My Shaman

Recently I did a collage, a window to the inner realm. As it took shape I began to realize it was revealing to me a very special advocate alive in my soul -- someone brand new and yet as familiar as sunlight or a pine-scented breeze. In the image sits an elder, a gentle man leaning on a cane, eyes closed, listening intently to the voice of Spirit. He wears a headdress of feathers and roses. He is a Shaman. In the image his world is hearth fire and new life, microscopic seeds and darkness, a passageway into the depths of the psyche, and the far cold reach of northern mountain vastness.

This morning, longing to be with him, I reach into the imaginal realm. I find myself walking through a high alpine meadow, lush with blazing verdent grasses and wildflowers of every imaginable color, toward a one room log cabin squatting at the crest of a little hill. More grasses and flowers adorn the roof of this dwelling, which is sod over pine poles and which sports a dented, rust-spattered stove pipe puffing smoke gently into the sunrise. As I draw near I can see that a lovely grey Pendleton blanket covers the doorway. A gnarled hand draws it aside, and my Shaman steps out.

His hair is startlingly white, like Rosean's. He wears roses tucked behind an ear and a pink shirt with red polka dots, jarring to look at. He smiles as he draws in a breath of cool mountain air, smiles even more broadly as his gaze turns to me. I see he has his cane hooked over an arm and that he wears soft leather slippers and soft denim jeans.

He looks a question out of his gentle brown eyes. I realize we already know one another very well. It comes to me that I've always called him grandpa.

"I am sad today, grandpa," I tell him, speaking the words of the lump that is in my throat. "I miss my mum."

He nods. His face is all easy light, all kindness. "She has not done well by you, TF," he says. I realize he has always called me this: "TF". I think I might even remember why.

"I think I have missed her since I was very little," I tell him. "I am lonely with the missing of her. I don't fit anywhere. I am a wind howling at the edges of houses, lifting roof tiles and bits of siding, desperate to be inside."

He has been holding a pelt, a soft animal skin, white with brown highlights. He brushes it with his fingers and puts it down gently on the ground. It fills out as I watch, becoming a living rabbit, and instantly streaks off across the meadow, ears laid back and hindquarters pumping. Startled, I watch it's little cotton-swab tail disappear into a clump of bushes.

He chuckles softly. "You have a bit of the wolf in you this morning. You've scared my bunny." My eyebrows go up, but I don't ask. He puts his arm across my shoulders and draws me in against his side. I feel myself relax. "Walk with me a bit," he says.

Suddenly we are at the edge of a vast lake. White birds accompany us as we stroll near the shore line across wet sand full of puddles in which minnows swarm. Mist is rising from the surface of the water and my grief rises with it like oily black smoke. A voice in my heart whispers in time to our foot falls, "Letting go, letting go, letting go, all the way down." The tension in my throat eases a little.

We walk for a long time. Then we stop. My Shaman draws a circle around me in the sand with his cane. "You are beloved," he tells me, and steps back a step.

I feel myself dissolve, become one with the lake. I am fluid of many layers, many colors, many temperatures. Fish swim in my depths. Ducks and cormorants ride on my surface. I am water droplets skating down the air currents, reflecting light. I am tiny bits of breathing liquid in which small minnows swim. All life emerges from me. All life returns to me. I feel my arms and legs dissolve, my nose and face and ears fall away. My belly is everywhere. My eyes see from a thousand perspectives.

In my depths is a heartbeat. For a long time I listen to it without thinking. Then I realize it is the heartbeat of the Mother. It is the heartbeat of Motherly love. I feel it in me and through me. It is a part of me, as intrinsic to me as my own heartbeat, my own breath. "Love, love," it pulses, sending me nutrients along its pathways.

I am back again in a dream landscape from many years ago. A tall woman has grabbed me by the back of the neck and is pouring water into the top of my head. I look down at my chest and see the water sloshing around inside me, as though I were a glass container. "You are my aquarium," the tall woman tells me. I have been her aquarium. But something is required of me in this moment.

This is God. This is the Mother God. I belong to her completely, always have. "Yes," I pledge to her. "I am your aquarium. With your help."

Things swirl away in a cacophany of color. I come back to myself after many minutes, and I realize that I am once again at my Shaman's lake, and I am kneeling on the sand. He is standing near me, and when he sees I have come back to him he gives me a hand and pulls me to my feet. He pats me in mock solicitude. "Much better," he informs me.

At his cabin later we share a cup of tea and talk about how the afternoon thunder storms will build behind the mountains and water this little meadow on their way to the plains. From time to time I spy a rabbit nosing about in the grasses and I watch appreciatively until it disappears. Around the fourth time this happens I realize I can feel its heartbeat. I can feel its heartbeat while the rabbit is in the meadow, and I can feel it after the rabbit has disappeared. The rabbit's heartbeat courses through my blood. I know where the rabbit is. There is no separation between us, absolutely none at all.

My Shaman smiles at me beautifically and pats me on the back of the hand, spilling a bit of my tea.