Follow the Berries
by Scot Kelly
First I wanted to thank Eric at Bingorage who kindly posted Artistream’s goals on his blog site. Eric hails from the Fort Francis area of Ontario. Ron, my son Damien and I stopped in Fort Francis in early July of this year. We had been driving for 2 days and nights from Vancouver and were pretty locked in (if you know what I mean).
Ron’s uncle has a canoe on the lake where he lives and he let us borrow it for a few hours. Ron took us to many of his favorite haunts on the lake. On 1 of the islands, I found a line of blueberry bushes that stretched through the interior of the island. While I ate my way through the bushes, Ron and Damien scouted the shores. I followed the blueberries up a ridge as the berries got fatter (yum!). As I rounded an escarpment, I decided to look up from my feast. Right in front of me standing on a boulder was the largest and most beautiful eagle feather that I had ever seen. The feather was leaning against a blueberry bush (naturally) standing straight up and down on its quill. It looked as though someone (Spirit) had placed it there for me to find. When I showed the feather to Ron, he pointed to the spots in the white area of the feather and said that it was a vision feather.
For many years I have been a “Seeker”. I have studied many different traditions: Alchemy, Western Mysticism, Zen, Theosophy, Shamanism, etc. I am not sure whether I am any closer to what I seek but there are times when I get glimpses. Most of the time I was looking for “Big” magic. You know the spirit in the burning bush type. Gradually (because I am hard-headed) it began to dawn on me that the “Small” magic was what I needed to pay attention to and that “Small” magic can have a big impact. When I look back to the major turning points of my life, there were always little signs, chance encounters, small coincidences, etc. that I listened to which led to a fork in my path. So now I take the time to open my heart and follow the berries.