Notes from the Cauldron

You Had Me at Hello

Freddie was missing.  My friends’ beautiful blue and gold macaw had flown the coop.  He had been sitting on Marlee’s shoulder as she walked by the lagoon near their condominium, leaning down to her ear to whisper, “Birdie…big birdie…” as they sighted a snowy egret standing proudly at the edge of the bay.  Then, suddenly, he took off. 

Occasionally Freddie would flutter up to a perch in a tree as they walked, or circle around a few times before once more regaining the security of Marlee’s shoulder.  But this time he winged over towards the condominium complex and disappeared.  Marlee ran after, calling to him.  But Freddie was nowhere to be seen.  Marlee and her husband, Jake, combed the grounds for hours, searching.  But soon it grew dark.  They reported Freddie’s escape to the security guard on duty, who promised to keep an eye out for him.  Marlee and Jake returned to their condo with heavy hearts.  Their place seemed empty without Freddie shifting back and forth on his perch, crying “Yumm…YUMM!” in louder and louder tones until they shared some of their dinner with him. 

Around midnight, the security guard got a frantic call from a single woman in one of the second floor units.  Although she was on the second floor, there was a strange man on her balcony.  She couldn’t see him, because her curtains were closed.  But he was out there all right.  She could hear him murmuring, over and over—“Hello?   Hello?  Hello?”

Yes, you guessed it.  When the security guard shone his flashlight up at the balcony in question, an abject and worried parrot was begging for entry at a balcony with a sliding door identical to his own condo close by.  Freddie was very relieved to be reunited with Jake and Marlee, who were very relieved to be reunited with him. 

But imagine how relieved the panicked woman was.  Her worst fears had crystallized with that man’s voice on her balcony.  No one can blame her for being positive that she was in danger.  And certainly, no one can blame her for not pulling back the curtains to see what was out there.  No one wants to come face to face with their worst nightmare.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” roared the Wizard of Oz.  The voice of our fears relishes being loud and terrible.  It tries hard to intimidate us into not checking behind the curtain of our conditioning, our denial, to see if what is out there is really as terrifying as we suppose.  Fear is a useful emotion.  It exists to protect us.  But in a fear-based culture like ours, often our fears are overblown, or baseless.  Often our anxiety is displaced.  Perhaps we take our suspicion that our lives are inauthentic and meaningless and turn it into paranoia that we will lose our jobs and starve.  We take our fear of living in an unhealthy culture and literalize it into a series of imaginary illnesses.

Fear is a real sensation.  But the stories we spin out of that sensation usually keep us small and powerless.  Our very survival instinct is warped into producing the stress that kills us.  It is frightening to pull back the curtain and stare into the dark.  But what is out there is rarely the horror we fear.

Most of the time it is a part of ourselves that is lost, yearning to come home.

Genuine Spurious Placebo

            Genuine Spurious Placebo!   The back page of the magazine touted a ‘miracle’ supplement with those words.  Being an unusually well-read child with a large vocabulary, I went to my parents with the ad.  “Doesn’t ‘spurious placebo’ mean that it’s a fake?”  I asked.

            “Yes,” my father harrumphed, “that’s exactly what it means.”

            “But how can they sell something if they admit it’s a fake?”

            “They’re counting on the idea that most people don’t know what those words mean,” my mother explained.

            “Can’t they look them up in the dictionary?”          

            This was my first conscious experience with the world of marketing, one that led me to be suspicious of that art even to this day.  Unfortunately, spiritual teachings are often marketed with the same dubious superlatives.  Whether it’s the secret, the outline, or the formula for success, the ten commandments, the four agreements, or the three easy steps to enlightenment, the paints by numbers approach to mastery is designed, not to enlighten, but to keep the readers in spiritual kindergarten. 

            Teacher Patricia Sun describes the choice thusly; if you want to learn to ride a bicycle, you have to go through the wobbles. You are going to look bad while you are doing it.  You will fall frequently and skin your knees.  At a certain point, many people are tempted to just sit on the bike with the kickstand down, just looking cool. 

            The problem is, if you want to experience the joy and freedom of skimming along on your bike, you’ll never get there by pretending to be able to ride it.

            Imposing our childish control fantasies on the universe is a way of pretending to ride the bike.

            If you believe the spiritual snake oil salesmen, you and you alone are responsible and in control of absolutely everything that happens to you!  You can be wealthy, attract your soulmate, never work another day in your life—in just a few easy steps that anyone can master!  Sounds too good to be true?

            It is.  Every ancient spiritual tradition teaches the ecological truth that we are part of a web of life, that everything is interconnected.  If the antelope creates its own reality of dying of old age, the tiger starves. If the tiger creates its own reality of bagging food for herself and her cubs, the antelope dies.  We are part of and influenced by our eco-system, our biology, our families, our society, and our culture, as well as our own spiritual practices and psychological choices.  To imagine that we can make a life for ourselves utterly independent of those factors is so obviously and painfully phony, you wonder how anyone falls for it.  Of course, it is fear of our own powerlessness against those larger forces that causes us to retreat into control fantasies. The person who can’t control their drinking develops elaborate strategies to keep people from finding out.

            The problem with the simplistic, absolutist New Age view that each man is an island and we create our own reality in a vacuum, is that it destroys our ability to be compassionate with ourselves and others.  If life is utterly perfectable upon demand, then we are bad and wrong for not being able to perfect it.  One afternoon in San Francisco I overheard a man braying, “Well, man, on some level they must have wanted the baby to die, or else it wouldn’t have died.”  It was all I could do to keep from going over and punching him in the face, saying, “At some level you must want me to punch you in the nose or you wouldn’t say such incredibly stupid things!”

