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.

The Feather Touch of Joy

It comes to me softly, like the feather touch of joy. I have awakened in the deepest part of the night, body suddenly an oven. Moonlight silvers the leaves outside the bedroom window, making them skitter like minnows in a great black sea. I have emerged from some deep dream -- there is something -- something like a warm room.

My grief has awakened with me, strong in the early morning quiet. I watch it swell. Just so. It is hard work and it makes me feel brittle and tired. But behind it I can feel the prayers of my friends, a weaving of support and love like hands linked all around my soul.


That warm place. I feel it now like a small point of golden light, no bigger than my hope. I chase after it as I lie in the darkness, and suddenly I am inside.

It is not a room. It is somewhere apart from space. It is as though I am held by some mammoth person. I feel his arms around me -- it is a "he" -- protective and comforting. This shocks me back into my quiet nighttime bedroom. It is truly novel; I don't think it has ever happened to me before, not at least that I remember; that a man has held me in this way.

Amazed, I return to my imagination. I am leaning against a huge chest. Arms still hold me and the deep booming beat of a heart is in my ear. Tears leak from my eyes as I recognize that aspect of Father I never knew -- or knew before speech, before abandonment.

Revelation follows, in the way of such moments, in a cascading series of understandings. I realize that The Father can be warm rather than judgmental, that he can claim me as his own. Perhaps this is the attraction in God the Father -- an image of God I've never before appreciated. He stands in a different relationship with me. The Mother offers nurturing, life, dance, connection, the power of holy anger, home and a place to which to return. The Father offers understanding and forgiveness. Having a Father, I suddenly have a place to stand in community -- and that leaves me with much less to do, much less to prove. I have never felt shielded quite like this before.

Behind me a voice rumbles like thunder, "I am proud of you, and pleased with you."

This meets some need in me so basic that I can barely stand it. A hard knot inside me releases. I suddenly realize I am feeling very little -- the little kid in me wide-eyed and totally vulnerable. "If you are just a product of my wishful thinking," I say to the great force behind me, "I will kill you." I recognize the absurdity of this statement but can't think of anything else to promise.

I hear an ozone-creating boom of laughter. "Dream on, bucko," says the huge voice.

I have a feeling that much more will come. For now it is just enough to feel the arms around me and the beat of the heart. I think of my son Mike, how when he was very little he used to lean against me as though I were a deck chair, arms folded behind his head and legs crossed. He'd tell me stories as he reclined there.

I think of sitting in this warm place as though it were a deck chair. I think of leaning back, arms behind my head, and telling stories. Something about how totally comfortable I feel with that image makes me grin. I drift back to sleep from that warm place, that tickling feather touch of joy.

Messenger from the Void

Raven watches me out of his sideways eye, which is black and ringed with gold like a wedding band around the abyss. Today he is Odin’s bird. I plunge into the Void through his dark vision.

There the blue ice ghosts of warriors swarm until I come among them, and then they draw aside to let me go further and alone. No light comes from anywhere. I have no sense of direction other than “on”. “Back” may be the same as “on” for all I know; the doorway seems to have vanished. I can see nothing, in any direction, except blackness. This is strangely restful.

I go “on” until I stop. Then I simply hang in space. No light, no sound – I think of Odin hanging on his tree -- nine days and nine nights until the Universe explodes. I float as though submerged in water. I am neither hot nor cold.

Suddenly light blossoms, gas-flame blue light which appears to be at some distance and which defines a horizon. It rises and cascades, eerie and silent like the Northern Lights. I watch, admiring the beauty. The light never changes color, but it ebbs and flows, dancing like flame.

I watch for a very long time. "I don't understand," I think, "what this has to say to me." Perhaps it has nothing to say to me. Perhaps I am nothing.

Slowly it dawns on me that this is no place for a human being. It is beautiful and restful but empty of human scale and connection. In a moment of extreme panic I realize I do not know the way out. I turn this way and that, but the same view greets me on every side. The icy horizon surrounds me. I try “swimming”, flailing my arms and legs to move through the void. Nothing seems to change. I can’t move that way. Or moving makes no difference, doesn’t get me anywhere.

It occurs I ought to will myself elsewhere. I open my eyes. Now I am out of the realm of imagination and back in the everyday world. But I realize my soul is still in the limbo of the Abyss. My grief seems to have been leached away, but I feel hollow and empty, not healthy. I walk about in the house, but can’t set my mind to any task. I am listless and restless. Everything seems pointless. My creativity has been Voided, as has my energy. I long for my tears.

