Diving Deeper

An outlaw's treasure

 
Many of the writings you'll find in this blog Diving Deeper come out of crises points in my life.  Writing has shown me that these can be transmuted into 'opportunities disguised as loss'.  This is the resolution I am often seeking, and I hope my sharing will inspire the same in you.

Writings done immediately after an event and those done months or years later will differ - the first are redolent with sharp pain or murky with the fog of confusion, while the second will have either the cool calm of reflection or the dark wound of bitterness.  In a way, it is all the 'truth'.

Recently, I came across a delightful book from the 70s by  Sam Keen and Anne Valley Fox called Telling Your Story :  A Guide to Who You Are and Who You Can Be.  The book's dedication reads: 'To the outlaws among us who are living their own stories'. 

I rather like the idea of being an outlaw.  Robin Hood the quintessential outlaw and re-distributor of treasures, hid out in Sherwood Forest near Nottingham in England.  I have been on retreat in a Greenwood Forest deep in the Missouri Ozarks.  This blog is my way of sharing the booty.

Here is an extract from 'Telling Your Story' about crisis and the hero's journey:

The practice of ritualizing the standard divisions between the stages of life reflects an ancient wisdom about the care and management of crisis and trauma.... If crisis is taken as a sign of sickness or disintegration the transitions will be accompanied by anxiety, loneliness, and shame.  If they are seen as signs of growth they may be experienced with excitement and pride....Perhaps the clearest indication of the dignity pre-modern societies afforded the transition crises is in the widespread tales of the journey of the hero....The story is told in many idioms but always the hero forsakes comfort, security, and certainty and plunges into the dark habitation of the powers of evil.  While in the underworld he fights with a demon or devil, and is often crucified.  But eventually he rises from the dead and returns to the ordinary world with enlightenment and power.  In the hero legends the promise is clear: any person who dares the radical descent into the chaos that lies beneath the veneer of personality and civilization has  chance of returning with a whole soul.

[From Telling Your Story by Sam Keen and Anne Valley Fox, 1973, Signet Books, p. 86-87.]

In the outline description of my first attempt at new autobiography (the novel-memoir), I wrote 'Leo's journey unfolds like that of a befuddled Parsival on a search for the unspecified Grail'.   Clearly, I saw my story as a hero's journey.  You can read more about that elsewhere on this site.

Meanwhile, here is an example of part of the exercise which follows the above paragraph from 'Telling Your Story'.  I encourage you to think of trying it out.

After you have done an initial outline of your autobiography put it aside and do another that uses entirely different events, key persons, and time scales. Turn your story inside out; try a new way of punctuating your time.  If your life story has the feel of a tragedy flip it over and make it a comedy; if it sounds like a romance change the tone slightly so that it is ironic; if it has a pathetic ring turn it into a hero tale.

I did something like this quite naturally when I was trying to process a dramatic and traumatic event in my own life.  The first person who read it, commented that I had a wry sense of humor that he assumed was 'English' (since I am English).  Perhaps I do or perhaps it was just a survival tactic.

Now, more than a year later, maybe I have come to a place in my understanding where I could write the same story from the points of view of the other participants.  If my 'imagination' can acheive sufficient personal distancing and compassion then there may be great healing in this exercise.

Read 'An Escape' here.  Look out for it's alternative versions in future blogs.

A painter of still lifes?

 

Some days I can hardly wait to live my life (and record my thoughts about it), other days it feels like I am pushing through tick-and-chigger infested undergrowth or salt-bathing the resulting wounds and welts from that (summer life in an Ozark forest!).  Life rarely feels still to me though.

Comparing living to painting as the writer quoted below does is an interesting exercise. 'If your life were a painting, what kind of painting would it be?'  In attempts to actually paint, I've noticed that I favor 'blown-up details'.  Danny Kaye is quoted as saying: 'Life is like a great big canvas; throw all the paint on it you can.'

The question of truth and the ethics of memoir was discussed interestingly and at length by Carol Spindel  in a article entitled 'When ambiguity becomes deception' in The Writer's Chronicle, December 2007, p. 19-24.  Here are some extracts from that article:

As much as I value truth, I also value a good story, and good stories are often made better by a thimbleful of embroidery, a sprinkle of exaggeration, and a trainload of boxcar-sized omissions.  In order to articulate an ethics of memoir, we have to bring the compact between memoir writer and memoir reader into the light of day.

...

I do not change the order of events or compress characters in my own nonfiction writing ... I want to be a painter of still lifes.  And yet the still life paintings I most admire are cubist, with their own particular and exaggerated way of seeing.  Psychology tells us that our beliefs and perceptions about what happened may be more important than what actually happened and I would not want to exclude this mythology from the literary account of a life.

... memoir as it is presently evolving, has a particularly fluid and ambiguous compact with it's readers.

Regards ethical questions and audacious storytelling, one of the best books I have read in recentl years is Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, 2003.  It is specifically labeled 'A Novel' but the author's biography on the back cover gives the reader cause to speculate about that.