            Though she was a tender-hearted woman, my friend Geneen typically felt contempt for people who were ill.  Certainly she felt sorry for them but—they wouldn’t be in that mess if they hadn’t created it.

            When Geneen became sick with breast cancer, no one but her husband knew.  She had painted herself into a corner. Assuming everyone would judge her as she had judged others, she kept her illness a secret.  I found out when her husband called me the day after she died.  Her shame kept her—and her exhausted husband–from receiving all the love and support her friends would have loved to offer.  It kept her from making closure with us.  More dramatically, another friend of mine had been cured of a far more virulent form of breast cancer by Enderline therapy, which is not available in this country but is practiced in Europe, Canada and Mexico.  It is possible that if Geneen had told me her troubles, the information I had about this cancer treatment might have saved her life.

            Addiction to the illusion of control is the most pernicious of all addictions, the root, in many ways, of all evil.  Evil actions come about when people feel powerless, and will do anything to re-establish a feeling of control (usually by controlling others). It is a fine line—naturally we want to become more powerful, more responsible for the circumstances of our own lives.  We experience miracles, and have no idea what our actual limits might be.  We can, however, be fairly sure that we are neither omnipotent, nor omniscient. 

            One reality check is simply this; anything that makes you feel more judgmental of yourself, or others, is not a true spiritual teaching.  The Dalai Lama has been quoted as saying, “My religion is kindness.”  Compassion is not the same as feeling pitying, smug and superior.  Compassion, empathy, comes from knowing we are all in the same boat, that much of fortune is grace or chance, that our actions and choices play an important part in our reality—but only a part. 

No Two Alike

            I wasn’t pleased that my family was moving from sunny southern California to upstate New York at the beginning of my High School years.  But there was one thing I was looking forward to, and that was snowfall.  I had seen snow on the ground when we traveled over high mountain passes in the Sierras.  But I had never seen snow falling.  I had seen pictures in my encyclopedia, showing how each ice crystal was both intricate and unique: ‘no two alike’.  And in the ‘Charlie Brown’s Christmas Special’ and other animated films, I had thrilled to see the sparkling flakes drifting lazily across the screen like faceted jewels.  I imagined how peaceful it would be to stand out in a snowy forest while snowflakes the size of my hand descended all around me like lacy six-sided celestial valentines.

            I was in school when the first November storm blew in.  I got up from my desk and rushed to the window, scanning the swirling sleet.  Tiny particles of ice scoured the windows.  

            “When do the big flakes come?”

            My classmates scoffed.  “Whaddya mean, the big flakes?”

            “You know, the big pretty ones where you can see the designs.”

            “You’re the big flake,” someone snickered.  One girl from Germany, who was kinder, came and stood beside me.  “This is as big as they get,” she whispered.

            I was crushed with disappointment and resentment.  How could those TV programs show big flakes blowing all around if they were really too tiny to see?  Dipping back through my encyclopedia at home, I realized that I had possessed no idea what they were talking about when they talked about the ‘magnification’ of the photos of the snowflakes.  Now I knew; it was some sort of photographic trick.  I felt swindled.  Snow was not beautiful.  It was just cold and wet and horribly heavy to shovel. 

            The next year, I turned fifteen on November the fifteenth.  Fifteen on the fifteenth would only occur once in my lifetime, and it sounded magical.   I expected something special to happen. 

            I stepped off the school bus into a swirl of dancing snowflakes.  The sun was struggling to come out of the clouds, so the ice crystals were a particularly brilliant white.  Once the school bus was safely out of sight I opened my mouth as younger children do, to catch the flakes on my tongue.

            A flake cartwheeled past my eyes, almost brushing my lashes.  It landed on a spike of the fake fur ruff on my winter jacket. It sparkled there, pristine, only an inch from my eye.  At that distance, I could see every detail.  I could see the crystalline structure of the six-sided star; at its center was a white rose.  The white rose was my favorite flower.  After a timeless moment, it melted, but not before its image burned on my brain like a tiny brand.   “Happy birthday to me,” I whispered. 

            Sometimes life showers us with blessings, but we reject them because they are too small to see clearly.  Sometimes it is we who are too small to see clearly.  Gratitude is the magnifying glass that helps us see a gift for what it is.

A Hawaiian Ghost Story

In 1982, my husband and I went to Hawaii for the first time.  Relatively young, and relatively broke, we visited three islands–the Big Island, Maui, and Kauai–and camped everywhere we went.  Maui enchanted us.  After ten days at Big Beach in Makena, we decided to visit the rainy side of Maui.  The car rental agency forbade taking their cars on the southern end of the Piilani Highway, warning that the roads were rough.  But we wanted to see the whole island, and the road looked straightforward enough on the map–only a short section appeared to be dirt–and our guide book highly recommended a primitive campground right on the beach just south of Oheo Gulch, better known as the Seven Sacred Pools.  The campground had no running water, but contained the ruins of an ancient Hawaiian village.  Perfect.

Hours later, skirting the worst of the broken up asphalt chunks euphemistically representing the ‘road’ we saw on our map, we reached the ‘dirt’ section of the road.  Soon we realized the dotted line on our trusty map was really more of a futuristic idea of where a road might go if anyone ever decided to build one.  Deep ruts had been left by trucks whose wheel-span was considerably wider than ours.  We crawled at five miles an hour.  My neck became cricked from leaning to the right as our right tires thumped and shuddered through a rut while the left ones scrabbled frantically for purchase on the higher ground between gouges. 