I decide to call out to the energies of Psyche and beg them to release me. I return to the dark and empty place of my imagination. The Northern Light display has disappeared, and I am again in total darkness.

Hanging there, I reach out. “Raven,” I call first. There is no answer. Nothing changes. I call then for the Mother. Still there is no change. I plead with Coyote, with the Little People, with Baba Yaga the Great Witch. In all cases, nothing changes. These are not the gods of this place. They cannot set me free.

Finally I reach in a direction I haven't tried for a very long time. "Father," I whisper. Sorrow hits me like a silent tidal wave. It spews me out of soundless emptiness and into my studio. I take a breath. Sure enough, I am present once again to myself here and now. Reproachfully I look at the window ledge where Raven has been sitting while he watches me. He is gone. I remain very, very sad.

Church Signs

Last week Rosean and I drove by a church sign that read:

WHY DIDN'T NOAH SWAT THE 2 MOSQUITOES?

Rosean laughed and amended it:

WHY DIDN'T NOAH SWAT THE 2 MOSQUITOES AS HE FLOATED DOWN THE WEST NILE?

What Noah didn't know (ah).

Friday and Saturday morning Rosean and I got up early and went out to Fossil Creek Reservoir with our coffees. (In case you ever need to know, Human Bean opens at 5 a.m.) With binoculars and a rather dated bird book we strolled to one of the bird blinds, sat a bit, strolled to the other blind, sat a bit more. We are not birders; we don't know anything about the culture and protocol of bird watching. We just witness all these little lives out at the Reservoir, each with its passions and trials, desires and attempts at fulfilment, births and endings. Yesterday two scarlet-eyed grebes called to each other in a way that caused my Scorpio partner to opine, "they want to get some." I was skeptical, but sure enough, soon they lifted their bodies and arched their necks in an elegant mating dance, a sort of side by side promenade across the surface of the water. We just loved this dance. We love all the dances, even the ones that make us sad.

I'm sure there are dozens of excellent sermons on the theme of Noah and the mosquitoes. After all, if we didn't have mosquitoes we wouldn't have swallows, those jewel-like darters. We wouldn't have the waterfowl who feast on larvae. In a terrible domino effect we'd lose entire ecosystems -- maybe the entire biosphere. Yet, in spite of our understanding of this fact, if it were entirely up to us we really would kill off all the mosquitoes. We'd have some rationale.

And, archetypally, the story of Noah really is wonderful. Imagine building a great hulking boat when you're living on a desert. Imagine waiting 40 years to be vindicated, 40 years before the waters rise. Imagine carrying the seeds of all future life with you on your ark, the craft shaped by your own hands and toil. And amongst the creatures is the mosquito. It works, you know?

But I think of all the little lives at the reservoir, and of the lives surrounding the reservoir in all the little (and not so little) houses, and of the lives in trees and at the edges of lawns. And I think, you know, we're Christian. We should put up one church sign and leave it until all the little plastic letters crumble and fall away, a sign like this:

CAN YOU EVEN F--ING BELIEVE THAT GOD WOULD PUT ON HUMAN FLESH AND LIVE AMONG US?

Or, as Saturday's Saint du Jour (St. Cyril of Alexandria) put it in the little daily meditation booklet Rosean and I read:

THE MOTHER OF GOD CONTAINED THE INFINITE GOD UNDER HER HEART, THE GOD WHOM NO SPACE CAN CONTAIN

Can you believe this message? It's the sort of fact that unravels your socks and sets your hair on fire so you have to get baptized just to put the flames out!

Silence and a Tiny Peace

"They are dead to me," my mind whispers as I sit in my favorite chair looking out through every window on leaves and bits of sky. I think of a time I killed a cat with a shovel -- it had been hit by a car and too many things were outside lying on the pavement that should have been safely tucked away under fur and skin. It was night. I had the shovel with me, returning from gardening with a friend. It was a quick, merciful ending. And yet I feel anguish and guilt.

When I close my eyes I can still see the car round the corner in the dark, and the impact, the tiny body arcing, the massive blind machine moving on oblivious. Against the painful lump in my throat I weigh the moment after the fall of the shovel blade when there was only silence and a tiny peace.

