Feathered Knowledge

Process Diary

This is the feather on my handlebars. I shoved the stem down into the slot of a repurposed camera mount and left it there, and it has ridden with me since — through rain it should not have survived, past everything I did not stop for. I shot it at the hour the sky goes blue, holding the sun behind the bar so the light came through the whole thing at once. Every barb lit separately; the shaft went gold and then violet where the white broke apart, and I did not expect the color. That is the point of keeping it. You ride past the same street a hundred times and one evening the light comes through a thing you have been carrying the whole way, and you finally understand it. The knowledge is not in the feather. It is in the fact that I kept it, and put the sun behind it, and looked.