They say that living beside running water, brings on powerful and sometimes dangerous dreams. This was my dreamscape. My childhood fantasy, after seeing the film Ring of Bright Water, was to be a writer and live in a cottage by the sea with otters nearby. In the summer of 2002, I was visiting friends in the Missouri Ozarks after a year of being a water gypsy. I had been wandering from watering hole to watering hole, with my then-husband, looking for somewhere to settle. For four days, staying in our friends' dome-house deep in trees, I experienced the most spectacular thunder-and-lightening storms. When the rain stopped, I reluctantly agreed to look at property in the unimagined domain of heartland America.
That was how I came to lose my heart and savings to several beautiful acres of land along about a half mile of Spring Creek in Douglas (colloquially known as Booger) County. It wasn't just the river otters and the writing room at the back of the perfect log cabin that sold it to me. It was a certain and unnervingly deep sense of calling. On the stormy nights of that first summer, local histories had me tossing and turning as I read of deluges that swept away small-holdings and grist mills along the bottoms of war-ravished valleys. The sturdy log cabin was perched right over the widening creek. Finding the remains of a grist mill, unearthed by the past spring's flood waters, I did wonder if we courted imminent disaster.
The quiet valley bottom was once a town for natives and then pioneers but, until that home was built, it belonged again to the wild creatures. Ozark Mountains took shape three billion years ago when much of the country was covered by water; it was the first part of the continent to emerge from the sea and the land seemed ancient. Ozarkians' reply to those who belittle their mountains is that 'our hills ain't high but our valleys sure are deep'. My adopted valley had a depth and wisdom that I soon learned to dream with. Below its surface, hidden streams had carved secret labyrinths in the porous limestone. Especially when it rained, water poured out of the hillsides like floods of ancient tears.
Living beside Spring Creek, I entered a new flow, a powerful and unexpected connection with the land. Not long after arrival, I was invited to a sweat lodge ceremony - a Native American ritual for purification through fire and water. It was there that I had an encounter with big cat medicine that seemed to be an initiation into wildness. Walking to the leader's house in the dark and alone, I became aware of a large animal following comfortably behind me. Perhaps it was Sparky their dog but glancing back twice I could not see him. Then I looked down and saw with spirit-eyes the broad, dark head of a female cat: she seemed to be my guardian, my connection with the old wilderness of the region. A real cat companion, named Pink for her spirited femininity, soon came into my life. She'd been abandoned to certain death when I found her under an oak tree at nearby little Big Spring. It was a mossy spot where children attending the old schoolhouse (since destroyed) had once kept their lunchboxes cool in spring waters. Being Pink's guardian gave expression to a maternal broodiness growing in me, her playful innocence made me sing. I spent hours under trees coaxing her down, catching her as she launched her trusting self into my arms. Watching her learn about, and long for, the wild deepened my own experience of it.
She'd walk the trails with me and spend hours spellbound by the hunt for wood-mice. There are many feral cats so I had her spayed. How grim I felt when she came home with shaved fur around her yellowed scar, and lay pained for a week. Before long Pink was out enjoying the land with me again, though tentative in her ermine whiteness. It turned out that Spring Creek made me so happy that I got pregnant. Until I became fearful of the implications of bringing a child into a turbulent marriage, I was peaceful and in awe of nature expressing itself in me. I gave up my child. I won't forget that wintry dawn: it was raining but not enough to stop me and my cat from stepping out on the deck to smell the air. (See also Eagle's wings (poem by Sulis) )
How much fresher it was than the air in Granite City miles away north, across the Mississippi River, where I allowed the termination of new life. As we left the safety of our silent valley, I was treated to a frosted landscape of incredible brittle delicacy. It was just how I felt. Then a great bald eagle flew down in front of the truck and slowed our passage up a winding hill. Not long after the last time that had happened, driving through another winter, we had crashed. Rationality wasn't in any of the sadness that lingered with the memory of the loss of my only child, but wildness was. Poverty and death are fearful things to tamed humans yet wild creatures seem not afraid of either.
When you live close to nature, your sensory perceptions intensify. That same winter, I had an exciting daydream of going down a deep crack where the creek flowed in front of the house. It seemed like the entrance to an underworld that I could not yet reach. The circle of land that called me to heal by building a rock labyrinth on a flat area beside the creek was connected with a deep longing. A few summers later, I buried my beloved Pink beside that spiraling symbol, along with the memory of the lost child. I still hoped that the same land that had brought me back to my own wildness would be my healing.