Sentenced to nineteen years in prison for a series of armed robberies, he escaped and spent ten of his fugitive years in Bombay - where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gun runner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia.

Despite this unnerving account, I (like many, many others) found the story to be both thrilling and touching.  A film starring Jonny Depp (one of my favorite actors) and directed by Mira Nair is currently in preproduction (for 2009).

Gregory David Roberts now lives in Bombay and is very active in support of charitable causes as well as sharing his writing skills.  His website was quiet for a few years but he began posting again in May 2008 and it's well worth a visit. 

He notes there:  'I’ll say this now for the record ... all the characters in my novel are created characters, fictions, invented by me, and none of them resemble living persons in any way.'  Apparently, he's been deluged with letters from people who feel deep empathy with the story and have found much healing in it.

'It’s a funny thing, how people react to the “discovery” that Karla and Prabaker, Abdullah and Khaderbhai, Didier and Khaled Ansari and all the others are created characters, and not real beings....[They are] stricken with disappointment...'

'I understand the thoughts and emotions involved. The novel is so closely linked to the real experiences of my life that people read the book as autobiography, rather than as the novel that it is. The rule of thumb for Shantaram, and for the sequel, which I’m completing now in these months, is that the experiences are all real, taken from my own life and direct personal experience, but the characters and the dialogue and the narrative structure are all creations. I gotta tell ya, dear Friends and New Visitors, that it’s a strange thing, a strange, double-edged sword of a thing to have readers utterly convinced and committed by your creative art, and then disappointed by the same creativity at the same time. I hope, if readers pick up and read the sequel to Shantaram, that they’ll find all the new characters left standing at the end of Shantaram just as fresh and alive in the sequel, and in the company of a whole new set of characters to know, and love, and revile, as the case may be.'

An aphorism I came across recently really seems to apply here:  Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation.  That's something I hope eventually to get to in my own living-writing - neither explaining nor apologizing but just telling it like it is for me.

Along the same lines is another aphorism:  Never let someone else's opinion of you become your reality.  And one more favorite of mine:  If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning  (attributed anonymous I beleive).

Back to pondering the question of what kind of painting my life would be, if I painted it.  To be honest, I think the best thing to do here is get out the paints or the scissors (for collage) and see what images come through or appeal.  I'll be sure to share the results with you here.

 

Writing spirit and finding water

'We should write because it is human nature to write', says Julia Cameron in her friendly and encouraging book The Right to Write:  An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life.  I've always loved words and one of my childhood wishes was to 'be a writer' but I've struggled with my right to that wish.

Back in 2002, I wrote the following regards my 'writing spirit'.  I was in love and water was the medium and mediator for that love.  I can't agree now that there 'is no gushing or turmoil' in my writing but I'm working on that!

At school I won prizes for my stories and longed to be an artist.  I obsessed for weeks on words like 'spin' and 'queen' for their esthetics.  My family called me a 'dreamboat' and counseled that a sensible education should precede those dreams.  So, training to be a scientist, I found relief in reading the metaphysical poets - and felt guilty.  In my career as an editor, my forte was balancing accuracy with poetic license.  Publishers liked my work but pompous authors sometimes got miffed.  Writing copious letters to my much-loved family, I sometimes felt ashamed of the emotion that colored my expression.  No-one ever wrote back like that.  I was always a little shy about saying what I thought of others; and I thought a lot, being an intuitive type.  People astonished me and I wanted to know more.

Eventually, I stopped doing science, stopped editing other people's writings, started just being me.  It took about five years to relax those habits and start dreaming again.  Writing begins when I'm walking or floating in warm-water.  A phrase comes that is beautiful and I'm in the flow again.  It's a delicate place of patience and persistence.  I'm watching the bubbles of a deep life force rising to the surface.  Whatever the subject, the insight is magical and unpredictable.  Now I can see that the apparent 'limitations' of my development have served me well.  There is no gushing or turmoil in these words but rather clarity, like a reflection on still water.  I am both writer and writ on - science meets spirit.

You'll find in my three weblogs a mixture of all sorts of examples of my writings from concerns about gravel mining in creeks, to critiques of green-washing in the spa industry, to unorthodox research on the effects of water therapy, to very personal short stories and poems.  All linked together one way or another by Water.

Water is the element of personal discovery.  Water sweeps us out from inside ourselves.  It forces us to face our personal realities, to reveal our inner realms of being, if only to ourselves.  Water is the element of naked truth.  And many more associations can be made and will be made.  Your own?

PS In researching links for this post I discovered another book by Julia: Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance!  It is now top of my Wish List and I hope to review it for you here in the new year. 

For the Watery Soul

Last year, while visiting Santa Fe, and browsing in the famed book shop The Ark, my partner, Joe,  handed me a book by Martin Prechtel who had once done a shamanic ceremony for him when he lived in Santa Fe.  The dedication 'For the Watery Soul' immediately attracted me. 

The book itself took my soul by storm and I plan to read it once a year around the time of my birthday (July 14).

On the back cover it says:  'Prechtel revives a ... style of learning, which calls for uncovering five additional layers of the story and diving with the reader deep into it's aboriginal richness, to bring to the surface all that is poignantly relevant to the reader's life and the present situation in the world.'