By the time we reached the campground, we were aggravated and exhausted, and it was pitch dark.  So we didn’t notice until we walked right up to a heavy locked gate at the entrance that the campground was closed.

We knew that somewhere ahead of us lay the winding road to Hana–a road everyone described as being a nightmare one should never attempt to traverse at night.

We decided to sleep on the beach.  It was foggy but calm.  We left the tent in the trunk and laid our sleeping bags out on the sand.  It felt incredibly good to lie down.

Then we heard it.  The unmistakable sound of a small child sobbing somewhere in the jungle fronting the beach.

“There’s a lost kid in there!” I said.  Elie and I looked at each other.  We had seen no sign of any human habitation for miles.

We got up and walked to the edge of the woods, shining our flashlights into the vines and trees.  “Come here, we’ll help you!” we called.

The only reply the sound of a terrified child, sobbing as if it’s heart would break.

Cautiously, Elie and I started to walk into the woods.  Except it wasn’t really walking.  The vegetation was so lush we were climbing over stumps, holding the trunk of one tree while slithering between it and its neighbor.  The mud was ankle deep.  We stalled, tangled in vines.

We shone our flashlights all around, weak stripes of light making the forest seem all the darker.  “Come to us!  We’ll take care of you!”

Nothing but weeping in response.

“We can’t go any deeper,” Elie said.  “We’ll just get lost ourselves.  We’ve got to go for help.”

Just then, the sound of the sobbing changed.  It grew.  Now there were five or six voices.  Sobbing.  Crying.  Screaming.  A whole family.

“Over here!  Come on, we can help you,” we shouted.

The only response was the continuing cries of anguish.

“Maybe they don’t speak English,” I whispered.

A particularly shrill scream ripped through the woods, raising the hair on my neck.  I looked over at Elie.  The whites of his eyes gleamed in the mist.  The unspoken question vibrated between us.  What happened to these people?  And…will it happen to us?

We scuttled backwards like crabs, thrashing our way through vines that tendrilled around us, purposeful and animate as snakes.  We could see the pale sand through the trees when Elie grabbed my arm and squeezed hard.

Twenty voices now.  Crying.  Screaming.  Sobbing.

A whimper tried to fight its way out of my throat.

Probably no one has ever run through dense jungle as quickly as we did.  Once on the sand we kept backing until we reached our sleeping bags.

Fifty voices.  Crying.  Screaming.  Sobbing. 

“Maybe the locals–playing a practical joke?”  Elie gasped weakly.

Sixty voices.  Seventy five.  A wild cacophony of misery.

Eighty-five voices.  A hundred souls howling in mounting hysteria.

“A hundred people just hanging out in the woods in case some lost tourists stop by?  We haven’t seen a house or a car in hours!” I protest.

Elie nods.  “How far do you think it is to a police station?”

“I don’t know.”

The voices in the forest reached a fever pitch of agonized shrieks, subsided into moaning and incoherent pleading, built into screams again.

We sat on our sleeping bags.  Actually, our knees were shaking so hard we simply collapsed.

“I can’t drive any farther,” Elie admitted.  “Look, like you said–it can’t be real.  A hundred people out in the middle of nowhere?” He got in his sleeping bag and put his hands over his ears.  “It’s just the wind, honey.  Just ignore it.”

Wet staccato gasps of women who have been screaming so long they have lost their breath.  Men groaning in unbearable agony. Children shrieking as if they had been scalded.

The air is damp, heavy, overcast.  The breeze so faint it cannot even stir the ends of my hair.

I pull a hand off of one of Elie’s ears.  “There is no wind!  Can the wind sound like this?  There is no wind!”

He claps his hand back firmly over his ear.  “It’s just the wind.  Pay no attention.  Just go to sleep.”

Miserably, I crawled into the sleeping bag beside him and put my hands over my ears.  The sounds continued, barely muffled.

Neither of us slept.

Finally the sky began to lighten, the black slowly fading into gray.

A hundred voices became eighty.   Seventy five voices became fifty.

We crawled out of our sleeping bags, trembling with stiffness and exhaustion.

The cries dwindled.  Forty voices, then thirty.  Crying, screaming, sobbing. 

Then only the family.  Half a dozen voices keening their anguish.  Dwindling into silence  as the pale disc of the sun rose into the mist.

We dragged our sleeping bags–and ourselves–back to the car, stuffed the bags in the trunk. 

“Let’s eat breakfast somewhere else,” he said.

“Definitely,” I agree.

Elie frowns, looking over my shoulder, back towards the beach.  I whirl around.  And like him, see something we did not notice, as we arrived in the mist muffled dark the  night before.

We walk over to the historical marker.  I don’t remember what year the event had happened, or which two Hawaiian Chieftains had been battling.  What I remember is the marker stating, in pitiless bronze, “On this site, an entire village consisting of approximately one hundred men, women and children was slaughtered.”

Wordlessly, Elie and I got in the car.  A short while later we picked up a couple hitchhiking.  They were white, but local.  They had lived in Paia for a dozen years.  We told them the story of our miserable night.

“Oh yeah,” the guy said casually.  “People see night-walkers over there–whole platoons of ancient Hawaiian soldiers–patrolling up and down the beach.”

“And they hear stuff too,” the girl chimed in.

“Yeah, and people would feel icy cold spots on their way to the latrines–stuff like that.  That’s why they closed the campground, man.  The hauntings were just too intense.”

We pulled over and let the hitchhikers out at their destination, thanking them for the info.  Then Elie and I stared at each other.

