he swung his legs out of bed, he found himself pulling his feet through the stocky green cargo pants he wore for working at the River House.

"Where are you going?" Suzy asked raising her head, his sudden, purposeful movement waking her all the way up.

"I have to go...up the river bank," he answered. He was kind of gone already, busy concentrating on an inner voice (perhaps the voice of his Kickapoo great-great grandfather), telling him: They have a feather for you, up the river bank. You must get up and go find it... It was like that. Crazy, but solid and insistent, and not to be denied, and so he found himself pulling on yesterday's socks too.

"There's a feather there."

"What?"

"A feather"

"A feather?"

"That's all. They're just telling me, "there's a feather waiting for me up the river bank."

"I'm coming too," she said, jumping up and into her clothes as he headed out the bedroom door.

Music: Ne-me'hota'tse (I Love You) by Joseph Firecrow

They started upriver, along the Pennsylvania side, she wore rubber gardening clogs, and he had the rubber knee-highs that came with the house. Each of them carried their long ash walking sticks, hers with the bark peeled down to white wood, his with the necessary girth to give any threat a good whack, if need be. If Suzy had known just how many snakes she was stepping over, or on, she would have been screaming like a schoolgirl the whole way, but she hadn't been there long enough to know yet, and Koko's intuitive calling took precedence over any phobias she was nursing. Funny, how an intangible necessity can vanquish any fear the mind might create. The snakes all seemed to know, and stayed well hidden, on her account, no doubt.

The two of them crunched and squished their way up the bank, weaving out to the river's edge and back "inland" along the scant deer and critter trail, sometimes on firm ground, or hopping rock to rock to avoid the spots you couldn't stand on without sinking.

He knew right where they were going, to the place up under the stand of towering white pines beneath the eagles perch. There, every day, from their pine-top promontory above the tree line, one or two of the great white-headed adults could keep watch on the river from the Narrowsburg bend down to Masthope. They sat stoically hour after hour, but they also did their fair share of preening and squabbling, so it made sense that a feather might be found underneath the spot, if one made it down through the tree limbs to the ground, or missed being carried away by the wind.

The longer they looked, the less likely it seemed, the grass and poplars low on the bank would have swallowed any feather landing there, and up in the barrens at the base of the trees it was easy to spot anything on the ground, if there were anything but pine needles. But still the insistence in his head: Keep looking, it's here for you.

"Let's hope they didn't get us out of bed for nothing." He said, clamoring back down the dry bank to the soft river's edge. He'd give it one last look, navigating along the base of the bank, where the pine roots held back what the river couldn't have. His eyes scoured the grasses for any sign of a feather that might have fluttered down from a hundred feet up and landed lightly, but to no avail.

"Did you find anything?" Suzy asked from up under the trees.

"Nope. I don't know why I felt so strongly..." Koko replied, like he expected all intuition to be magical, or something. He turned and looked up to her above, and as he did, something caught his eye.

There was a series of shallow, twisting caves in between the tree roots cascading down the bank. He bent down, and looked up into one that was about eighteen inches wide and a foot high. Hello, it said...you see, here I am for you.

One perfect, foot long, chestnut brown eagle feather sat tucked on a rakish angle, as though positioned by a stylist's hand, up in the mossy cubby hole. It was only visible from where Koko squatted in front of it. He

gently brought it out and held it up by the quill shaft, "Suzy..."

She looked at it with wide eyes, and looked back to him and smiled and didn't say anything.

This is to let you know that the eagle's steady gaze looks right past this world to your great-great grandfather's home in your heart. This is their gift - the gift of this feather for the faith in the voices of your ancestors that you can hear when you open your heart. This feather tells you how much more can always be seen if you look beyond this world, into the invisible world where everything comes from, and goes to. Down on the ground, it's hard to find without this faith; from up where the eagle looks out over the big picture, anything can manifest.

"Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up a stone; you will find me there."

Logion 77, The Gospel of Thomas

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 2: From Czechapoo to Kickajew

"Your ego tells you this is your kingdom, your true identity, and therefore you must do whatever it takes to make this story turn out to be a good one for you. But you know...that this is not true."

Eckhart Tolle

My father's family was Czech, or more regionally, as my father insisted, Bohemian. To him, calling a Bohemian a Czech was like calling the class valedictorian a "member of the student body." The Bohemians, according to Dad, were the creators of all things honorable, and everyone else came in a distant second-best. Democracy, printing (Gutenberg was really "John of Cutna Hora," a Bohemian genius the Germans had nefariously misappropriated), and of course beer, were all creations of The Great Bohemian Empire. To Dad, "Czech" was a misnomer which ignorantly grouped Bohemians with Moravians, and later (God forbid) with people he called slovaks.

