So. Welcome to my little blogorama.

I didn’t want my first real entry to be nothing but complaining (which it would have been, since I already wrote an entire article on how much I hate my job), and even though my wonderful husband suggested I start out extolling his many virtues (so many!), I think I’ll start off my blog with the story behind the whole Blue Feather thing. After all, I do have it tattooed on my body, so it must mean something important to me, right?

I was a kid when I first read Illusions by Richard Bach, and I’ve been re-reading it ever since. It touched me in a way nothing ever had before, and the stories, parables, whatever you want to call them, really resonated with me. They still do, and I’m still learning from them (life is one big learning process, after all). But the strongest idea in the book, I feel, was the concept that We Are All Free To Do Whatever We Want To Do.
In a nutshell, this means that our lives are our own responsibility, and you’ll get out of it what you put into it. For instance, If you want to lie around eating junk food, that’s your choice -- but so are the consequences, such as an expanding waistline, poor health, and bad teeth. If you want to work hard and make a lot of money, no matter what type of business you’re involved in or whether or not you’ll have any free time to spend that
money, that’s also your choice. That’s the beauty of being human: we all have choices, every day, and we are completely free to make them. We are free to make mistakes, too… even if we know they’re mistakes going in. We’re free to try something new, even if it scares us. We’re free to be friends with who we want, and we’re free to keep people we don’t like out of our lives. Our lives, our choices.
Many people think this concept is faulty – that it should be We Are All Free To Do Whatever We Want To Do… As Long As We’re Not Hurting Someone Else. And that’s a nice sentiment, but it’s just not practical. You can’t help hurting someone else if they choose to be hurt. The example Bach uses in his book consists of a man refusing to let a vampire suck his blood, knowing that the vampire will die without it. The vampire is very weak, and needs blood badly, but the main character (Bach himself, actually) still refuses to give up any of his blood. And that’s fine, because that’s his choice. He is not willing to risk his own health, and that’s totally valid.

"Richard, in being so fierce toward my vampire, you were doing what you wanted to do, even though you thought it was going to hurt somebody else. He even told you he'd be hurt if..."
"He was going to suck my blood!"
"Which is what we do to anyone when we tell them we'll be hurt if they don't live our way."
I was quiet for a long time, thinking about that. I had always believed that we are free to do as we please only if we don’t hurt another, and this didn’t fit. There was something missing.
"The thing that puzzles you," he said, "is an accepted saying that happens to be impossible. The phrase is hurt somebody else. We choose, ourselves, to be hurt or not to be hurt, no matter what. Us who decides. Nobody else. My vampire told you he'd be hurt if you didn't let him? That's his decision to be hurt, that's his choice. What you do about it is your decision, your choice: give him blood; ignore him; tie him up; drive a stake of holly through his heart. If he doesn't want the holly stake, he's free to resist, in whatever way he wants. It goes on and on, choices, choices."
"When you look at it that way..."
"Listen," he said, "it's important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do."


Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to be concerned about other people, it’s important to care for others, and I don’t advocate walking around making choices that will hurt people on purpose, because that’s mean, and mean people suck. (Unless, of course, you’re a sadist and your friend is a masochist, in which case, go for it.) But if your own happiness is in jeopardy because you’re afraid of hurting someone else, you have to decide which is more important. See? Choices.
And the same goes for being on the receiving end, too. It is your choice to be hurt by someone else’s actions. If you are the vampire who needs to suck blood, but your potential victim won’t let you, it’s up to you to find another source for what you need. You could take it as a personal affront… or you could just realize that, hey, this guy just doesn’t want to give up any of his blood right now, to anyone. In which case, you can go
off and look for someone else to provide you with their blood, or find a butcher who stocks animal blood, or decide to drink grape juice instead. If your job, or your relationships, or your diet isn’t giving you what you want, you have the option – the right – to find an alternative that does.

The corollary to this whole thing, which I mentioned before, is that you get out of life what you put into it. If you put forth happiness and contentment, sooner or later you will create it for yourself. If you put forth misery and depression, that’s what you’ll get, if that’s what you want. Some people call it a self-fulfilling prophesy, or creative visualization, or some other new-age whatchacallit. Whatever it is, it is power to make your life what you will, or to bring into your life something you want. Sometimes it takes a long time to realize your dreams or goals, and there can be peaks and valleys along the way, but it can happen if you really want it to. It’s happened too many times for me to count not to believe it.

"…Show me what you mean. Give me a little miracle of the magnet... I do want to learn this."
"You show me," he said. "To bring anything into your life, imagine that it's already there. ... Something small, at first."
"I'm supposed to practice now?"
"Yes."
"OK... A blue feather."
[...]
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, iridescing 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."
[…]
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!”



(exerpts from Illusions by Richard Bach, Delacorte Press, New York, 1977.)