Neither of us believed in ghosts.

Sometimes something happens that throws your world-view into chaos, and you realize that what you thought was reality was just a theory—a hypotheses which no longer fits the new set of facts.  You can cover your ears and close your eyes and try to ignore the new set of information, but this won’t work for long unless you are prepared to stay permanently stupid for life (sadly, many people are willing to do just that). 

I had never believed in ghost stories or haunted houses until this event.  I accepted that a beloved spirit might visit the people it cared for, in dreams or even in a vision state.  I had experienced that myself.  But spirits howling in misery, trapped between the worlds for eternity?  Murdered souls unable to leave the house or forest in which they perished?  That was unacceptable, unimaginable.

Trying to understand my Hawaiian experience, I cast my mind back to my first visit to Scotland.  At one point I had cut diagonally through a large intersection in the city of Edinburgh to rejoin my mother and cousin.  As I made my way through the broad cross roads, I was blasted with unbearable heat.  I felt dizzy, sick, on the verge of passing out.  I stumbled across the street and pressed my forehead against the gray stone wall of an old building.  “What’s wrong?” my mother asked.

“I think I’m getting sick.”

But after only a few moments, the sensation of heat and dizziness subsided.

“I thought I was coming down with a fever, but it’s gone now,” I said, puzzled.

Right on the building where I had leaned my head, was a historical marker (what would we do without historical markers?)  It stated that numerous accused Witches had been burned at the center of this town square during the 1500-1600’s.  The sensations of intense heat and ebbing consciousness I had experienced at the heart of the town square were some sort of psychic imprint, an energy scar from those times.

Thinking about these two events, I developed a theory that traumatic events often leave a vivid imprint on the scene where they occurred.  If we put on a disc of Elvis Presley, it will sound as if he is singing in the room with us.  But that does not mean that he is present.  In that same way, I think events, particularly traumatic events, can leave a ‘recording’which can be felt, heard, seen, or all of the above, by someone passing through that energy recording.  Somehow the presence of a human consciousness trips the switch and the scenario unfolds again.  It is not that the souls who suffered are trapped in their suffering, only that it has been recorded in a way that makes it seem current.

Other experiences I have had since that time ‘fit’ with this theory.  But a shaman is a sort of scientist, and explorer, a spelunker into the human psyche and its interface with a mysterious world.  If I get more information that conflicts with my theory, I’ll have to revise it again.

The Emperor has no Seals

Growing up in an agnostic household, Grimm’s Fairytales was probably as close to a Bible as anything in my experience.  My favorite stories were of the Little Mermaid and the Ugly Duckling, but I was fascinated by the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes. In this story, a mendacious flim-flam artist persuades the King and all his court that he has clothes so fine that only the most discerning eye can see them—to commoners, they look like nothing at all.  Since no one wants to admit they can’t see the nonexistent clothing, the King is convinced to buy an imaginary wardrobe and ‘wear’ it during his next procession through the town.  Everyone oohs and aahs over the Emperor’s sartorial splendor until they pass by one family where a young girl bursts into laughter and asks, “Why is the Emperor naked?”   Abashed by this sudden revelation of the truth, everyone, including the Emperor, suddenly realizes that he is naked and that they have all deceived themselves.

I loved the idea that a perceptive little girl like myself could tell the truth and make the adults around me see that it was so.  But that tale bore no resemblance to the world in which I found myself, a world in which adults were always right, and children should be seen and not heard. 

My parents raised us in a southern California beach town, and we had a small dog named Charcoal who adored the beach.  She was jet black, probably a cocker/terrier mix, and though a timid dog in many ways, she had absolutely no fear of the water.  She would plunge into the sea, legs churning, and swim out past the roll of the waves, paddling back and forth beyond the breakers. She enjoyed swimming with the family, but she would also strike out on her own and swim for hours.

One day, while walking down the beach, I came upon a cluster of people pointing and exclaiming over something in the ocean. “What is it?” I asked a man who was gesticulating excitedly.

“There’s a little baby seal swimming out there,” he explained.

I shaded my eyes and craned my head but couldn’t see it.

“There, right there,” the man pointed helpfully.  But all I could see was my dog, swimming happily beyond the curve of the waves.  The man kept pointing in that direction.  “Don’t you see it, don’t you see it!” he cried.

I squinted as hard as I could.  The seal must be right near Charcoal!  Maybe they would play together!

“I still don’t see it!” I yelled.

“Right there, all you can see is its little black head.”

Suddenly I realized that with her ears plastered to the side of her head, Charcoal looked as sleek as a baby seal.

“That’s not a seal, mister, that’s my dog!”

“Don’t be silly, little girl.  It’s a baby seal,” the man said patronizingly.  Just then a couple ran up carrying a large pink blanket. “Guys from Marineland are on the way!”  the second man shouted.  “They said to wrap the baby seal up in a blanket until they get here!”

Oh no!  The guys from Marineland were coming!  They would take Charcoal and put her with the captive seals!  I knew how adults were.  They would never admit they were wrong.  They would just put her in a tank with the other seals and pretend she was a seal.

“Charcoal!  Charcoal!” I screamed.  “Come!  Come here!”

Charcoal heard me, turned, and began swimming to shore.

“The baby seal is coming to shore! The baby seal is coming to shore!”  The throng of excited adults and children swelled to twenty or more.  The couple with the pink blanket rushed to the waters edge and hovered, ready to pounce.

“Hurry Charcoal!  Hurry!” I shrieked desperately.