This odd confluence of American Kickapoo Indian and Eastern European made me feel pretty one-of-a-kind – a "Czechapoo." Uniquely, and utterly American. Searching, noble – in a way...romantic. In an obscure sense the best of the best, yet hopelessly out of place and misunderstood; and in my case at least, often confused to the point of stupefaction. I can't speak for any of the other Czechapoos, but for me this collision of the aggrieved and displaced Nature-man with the Euro-aryan intellect, poured into the mold of early Anglo-American entitlement and catalyzed by 60's pop media led to a state of permanent semiconscious detachment from anything real that had ever gone before – in an endearing way, one would hope.

A trip to the newly liberated Czech republic in 1992 led to a discovery that further complicated this lineage, and by doing so, made clear something that I'd long begun to suspect. My last name, which I understand translates as "Hill People" (whether the form indicates "hillbilly" or "from the top of the hill", I do not know), is apparently a Jewish surname.

I thought that my grandparents were devout Catholics – and Mumsy most certainly was. But my grandpa, Mac-o, who looked like Kruschev and dressed like a rich Nevada ranch dude – complete with cowboy boots, hat, and silver and turquoise belt buckle – wasn't much for Mass. And since Mac-o seemed to always have an instinct for finishing in the money, I can't exclude the possibility that he may have assumed whatever persona offered the greatest perceived benefits at the time. It's quite possible that a Slav becomes a cowboy in much the same way that a Jew becomes a Catholic, or probably might have done both in his case.

This discovery, at about age thirty, explained a lot to me, and as a broken ego rushes into any void where it sees an opportunity, often dragging the human along through their life, my broken ego at last had a viable delusion it could sink it's claws into.

In lieu of having failed to conjure up for myself any apparent real identity up to that point in life, I became the universe's only "Kickajew" – part Indian, part Jew, unwanted at birth, and thereby the single most naturally persecuted man in the world. I was one of the last of the unassailably noble victims, and so able to descend on any side of any argument with absolute moral authority and righteous justification.

And so it was that the spiritual complications brought on by childhood difficulties and an effusively overactive imagination had finally made me "whole," in that rather delusional, grandiose manner generally reserved for the "dissociatively disordered." I thought I finally knew who I was, when in fact, I had really been cast out into the wilderness at a relatively young age, with much too much more justification than I needed.

"When Man ate of the fruit of the Tree, he discovered himself in the field of duality instead of the field of unity. As a result, he finds himself out, in exile."

Joseph Campbell

There are, generally speaking, two types of ego that make a person so. One is a healthy, not particularly self- important ego that allows the true self to interact with material life in an easy, unfettered way. This ego is beneficial because it provides a sound natural foundation while playing a relatively small role in an individual's development. The healthy person finds it naturally easy to "stay out of their own way," permitting the flow of Source energy, which is love, to grow an authentic self. This ego is grounded in Love and knows naturally where it fits in the big picture.

The other ego is unhealthy. Over-important; over-complicated. The voice of the False Self. This ego can often act as the main interface with material life, pressing unfair and unnecessary demands and comparisons on an individual; stunting the growth of the authentic self by impeding, or totally cutting off, the flow of Source energy, which is Love. In this way, we innocently become our own worst enemy. This ego is grounded in Fear.

Here is the essence (a version) of the metaphor of The Garden of Eden. The unhealthy ego knows everything, and always needs to be right. It makes a constant diet of "the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" – namely judgment and comparison. And when it serves as the sole intermediary to the universe, to the Source, the hapless natural self is banished from the garden, and simply being is never enough. One must become something other than their authentic, natural self, based on what they think others expect them to be. This need is never satisfied.

On a larger scale, this unhealthy egoic thinking process is the mass default for Western culture, and increasingly with the export of American consumerism, to the rest of the world. The rapid expansion of this dangerously delusional unhealthy mass ego – given a voice by round-the-clock media programming and driven by a fundamentally inhumane commercial market and it's equally unconscious advertising – is the reason that we find the very survival of our species, and the ability of our planet to sustain life as we know it, suddenly in such precarious circumstances. This mass ego lives to "control" and exploit the earth in order to ameliorate it's voracious need that can never be met.

The sooner we can personally cut through the useless and destructive mass ego to the simple underlying truth, and become honest – first with ourselves, and then with others – the sooner we'll see that no matter how big the problem, there is a spiritual solution. With this simple realization, we will become conscious, and the inevitable spiritual evolution of our species will become our shared reality. Evidence of this spiritual evolution of humankind is all around us. It's happening now.

