Lynne Scott Constantine, 2022
digital photo composite, 12″ x 12″

The twelfth-century German mystic, composer, abbess, and polymath Hildegarde of Bingen told of a king who picked up a fallen feather and, flush with power, commanded it to fly. The feather did fly——but not because of the king’s might. The feather was carried on air currents stirred by the king’s breath. So, she wrote, am I: “a feather on the breath of God.”

Here I imagine the feather that is our collective spirit, our collective good, carried aloft by “the breath of all”——all of us, all of nature, even the solar wind.

In this composite, the background image is a detail from a NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory photograph of a phenomenon called plumelets, believed to help explain how deformations occur in the solar wind. The feather is from a barn swallow pair that nested in my backyard; one of its feathers (quite tiny, though large here because photographed with a macro lens) landed at my feet.

A technical note: Possessing barn swallow feathers is not prohibited by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.