Just over a month before Pink died, I had a warning dream. In it I saw a smallish beautiful wild cat, with cream and flecked fur in very good condition, maybe a bobcat or young cougar, behaving anxiously beside a pond. When I looked closer I saw another cat under the water that appeared to be drowning and emaciated. The healthy animal was obviously attempting and intending to rescue the other, though this seemed near impossible. Perhaps the dream was for Pink. She died from feline infectious peritonitis, otherwise known as 'wet' disease because it sometimes involves accumulation of fluid on the abdomen and lungs. Perhaps it was also a dream for my own growing distress.
Death hearkens back to the chaos of creation: it can be a rite of passage eased by water. The night Pink began to leave me, she wanted to be outside in the leaves breathing the dark air and the earth smells, hearing the creek's lament. We sat with her protectively, aware that the cycles of life and death were spinning with irrefutable force around us. Her grave was marked by a large flat stone imprinted with ancient waves, two P-shaped stones and a fossilized spiral shell, all from the gravel bar on that land. Oak planks dredged up from the old ford in the creek separated the spot from the woodland. It seemed to me to be a boat to help her travel to the next world and to remind me that I could go with her in spirit at least.
Upstream they were mining for high-quality gravel in open pits that soon changed the course of the creek and regularly turned the pristine water into a grey or brown flow. Missouri is a notoriously rocky place - there was a beachful of astonishingly varied and ancient river stones on that land. Turning grandfather rocks into gravel seemed tragic. I wanted to honor the rocks by creating a forty-foot diameter labyrinth on a perfectly flat circle of lawn overlooking the creek. It was a laborious creative project and the land called me to it. It became and continued to be a meditation in turning up to the task without fail. The reward was an unfolding relationship with the land and with each mysterious rock.
Some days while making my sacred space, among the trills of birds celebrating spring and the melody of the nearby creek riffle, I thought I heard children singing out of the past. Each trip to the beach required me to overcome a fear of snakes, taking the one who lay across my path one morning as more a requirement of respect than a warning to keep out. I walked the labyrinth to commune with myself and the outdoors. Pink used to walk it too, picking her way along the stones rather than the grass path. Mushrooms, latent in the soil, pushed up on the west side - bringing an underworld of nature spirits to the surface.
I created a full-moon labyrinth ceremony to bless the waters with a simple prayer: guide me through the mists that separate, reveal to me the land within the land, free the waters of the sacred springs, that I may wet my wisdom. I'd also wet my wisdom in a 'family' sweat lodge during the cool months. A spot at the end of a logging track, tucked into a curve of rock and sheltered by a dogwood tree, seemed just right for a lodge. Modern Native Americans sometimes feel affronted by the adoption of the sacred inipi ritual outside tradition but when a snapper turtle chose the freshly cleared earth between fire pit and alter mound to lay her eggs, I felt reassured.
The sweat lodge or inipi signifies Mother Earth and so does the Turtle. Pink sat on a vantage rock watching us clear the path, build a fire around the rocks, and cover the bones of the first lodge with blankets from the thrift shop. Sitting on the earth in the deep darkness of that dome, with herbs sparking on the hot rocks and steam rising from the water poured upon them, was an earthy and spiritual experience. I've found it hard to believe that the tribes who began that ritual would deny it to anyone who wants to listen to the dreams of the land. For me, the sweat lodge has been a place to connect with the earth, to commune with the spirits of my dearly departed, and to hear the voices of the ancestors who guard the land.
For a while, those ancestors honored me with stewardship of my creek-side home, and every loss seemed a test of my fitness for that task. I like to remember Pink as she was one Sunday morning early, floating with us down the creek in the john boat. Suddenly we came upon the otters playing and fishing, totally oblivious of our presence. They made me think of the legendary sealwomen at play on the rocks, risking their pelts to the needy love of a fisherman. I vowed then to safeguard them and their watery home. Each time I walked the water-side labyrinth watched over by the spirit of Pink, I renewed that vow. But the dramatic day came when I left that land and broke the vows I had made to myself.
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The Ring of Bright Water may have been a fable I had absorbed into my psyche as a child and was unconsciously seeking to reveal to myself through my own lived life. I fell for that land on Spring Creek like a lover falls for the most unlikely of partners, and that love brought me many harsh life lessons against a backdrop of pure soul joy. In another post, using my own experience with this film (based on an autobiographical novel by Gavin Maxwell) as an example, I'll explore how working with favorite and formative stories like these - turning them into personal myths - can lend richness to our understanding of the gifts and losses of our lives.