“Be careful.  Even a baby seal can bite,” a heavy-set man in a Hawaiian shirt cautioned the couple with the blanket. 

Charcoal began surfing in with the waves.  “Look how well the baby seal swims!” a mother enthused to her young son.  I began sobbing.

Charcoal washed in with the next wave.  Then she stood up on her four legs and shook off to dry.  The tension and excitement sagged out of the crowd. The couple with the blanket stood frozen with shock.  I grabbed Charcoal by her collar.  “Come on Charcoal!  Run!”

We galloped down the beach away from the disappointed crowd.  Finally we reached our family.  My father furrowed his brow at my tear-streaked face.

“What’s wrong?”

“A bunch of grown-ups thought Charcoal was a baby seal.  They were going to take her to Marineland!”

“They weren’t going to take a dog to Marineland.”  He shook his head.  Crazy kid.  But I knew what a close call it had been.

Having grown up in a culture where children were generally held in contempt and their truth ignored has made me passionate about listening for the truth in all voices, especially the disenfranchised.  Often it is the youngest person, with fewer preconceptions, who notices the obvious and states it without prettying it up.  Often it is those standing outside of society’s privilege and power, those less invested in maintaining the status quo, who see through the phony premises of that culture to a naked truth that may be unappealing.  But I also listen to the voices of those whose perceptions are usually very different from mine.  If Hitler says the truth, I want to hear it.  If the Pope says the truth, I want to hear it. The messenger doesn’t matter.  Only the truth of the message counts.

Dragonfly

When I was young, I bought a book at the Little Big Horn National Monument, site of Custer’s last stand.  The book, originally published in 1932, is called Pretty-Shield; Medicine Woman of the Crows, by Frank B.Linderman.  Linderman was a white man known to Native Americans in Montana as ‘Sign-talker’ for his knowledge of the sign languages used by the tribes indigenous to the plains; the Crow (Absarokee), Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapaho and Blackfeet nations.  He made it his project, using sign-language and Native translators, to interview some of the oldest tribes-people, to preserve their memories of their world before the whites came and destroyed an ancient way of life.  Pretty-Shield is an invaluable window into the magical mindset. 

In Pretty-Shield’s world, humans conversed with animals as a matter of course.  A mouse confides in a woman that their enemies are coming, and the entire encampment is moved to a safer place based on the mouse’s advice.  Pretty-Shield’s helpers were the ant people, who she describes as busy and industrious.  That I can understand, but when she says she named her children names she heard the ant people calling each other; “they call each other by names that are very fine”—my mind screeches to a halt.  The ants call each other by names that are very fine?  The only way a modern person will hear the ants talking to each other is if hallucinogenic substances are involved.  Now, people who talk to the ants are delusional.  Yet a mere 150 years ago, in the tribal worlds of the Americas, discussions with every sort of creature were regarded as entirely normal.

Magic was also a given; events that we would characterize as miracles were something taken as a matter of course.  One story she tells which completely knocks me out of my 21th century mindset is a tale of a young man whose totem was the dragonfly.  In Pretty-Shield’s recounting, her tribe had just moved to a new camp that featured a profusion of berry bushes along a creek. Most of the men went out to hunt for buffalo while the women erected the lodges (sometimes called tipis) where they would all stay.  A few men, called ‘wolves’ stayed posted at high points around the camp to watch for enemies.  One of the women finished putting up her lodge first and rushed to the berry bushes to begin gathering.  The other women continued erecting their lodges in a more leisurely fashion. 

Soon the woman began screaming from the berry bushes that she was being attacked by a grizzly bear.  The women called to the men guarding their camp.  The man named Crazy-brave, whose medicine was the dragonfly and who was painted to look like a dragonfly called out; “Look out for yourselves here.  I will go to the woman.  The bear will not see me.  I am the dragonfly.”  Then he began to sing his dragonfly song and walked with a big knife in his hand, into the bushes. 

 Pretty-shield, who was a child when this occurred, reports, that of course, since Crazy-brave was singing his dragonfly song, the bear could not see him, so he walked right up to the bear and stuck his knife in its throat.

It’s Pretty-shield’s nonchalance in recounting this episode that throws me.  She is not surprised or amazed that a man could impersonate a dragon-fly to the extent that he could walk right up to an enraged grizzly and stick a knife in its throat.  It is an impressive transformation, but not an astonishing one.  Everyone had animal ‘helpers’; magical powers were not confined to a shaman or priest class.  Each person went on a vision quest when they were on the cusp of adulthood; the successful completion of that quest marked their transition into an adult role.  Precognitive dreams, visions obtained while fasting, grieving, or in sweat lodges, understanding the language of animals, the river or the wind were standard, not extraordinary.

We live in a culture in which the ‘real world’ involves being shut up in an office building where the windows do not open, often many floors removed from the earth, unable to feel or smell the breeze, disconnected from all sense of rhythm or season. In such a world, ‘magical thinking’ is a term of psychological disdain for a phase that children are supposed to outgrow (long before they enter the work force).  It is important for us to acknowledge that, cross-culturally speaking, there is no actual consensus for what constitutes ‘reality’.  Scientists admit that they have no idea what 80% of our brain is for.  Witches and shamans are people who are very curious about that 80%.

The Great Depression

            Shortly before I turned fourteen, my family moved across the country from Los Angeles, California to Rochester, New York. Naturally, I was miserable. The kids in Chili, the suburb where my parents first moved, were wearing clothes that had been popular three years ago on the west coast.  I was wearing clothes they had never seen.   The kids in Manhattan Beach had talked about surfing and sailing and tans.  The first question Chili kids asked me was, “What church does your family go to?”