Tales of the Koko Lion, Part 1: The Kickapoo Secret

There's a way of seeing that's available to you when you escape the delusion and artifice of your ego, of who you think you are. A way where there's no need for judgments or comparisons of any kind between yourself and others. When those feelings, those fear-based needs arise, you recognize them as unresolved aspects of yourself, and just release them. What once seemed like such a vital and automatic need to compare and to judge simply dies off of attrition, starved of it's energy. The urge to gossip disappears. You begin to view those who indulge in it with compassion, understanding that they need to reveal their own fear to find some comforting identification with others, to momentarily enhance their picture of themselves, and hopefully get a little relief. Once you can adopt this approach to seeing others, you will rarely be offended by anything.

Without your own crazy horse in the race-- your ego's attachment to an enhanced version of yourself, or the need to defend yourself from some threat of your own creation, those frozen perceptions that created the surface of your personal "reality" thaw out, and like a shell dissolving, the surface of all things and people becomes transparent, and the truth is casually and refreshingly exposed. You can finally see people and things as they truly are-- creations of lives; of thoughts, of fears and hopes.

It's like taking off the dark glasses you've been wearing... at night. And then starting to turn on a couple lights.

You begin to see everything as being simply animated by our common source energy. Actions and objects formed by thought made material. We are all the same stuff, and often, without a clue, directly connected to one another and the universe in every cell, in every moment.

It's a big relief, and very refreshing- to start to view the world that way. And putting it like that seems really simple, doesn't it? Everyone becomes incredibly interesting. But how can we go about attaining such a realistically tolerant way of seeing? Since we already have everything we need to know inside of us somewhere, we can start by delving into the handiest example of the form we all can examine closely and carefully – ourselves. We just need to fearlessly look at ourselves with the same kind of compassion. Like we were looking at someone else.

Certain stories describe us almost entirely, and in my case, one of them is this story of my fairly recent ancestors on my Mother's side. Who they were, and how I unconsciously, on purpose, chose to depict the part they played in forming my peculiar self-definition. As with all my stories, they could be complete and utter fabrications. But they're not. They're true, as well as I know. Sometimes, perhaps, more apocryphal than academic, and just slightly more than loosely documented. And as I said, the names are incomplete, or changed to protect unwilling or fragile participants. So, on with the stories...

At a rather young age by our standards (though oldish by hers), twenty-three or twenty-four, my Great-great grandmother set out of Missouri to cross the Oregon Trail by herself, in the mid 1840s. It was a rare thing for a young lady (one named Churchill, no less) to undertake such an impractically feminist adventure in those days. And though I don't know her motivations, we can surmise that what she wanted very badly was a change of scenery.

As a female she was automatically relegated to second-class status. And being an unmarried, unaccompanied female lowered her status even further – to third, or fourth-class. As such, it was deemed that she ride in "the back of the bus," or in this case, in the back of the wagon train with the other third and fourth-class citizens; wayward misfits, gypsies, and the like. Families of the solid God-fearing "Christian" caste, led by real men of fine American mettle, took their positions at the front of the train. These were the men who made this country, and in many ways the world, what it is today.

Bringing up the rear as well were the American Indians who showed them how to find water, what they could eat along the way, and which direction they should actually go in to conquer "the unknown wilderness" that was the "unexplored" continent to the west. My great-great grandfather was a Kickapoo indian that Ms. Churchill met amongst the others back in the rear of the wagon train.

The Kickapoos are a tribe with origins in the Great Lakes and plains region of eastern Minnesota, northern Iowa, and parts of what is now Michigan, and I suppose that when the wagon train neared The Great Divide, my great-great grandfather felt the need to return to his land and people. Perhaps he wasn't aware that Ms. Churchill was carrying his child. Maybe she didn't know yet, or she knew and didn't tell him. In any case, the universe has since put too much space between us all to know what truly passed between those two people in that natural world so long ago. He went back home. She went on west.

Before the wagon train reached it's destination, she must have felt it imperative to be married for the sake of her unborn child-- the stigma of unwed parenthood being too great an obstacle to overcome. She apparently found the most likely match she could, and sometime before arriving in Eastern Oregon, she married a Basque shepherd named Jordan, who became, in name (my middle name, in fact), my step great-great grandfather. They settled in central Oregon, where you find Jordan creek and Jordan City, and had six more children together. But it was that first-born, half-Kickapoo boy whose grandson, Harry Jordan, met and married my grandmother, Minnie Fletcher. And that was my mother's side of the family.