The thing with feathers

When you’re a tiny little girl living on the other side of the world from your grandparents you create an awful lot of handmade cards and presents to be sent across the ocean.

From Switzerland to Australia, each treasure sent with the correct postage and the hope that it might make it all the way to Grandad and Grandma’s house.

Glitter, paint, pipe cleaners, collages, photos, crayons, pencil, pen and…feathers.

It was this last that turned out to be our downfall.

A homemade Christmas card, with a riot of colourful toddler ‘words’ scrawled across every side. And for the pièce de résistance, brightly coloured feathers, bought from the craft section in the local supermarket and stuck on with the strongest glue we could find.

But it turned out that Australia’s very strict customs laws won’t let anything through that might threaten Australia’s unique ecosystem. And that includes untreated feathers.

I’d argue that our feathers had probably been processed within an inch of their life by the time they made it on Grandma and Grandad’s card, but it was not to be.

So the card never made it.

But something else did.

A few weeks after we sent it, Grandma and Grandad rang to tell us they’d received a photocopy of the card instead of the real thing. Sent by Australian customs, their heartstrings pulled, apparently, by the love apparent in the garish colours and the liberal sprinkling of feathers.

Logistically, this particular little project was a failure, because there was no actual card to hang on Grandma and Grandad’s fridge along with all the others. Yet in retrospect it succeeded brilliantly.

This was a card I’ve been in no danger of forgetting, though the little girl who created it is now fully grown.

Nor will I forget how I felt when I heard that a customs officer had opened it up and taken the time to carefully photocopy a small child’s artwork before destroying it. And then sending that copy on to my parents!

The thing my daughter made didn’t make it but the feeling behind it certainly did. So too did a strong feeling of community, humanity, and connection, stretching across oceans.

Creative work has a habit of travelling via routes we can’t even begin to predict.

We can’t know for sure how something is going to turn out. We can hope, we can plan, we can guess, but the nature of creativity is that the final outcome is unknown until we get there.

And sometimes the thing we make, the card or song or poem or dance or whatever, turns out to not be what matters most.

Instead, it’s the story it creates.

It’s the conversation it starts, the connections it forges, and the memories that linger on long after the creation itself disappears.

For me, this turned out to be a feathery creative project that set in motion a whole narrative I could never have imagined. One about creative possibility, and the idea that creativity has a habit of taking its own path instead of the one we think it should.

For my daughter it was no big deal.

This was one card of very many. Just another opportunity to get out the crayons and glitter and glue and, for the first and only time, some feathers, and see what might happen.

She already knew that Grandma and Grandad were going to love it because it was made by her. That they didn’t actually get to hold it didn’t matter in the least.

She’d made it, and that was enough.

I couldn’t finish without including Emily Dickinson’s beautiful poem, which, when I came across it again recently, triggered my memory of our feathery card, and the hope with which we sent it across the ocean.

“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.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers, by Emily Dickinson, 1861