What church?  With the exception of a few deeply pitied Catholic kids, young people in Manhattan Beach didn’t go to church. The beach was church.  My parents were agnostic—common enough in southern California in the sixties, apparently unheard of in upstate New York.

“The kids want to know what church we go to,” I complained to my parents.

“Tell ‘em we’re Pagans honey.  Tell ‘em we worship the trees, “ my father suggested.

Somehow I did not think that would go over very well. 

Smart, skinny, flat-chested and bizarrely dressed, I assumed the role of the social outcast.  I began digging a hole in the vacant lot adjacent to our property.  No, not a grave.  A tunnel.  A catacombs winding in several different directions.  Each day after school I would change into dusty sweats and retreat to the hole.  I dug downwards with the determination of a badger, contemplating the weather in China. I dug towards the tree line with the single-minded intensity of the war prisoner pilots of The Great Escape.  Sometimes I just lay in one of my tunnels, breathing the comforting scent of damp earth.  There was a thrum below the surface of the earth just beneath what I could hear, yet could sense.  I didn’t consciously know then that by lying enfolded by the earth, I was wrapped in the earth’s grounding, soothing vibration.  I just knew that when I emerged from my underground sojourn, I felt immeasurably better. 

But soon, my undermining parents undermined my mine.

“What if it collapsed and you were buried alive?” my mother asked.

“Then it would be exactly like the rest of my life,” I snarled.

Parental wisdom prevailed, and I was forbidden any further digging.  I had to find solace at the earth’s surface.  Fortunately there was a deep woods just behind my house, so I made forays deeper and deeper into the forest after school, practicing moving, Indian-like without a sound, climbing trees to gaze into birds’ nests, or imagining myself as Maid Marion, stealthily eluding the Sheriff of Nottingham while making my way back to Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

One day, in my wanderings, I became completely turned around.  Nothing looked familiar.  I had never been in this part of the woods before.  The trees were tall and I had not even the remotest concept of where North, South, East or West might lie.  After some increasingly frantic reconnoitering it finally occurred to me to climb a tree.  Squinting up towards the leaf-dappled sunlight, I chose the largest tree and began to climb.  Finally I reached the top and looked around.

Nothing but trees stretching away in every direction.  I was stunned.  How had I walked so far?  So far that there was not a single house in any direction?  Despairing, I climbed down.  I looked around for any sign of my own tracks, a trail I might follow back, but my sneaky Indian princess style of gliding through the trees had left no sign of my passage.   I closed my eyes and took my best guess what direction home was.  I walked a dozen yards in that direction, then turned back to see if anything looked familiar.  Yes!  That bush with the yellow flowers, I’m sure I passed that.  Encouraged, I continued, turning back every so often to find another visual reminder that I had, indeed, come this way.  Occasionally I would have to travel in a circle to find anything familiar, then I would correct my course.  Within a surprisingly short time, I was at home.

That night, I shared my strange experience with my family.  My father explained that earth beneath the woods must form a giant bowl.  The descent into the bottom of this bowl had been so gradual, I had not noticed it.  He drew a diagram, showing that from the bottom of the bowl—called a depression–even when I climbed to the top of the tallest tree, I could not see out beyond the rim of the bowl.

In a depression, no matter how high you climbed you couldn’t see your way out of it.  You couldn’t see how to get home.  But by observing your surroundings carefully, you might be able to make your way out of it.  This lesson has remained with me.  I remind myself, when I am in a depression, that I will not be able to see clearly or accurately.  It will look as if I am impossibly lost.  I simply have to choose a direction and move towards it.  Sometimes home is not as far away as I think.

The Brothers

            The earth shook.  I grabbed onto a tree to steady myself.  Was it an earthquake?  It sounded like something huge had crashed to the ground up ahead. 

            Stomp!  Stomp!  Stomp!  Like huge footsteps.  Then another toppling crash vibrating the ground beneath my feet.  My heart rate accelerated with the vibration.  I was out in the woods, far past midnight, in the hills near Ukiah.  We were visiting friends who lived on a large tract of communal land in an old forest of pine and madrone.  My husband had left to walk back to our tent over an hour ago, while I stayed to talk with our friends in their cosy cottage.  So now I was alone, threading my way along a narrow trail carved on a ridge, extremely stoned on Gwydion’s sinsimilla honey, a concoction of the sinsimilla he grew cooked down and mixed with honey from his own bees’ hives.  I had been expecting that the sweet treat, spread on toast, would confer a gentle marijuana type buzz. But it was feeling more like the early stages of an acid trip.

 So I’m walking along stoned, vulnerable, and it sounds like enormous animals are battling up ahead.   What the heck could be out here in these woods making noises like that?  Bear?  Elk? If it had happened only once, I would say an old redwood had fallen.  But the shattering crunches continued to reverberate through the forest, and now I could hear muffled grunting as well. Now the sound appeared to be coming from directly below.  I stole quietly through the trees and gazed down on the scene beneath me.  There, in a large moonlit meadow, two creatures battled.  One of them appeared to be a baby gorilla.  Don’t ask how I knew it was a baby, since it was five or six stories tall.  But it was furry, innocent, yet extremely powerful and determined.  It’s opponent was the same immense size, yet even stranger; a God who seemed entirely composed of seething, flickering blue fire.

