Today, I went walking along the familiar trail near the bayou—familiar, but never the same. As the sun burned down with July heat, the trail opened into a portal. The ordinary dissolved into a strange orchestration of symbols and messengers, and I walked right into the middle of it, unknowingly stepping across a spiritual threshold.
On the far side of the creek, I saw what looked like a black wall gliding across the grass. It moved in waves, fluid and silent. As I approached, I realized it wasn’t a wall at all—but a committee of vultures. Dozens of them, possibly sixty or more. Some stood in the water, others stretched their wings wide like dark priests invoking sky spells. They congregated in clusters—on benches, beneath trees, in the shade like silent sentinels.
There was no visible death, no carcass, but the stench of decay hovered over the low, hot water. I felt the sacred gravity of their presence. The vultures didn’t threaten. They witnessed. They cleansed. They waited.
Just before I saw them, I had stopped at Tristessa—my beloved oak. She bore a touch of white, webby fungus, a sign I’d seen elsewhere on oaks in the grove. Her roots offered no feathers today, only quiet. But near a neighboring tree, I did find one: a small, soft feather, brown and white. Young, downy. As if some baby bird had passed this way or transformed.
Further on, I found another feather—clearly from one of the vultures. I tucked them both into my pocket, thinking them sacred, only to later discover they had vanished. I never felt them fall. They simply left. Like messengers who had delivered their words and returned to the wind.
The grass along the trail had recently been mowed. What was tall and waving last week was now shorn and exposed. Death of the old to clear the path for something new, perhaps. A subtle Tower moment beneath my feet.
As we passed the vulture wall, the heat pushed down like judgment. It was 94 degrees, and my dog was struggling. We found shade in a cypress grove where time slowed. A lone cardinal called from the trees, and I looked at my watch. 4:44.
Angels speak in numbers. Four is the number of foundations, stability, and protection. Three of them is a divine exclamation point: you are seen, you are supported, this path is sacred. Even when the vultures are gathering and the feathers disappear.
While we were in the grove, a man on a bike pulled over. He took off his headphones, looked straight at me, and said, “Have you ever seen the vultures like that before?” He comes here every day, he said, and has never witnessed anything like it. Neither have I. We both agreed—the bayou stinks. There’s something in the water. A death, a clearing, something unseen that called the vultures to this holy feast.
Further down the trail, I found something that looked like a snakeskin—but turned out to be a piece of bike handlebar grip. Illusion and shedding skin. What appears like transformation may be mundane—but it’s still something left behind. Even plastic becomes a message when spirit wants to speak.
When I went to retrieve the feathers from my pocket again—both were gone. Vanished. Returned to the ether.
I had been thinking all along the trail about death and rebirth. About my son beginning boot camp today. About what parts of myself I am shedding. About who I am becoming. The vultures, the feathers, the fungus, the heat, the cardinal, the man with the question, the vanished feathers, the ringing, the illusion of the snakeskin—each was a breadcrumb on the trail of transformation.
