The Making Of An Eagle Staff

Some years ago, when I first started to coordinate powwows, I was told that I needed an eagle staff for the gathering. I asked how that was to happen and was told simply to put out the word that it was needed. A couple of months later, at another gathering, a woman came to me to tell me she had heard I was making an eagle staff. I asked how she had heard that since I had said nothing to anyone - but she offered an eagle feather from a Cherokee elder who had passed over and came back the next day to gift me with it. I told a friend what happened and the friend offered to make the eagle staff for me - just provide the feathers. I called a friend who had gifted me with a feather from his son's headdress after his son was killed in a car accident - I asked permission to put the feather on the staff and he offered me seven more feathers.

That is how the eagle staff came to me that has now graced eight powwows, including the Eagle And Condor Intertribal Powwow, with its medicine. It now has twelve feathers but I have seven more to add to it, gifted to me by a young man at a youth conference for substance abuse prevention at which I had been asked to play. Having just been released from a residential treatment program, he came to me with the seven feathers and said to me that he had been praying about what to do with them - that it came to him that he was supposed to give them to me.
Now, I have two questions in my mind. The first - how is it that things sometimes happen this way and other times not? What is at work when that happens?
The second question, which is troubling to me, is: should I even be speaking of these things here? These are delicate matters and need to be discussed circumspectly and respectfully. There are many, many reasons not to speak of these things in this kind of forum - but now it is done and I do not withdraw it.
Please know that there is so much more to be learned than can ever be shared this way. Any who are really serious about learning these ways must seek it in person from those who know, over time, with the utmost patience, humility and respect for that which is being given.