They fought fiercely, pushing, grunting, shoving.  One would topple the other, but then the fallen god would rise in fury and throw the other to the ground, causing the whole landscape to shake. All the birds and animals seemed to have fled; there was no sound but the sounds of the struggle, no movement except their movements.  I realized in a flash that the god who appeared like a baby gorilla was the god of life, remembering the Tom Robbins quote; “Life is like a baby gorilla; very friendly, just doesn’t know its own strength.”  Then I saw that the blue god battling him was the god of annihilation; energy zinged around him like molecules of nuclear energy going into fission.

            How could a baby gorilla, even one six stories tall, prevail against one who embodied the intense power of unleashed nuclear warfare?

Yet somehow he held his own; slammed to the ground, yet rising, baring his teeth in fury and charging.  I stood watching the ultimate conflict between life and death, clutching a nearby tree in anxiety.  Who would win? Life or death?  Who would win?

Sometimes the battle was fierce.  Sometimes they stood panting, regarding each other before plunging back into the fray.  At first I had hidden, fearing they would see me.  But now I knew they had eyes only for each other.  For them, nothing existed but this combat, and the fate of the world hinged on the result.

I don’t know how long I stood there, breath coming in short gasps, before it finally dawned on me.

Neither would win.

The baby gorilla and the blue god were brothers.  Their struggle was an eternal dance.  They had fought since the beginning of time and they would continue to struggle, sometimes life prevailing, sometimes death claiming victory. 

Relief flooded me.  I bowed towards the two gods who battled on, oblivious to my presence, and walked peacefully back to our tent.  I lay down beside Elie and said, “I just saw the god of life and the god of death battling in the meadow.  I was scared that death would destroy life, but now I know that they’ll battle forever and neither of them will ever win over the other.”

Elie sighed.  “You’re stoned, babe.”

“I know,” I smiled into the darkness, “but it’s still true.”

Fire Walk

Water is my element.  In spite of having nearly drowned on several occasions, when I slide into the water I relax into that silky embrace, that buoyancy, trusting that I am safe there.  Perhaps my direct ancestors were some of the last to haul themselves onto dry land in a quest for evolution. As a child, of all the fairy tales I read again and again, the story of The Little Mermaid enchanted me the most.  Scuba diving is my favorite form of meditation, with snorkeling following as a close second. 

            Fire is another matter.  Though happily swimming like a dolphin in the caldera of sexual passion, literal, physical fire had always frightened me.  I had memories of being burned as a Witch in my last life.  As a Witch in this life, I knew it was vital to establish a good relationship with each of the four elements; air, fire, water and earth.  But I didn’t trust fire. 

            Probably because of my need to re-establish trust with the fire element, I gave birth to a son who had six planets in fire; a stellium in Sagittarius and a moon in Leo.  This was a kid who spent long hours gazing into our hearth fire without a shudder of doubt or a flicker of unease.  Once, when he was five, he said to me, “Have you ever noticed that whenever fire shifts, it benefits? It never smothers itself.  It always changes for the better.”

            No, I had never noticed this.  When I looked in the fire it appeared to be dancing with ruthless passion.  I heard screams and saw flesh blackening like wood.  Banishing those images, I started watching the fire with him and saw that he was right. The spirit of the flames, questing for oxygen and new fuel, did indeed seem to shift to create more energy for itself. 

            But my unease with fire remained.  I could accept its beauty while gazing into the single flame of a candle.  But in a larger format, whether hearthfire or campfire held by a ring of stones, I never trusted its containment. Scared by little, I was one of those people who routinely drove miles back to the house to make sure I had not left the oven on.

            As the first year-long Apprenticeship program I taught came to a close, one of my students, who taught fire-walking, offered to include a fire-walk for the group initiation.  I was not wild about the idea, but it ‘caught fire’ with all of my students, who clamored for it.  I agreed, against my better judgment.

            Before the fire walk, I looked at all my students’ faces.  They were both excited and afraid, but all my maternal instincts could focus on was their fear.  “If anyone has to get burned, let it be me,” I prayed.  Then, thinking that since I was the teacher, I should go first, I hopped onto the glowing coals.

            I knew I was burned after only a couple of steps and staggered awkwardly off.

My student, who was leading the exercise, urged the others to keep drumming and allow themselves to slip into trance. Breathing through the pain, I watched as my students slipped into an altered state.  One by one they danced across the coals. None of them were hurt.

            The next year, one of my male students was also a certified fire walk instructor.  Again the offer was made, and the challenge accepted.  I told my students up front that this year I would not walk the coals, but being an adventurous group, they still wanted to try it.  We hauled the wood down a steep ravine to the beach and danced and chanted for hours.  I became very altered, watching their faces change into people I had known in other lives.  Finally our guide for the fire walk said that the coals were ready.  I took my position drumming, having already stated my intention to act as support only.  I detached completely, not projecting my fears about my students’ well-being or taking any responsibility for them.  As they walked across the pulsing coals I drummed ecstatically, feeling the power of the fire enter my drum.  Suddenly, without premeditation, the fire called to me and I said yes.  I danced to the throb of the drums and reached the far edge unscathed. 

            Sadly, my students that year did not fare so well.  All of them were burned, one of them quite badly.  When I asked, aghast, why she had walked the coals three times if she knew she was burnt the first time, she said she ‘wanted to get it right.’

