Dove Tales, part 1 by Sara Wright

Hundreds (it felt like thousands) of wings descended around the stone table I was sitting on at dawn. Transfixed by this sight that seemed to be occurring within as well as without I could barely comprehend the thousands of soft coos that floated through the air. Celestial music filled my ears. Was this really happening I wondered even as the birds clustered round my feet? I’d loved doves as a child, had drawn thousands of them. In Medieval paintings white doves descended upon Mary as Grace. The child believed. Doves were like no other birds the child was sure…

 The buildings and churches of Assisi all had doves cooing from rooftops distracting me from outdoor lectures. I was attending a Jungian conference in Assisi Italy and every morning found me wandering the narrow streets or climbing Saint Francis’s mountain to pick wildflowers and sweet herbs. I had no idea until approaching Assisi that the golden sunflowers that stretched across the horizon almost blinding me that I would spend one week of my life in two worlds. One as a member of a professional conference, the other submerged in experiences that lifted me out of ordinary reality. The time with the doves was just one of many experiences of Mary, Saint Francis and Old Women (who approached me in the streets) that lifted me out of the life I knew.

What I felt and sensed was stronger than any rational thought, so experiential reality held me fast and even at the time these experiences were occurring I hoped this reality would never let me go.

In retrospect it was the doves that were calling me into a life I had not planned to live. The Bird Goddess was alive and yet I had never even heard of her. She was, of course a dove. Before I left Assisi, I was drawn to a famous sculptor who sold terra cotta dove pots. I bought one instantly and worried about the pot breaking all the way home…

Whenever I fed the flocks of mourning doves that waited just outside the kitchen door the presence of those birds with their poignant songs helped me return to that extraordinary week wondering what it all meant. I placed the pot in my plant window, and although it was a planter I left it empty. I believed in some power that was associated with the dove, and this remained another daily reminder long after my colonized mind tried to separate me from my Assisi experience.

When My father died suddenly in 1993 I was still feeding hundreds of mourning doves, though by then I had moved to the mountains. A crisis emerged out of my mother’s refusal to have any kind of service for the man she had been married to for 50 years. My uncle and I couldn’t accept this decision and made plans for a memorial service to be held in New York at a Catholic Church as soon as possible.  When I called my mother to invite her, she refused calling me a selfish daughter who only thought of herself.

It’s important to know that my father who came to this country when he was twelve, was one of six Italian poor immigrant children who went on to become an aeronautical engineer. My dad held all family dear, including those of his mother and surviving siblings. My mother disliked Catholics and my dad’s family. She forcibly separated my brother and I from our Italian relatives as children, but my father never wavered in his loyalty to all. Was that why my mother refused to be part of any service? All I know for sure is that she forced my children to choose between her and me. Both complied. Neither attended the moving memorial or the luncheon afterwards when my aunt set an extra plate ‘by mistake’. As we sat down under stormy skies a sudden shaft of light hit the plate lighting up the entire room. ‘Pete is here’, my aunt immediately remarked as I shivered. Yes, of course he was with us. Some of his family had finally acknowledged that this man had lived. Funerals are not just for the living; they bring closure for the dead.

I didn’t know it then, but this event would mark the end of my relationship with both of my children for life. They chose to follow their grandmother’s path – the one with money as the golden thread – the lure of money/power is apparently irresistible and I certainly had neither. Just as they deleted their grandfather at the time of his death, so they deleted their mother in life. ‘His – Story’ repeats.

During the last conversation I had with my mother  four months before her death she taunted me with the fact that I didn’t have my children – she did. I’ll never forget. Vengeance until the end for the unwanted daughter. She refused to see me for the last twelve years of her life, thought I tried repeatedly to reach out to her.

But I digress. The day after my father’s death a white dove appeared with the mourning doves I fed. This bird stayed one day and vanished. That very night my uncle called me. Earlier that evening when he sat down to eat pasta with my aunt he thought he felt a stone in his mouth. Spitting it out he was stunned to see that it was a tiny white stone dove. Inexplicable unless one knew that my father who even as a lapsed catholic still believed in Mary’s Grace and prayed to her. Was Mary’s grace manifesting as a white dove. I think my uncle and I were on the right path. The Way of the Goddess.

Part 2 to be posted next Tuesday