For a few days now there have been moments when I haven't remembered that I am now an orphan. Laughing with friends, working on projects, I live into the moment and dream into the future. At other times I look at my hands and am shocked to find them large-veined and wrinkled, the hands of an aging woman. In those moments the grieving child looks out, puzzled, into my life. My own palms hold her broken heart, my own vibrating lullaby stills her fears.

"Dead," insists my knowledgeable wisdom, and the shovel blade comes down with a clank, cleaving the central chord, the tie that binds. And even the little kid sees how my true history is emerging now that the falsehoods have been severed from it. Love drove me, my own love, invisible because not mirrored. It is a huge-hearted thing, this love. It cherishes and supports, nourishes, sustains, reaches with understanding across almost any barrier. Almost.

There are some collisions that cannot be survived. There are some endings that are written into every possible future. Alone on the pavement in the night this is what I know.

Sitting in my favorite chair looking out at green, I remember once again and weep.

To Whom Do I Belong

Grief has gotten into my joints like cold, and I am moving slowly, like a lizard before the sun has warmed the rocks. Every aching lift of arm can unleash a bout of tears. I carry myself gently, tenderly. I am a little surprised at the intensity of my feelings, a little unnerved -- yet bizarrely grateful. Most of the pain I suffered growing up was endured alone and in the dark; I'm not so used to sharing with family and friends, not so used to being cared for.

I am so thankful for Rosean, for Carrie, for my friends, for my friends' dogs, for my kids and grandkids. I belong to these people as they belong to me, and I am grateful.

Today the angel and the raven sit side by side on the window ledge of my studio. Soft, green-smelling air wafts in around them, mixes with the odor of turpentine. I finish my work, turn in that direction.

Raven's eye is lapis and deep as geyser water. She ruffles her iridescent feathers and croaks. I have an image of tree rings in a huge old stump, tiny dark green fir needles, humus, cool and deep. I am young, looking up through the cathedral of lodge pole pine at a lapis-colored sky. Puffy clouds silently glide by. For a long moment I lean in to the remembered whisper of wind in tree tops, the smell of sap, the underlying silence. Here is where my gut is grounded, where the umbilical chord of my soul is buried. Out of this place I came into the world of human relationships like a child raised by wolves.

Back in the studio, the angel's eyes are compassionate, even as fire dances around his/her head. I am comforted by the leap of flames, orange and gold and blue. Now I am a much younger child, and I look fearlessly at this heavenly messenger, asking, "whose child am I?"

Mother Earth claims me. My own particular forest and my own mountains claim me. Uri, the dark woolly god of buffalo claims me. Irene the goddess of peace and coyotes claims me. The queen of fairies claims me. Raven claims me. Jesus the Christ claims me. He is my brother. I am a child of God.

The Irreconcilable Difference

I am wearing my Leo socks today in honor of the fact that, while I am sometimes vain and self-focused, I am also deeply, incredibly loving and generous, and often open to the Spirit. My Leo socks will hold my feet dear as I seek ways to hold myself dear and allow my friends to hold me dear on this day when I feel like a layer of my heart has become powder and is blowing away.

Yesterday I was disinherited. This was as inevitable as brush fires in California. Still, I was not prepared for the severing of ties with my parents, abrupt and final as it was after a short foray into truth telling. Both my mother and my father have spoken, and so I, along with my sister, am orphaned. Thank God for my sister.

Here's the thing I will always remember: I told my father that if this was the last time we would ever speak I needed him to know I love him. I told him the truth of my forgiveness and for just a few seconds I saw deep in his eyes the longing to believe and accept it. My poor dad.

He will deny that, of course. He will say I am completely crazy, delusional, brainwashed by "the feminists". I imagine he believes he has to say these things; I know in my heart he knows otherwise.

I let go of my mom years ago. I was washing clothes one day and I imagined her standing at her washing machine and yearning for me as I was standing at mine and yearning for her. Despite everything, we were mother and daughter, loving one another deeply, and yet between us lay a truly irreconcilable difference.

The same difference reared its head yesterday. It is not going to go away. If my parents eventually try to bridge the chasm they just created, I hope I remember that truth telling doesn't just happen one time. It is ongoing, relentless -- devastating.

I am stripping the bed in the guest room, washing the sheets and the towels. The windows are open to dissipate my mother's strong perfume. The soft, rain-laced air is soothing on my swollen eyes.