            You can’t dance with fire and stay in your head.  The fire of sexual passion is the same.  You can’t stay in your ‘right mind’ and surrender to passion.  The two activities are simply incompatible.  I remembered a time when I had been making love with my husband and a couple who were our close friends in the schoolbus they had painted scarlet and turned into a comfortable traveling home.  Coming down off the top of a blazing orgasm, I realized that I had one foot braced against the pot-bellied wood-burning stove near the bed.  The stove that was glowing with heat.  I pulled my foot away quickly.  One of my friends leapt up to get the aloe vera.  I waited for the pain to start, for the blisters to form.  But nothing happened.  Though my foot had been pressed against a red-hot stove for more than a minute, it was untouched.  I had been matching the intensity of the fire with my own heat; in that state of oneness with it I couldn’t be harmed. 

            Though still cautious and respectful of fire, I no longer fear it.  Fire is the master of teaching emotional presence. While the consequences of approaching fire incorrectly are more blatant, it is no different from the rest of nature, no different from the unknowable force we call spirit.  When we stay in our heads, ignoring our feelings and trying to control others or control our own experience, we lose the opportunity to merge with forces greater than ourselves, and we get hurt.   When we surrender, we crack open the door to heaven.

Jaws

I visited Hawaii for the first time in 1982.  Since then I have fallen more and more deeply in love with the land and sea of that place, to the point where I have considered relocating from California to Hawaii.  Though I had little money, I decided to look for a small property in Hawaii, hoping it would make it more possible for me to spend increasing amounts of time there. 

            Several years ago I walked out to the lava flow to pray to be allowed to steward and protect and become part of this land that the volcano Goddess Pele had created.  As I walked towards the slowly oozing lava, I found some strands of volcanic glass known as ‘Pele’s hair’.  The thin strands of glass are golden.  I pulled a few of my hairs out.  They matched the strands of Pele’s hair perfectly.  I made an offering of her ‘hair’ and mine, laying it in the path of the slow moving lava and asked her permission to dwell on her land.  Threading my way back over the rough, shattered terrain of old lava flow, I tripped and fell, cutting my knee.  Another hiker rushed towards me, asking if I was all right.  I assured her that I was.  The sight of my blood glistening in the jet black swirl of lava gave me no pangs of alarm.  Once the hiker had gone, I whispered, “Accept my blood, Pele. I am one with this land.”

            I bid on a small house I fell in love with that trip, but the owner decided not to sell.  My next trip to Hawaii was only for ten days, so I did not plan to look for a place.  But I had lunch in Hilo with a former student who happens to be a realtor, and decided to accompany her to check out a couple of condos she would soon be showing.  One of them, while a wreck inside, had a splendid view of a sea lagoon that captured my heart.  While I wanted land, not a condo, the price was right.  I put in an offer and drove to Kona, on the other side of the island, wondering if anything would come of it.

            Two days later I was snorkeling at a bay known to locals as ‘Two-step’, my favorite place to snorkel on the west side of the Big Island.  I was hovering over an enormous sea turtle who was sitting on the sandy bottom perhaps a dozen feet below.  The water was crystalline, and I could see him perfectly.  Then something moved between us.  It was a white-tipped shark, about seven feet long, six to eight feet beneath me.  It moved very slowly, as if checking me out.  I held still, suspended in the water above.  It’s head was enormous, perhaps three feet across, and I knew that meant his mouth was correspondingly large.  White tips rarely attack humans, I said reassuringly to myself.   But when they do, its always from below, another part of my mind warned. The shark moved very slowly, with great deliberation.  I had always thought they were stiff, but he was as fluid and graceful as a tiger, muscles rippling beautifully—but ominously– beneath his skin.  I began to formulate a plan.  If the shark came up towards my front, I would try to go immediately for his eyes.  If it came towards my legs I would kick at its nose.  I was not that far from land, and there were numerous people there, but I doubted anyone would come to the aid of a stranger being attacked by a shark. I gave a prayer of thanks that my son was not with me on this trip, that I had no one to worry about but myself.

            Slowly the shark passed.  I continued to watch as it sauntered –as much as any creature moving through water can saunter—coolly through a tidal path carved through the coral.  The fish had all disappeared.  The sea turtle turned its head with almost imperceptible slowness, watching the predator depart.  When I could no longer see the shark, I turned and swam a few strokes splashlessly towards shore, then turned to scan through the water.  I repeated this series of movements again and again for the insanely long trip back to shore.

            That night a friend of mine who is almost pure Hawaiian came to visit.  He grew excited when I told him of my encounter with the shark.  Willy Iaukea is descended from an elite group of warriors and assassins, the Hawaiian equivalent of the Ninja. He explained that his family were members of the shark clan, and that sharks were seen as the protectors of the island.  “It is the sharks who decide who can live here and who cannot,” he declared. “The shark people came and checked you out.  They think you are o.k., you are worthy.  You can live here.  And I am shark clan, and I also welcome you to live here.  You are going to get that place!”

            The next day I heard that my offer had been accepted and escrow was flowing smoothly.  I bought the condo and it has given me great joy.  And now the memory of that shark, his exquisite grace, his fearful symmetry, gives me great joy as well.  To encounter a wild creature in its territory, and on its terms, is always a gift.  When it is a creature whose power is equal or greater than your own, the gift is multiplied.  The Big Island of Hawaii has more power, more mana, than any other place I have visited. The earth itself is constantly in upheaval, in flux.  Creation is raw, flowing and open.  The Goddess of the volcano makes the land, and she can reclaim it at any time.  Living there is a privilege, made all the sweeter by knowing it can be revoked at any time. The Big Island reminds you, constantly, to appreciate the present, to know that not even the earth is stable and solid beneath your feet.  It is exciting, unnerving, thrilling and disturbing in equal measure.  Pele reminds me that I do not ‘own’ anything, to take nothing for granted.  My time there always deepens my connection and commitment to magic.