I'm full of admiration for what he has achieved here.  The drawings throughout are Prechtel's own and they are astounding.

It's definitely a book to read aloud. Perhaps one I can suggest to the local community radio where I have yet to volunteer as a storyteller.  I've always enjoyed reading aloud or being read to.  I have a special family memory of my father reading On Watership Down to us all while we toured New Zealand on holiday. 

In The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun:  A Mayan tale of ecstasy, time, and finding one's true form, Martin writes:

To me these Mayan stories are like water.  To the Tzutujil there is only one water which rushes, puddles or is captured in a multitude of diverse forms like plant leaves, hot springs, rivers, lakes, ponds, ice, tears and streams, and like the amniotic fluid at our births, all this water is trying to get back home to the original mother of life, the Great Grandmother Ocean, the great dream pool.

Like water then, there are many, many forms of stories, more than anyone of us could ever know, but like the rivers and tears, each story contains the exact same storywater as the original "Big Story".

From Martin Prechtel, The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun, 2005, North Atlantic Books, p. 4-5.

I had planned to be in Chichen Itza (close to many Mayan sites) for my birthday but at the last minute decided it was too extravagant for my current circumstances.  I wonder?  Time to dive back into life?

See also this post on my blog Vision Spa Retreat referencing this book.


Thomas Berry, the beloved cultural historian who died last month aged 94 years, also stressed the value of story when he wrote:

It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it is no longer effective. Our challenge is to create a new sense of what it means to be human.

Martin Prechtel has written one such story for me.

The Wood between Worlds: C.S. Lewis

When my new friend Steve M. gifted me two children's books (the first in the seven book Narnia Chronicles series by C.S. Lewis)  for my fiftieth birthday, I believe he knew what I'd discover.  But Steve was suitably mysterious about it.  We met only once about two years ago when I gave him an aquatic bodywork session.

Steve insisted that I read the first book first, The Magician's Nephew.  Apparently, this was the most challenging Narnia novel for Lewis to write.  The other six books were written quickly between 1948 and 1953 but this one occupied him over six years between 1949 and 1954.  It was quite autobiographical.

C.S. Lewis (known as Jack) died just before he turned 65 on 22 November 1963 - the same day as Aldous Huxley died and John F. Kennedy was assassinated.  This constellation of deaths intrigues me - a writer on spirituality, an explorer of altered states, a much-loved leader - all walkers between worlds.

One of the things I appreciate about my long-distance friendship with Steve, is that he brings me back to my English roots.  It's something that I've persistently denied in my wanderlust and my soul searching.  Steve's gift reminded me of another way in which I sought out those roots.

I attempted it through my own unfinished novel - begun and ceased (50 pages later) in 2002.  It is a children's story also, and an autobiographical mythopoetic spiritual journey.  It explores altered states, cultural divides, paradise lost, and my own yearning for belonging and for spirit.

The awareness of something more mysterious and even numinous in my life began when I jumped into a warm water pool - rather like C.S. Lewis's children do. I too discovered the 'Wood between the Worlds'  and had some troubling adventures of my own.  But I knew nothing of such connections until Steve's gift arrived.

Making connections is one of the delights in my life, something that always restores my hope and imagination.  The book Steve loves and shared with me has given my own creative dreams a new lease of life.  Perhaps I will start writing my story again and letting it take shape in reality as it did before.

Last time though, my personal reality turned into a kind of Charn (see later) when, like Digory I rang the bell that taunted me:

Make your choice, adventurous Stranger;
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, til it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.

I believe that I have been lucky enough to land again in the Wood between Worlds.  I've had to give up the apple of my eye (some deeply held personal desires) and go on a mission of sorts.  There is a lot more for me to explore in C.S. Lewis's book and the others that follow in this series.  Steve seems to have divined that. 

Thank you Steve.

The following precis of The Magician's Nephew from Wikipedia is as excellent as any I could come up with, so here it is:

Dreaming up the land

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. 

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.

....................................................................................................................................................

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 the next 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.

White Eagle frees the waters

 

I met Chief White Eagle in December 2003 while visiting Hot Springs, Arkansas, apparently to buy some furniture for a small spa retreat I owned at that time in  Missouri. I had been in the Ozark bioregion that spans both states for eighteen months at that time. The ancient landscape enchanted me; yet the violence of the pioneering days and the Civil War was evident everywhere.  A crystal clear tributary of the North Fork of the White River, Spring Creek, ran through the land I settled on and continued on down into Arkansas.  The region boasts one of the largest concentrations of springs in the world.  There are no hot springs in Missouri but there is one in Arkansas, a sacred site to indigenous peoples.

'In a place like no other on earth was a Valley of the Rainbows.  The healing waters, crystal stones, abundance of food and herbal medicines were available to all that needed them.  The elders foretold of a time when these springs would be controlled so they could not flow, their vapors could no longer be seen.  War, greed and power would replace peace.  A white eagle would be sent to build a nest at the foot of the mountain giving birth to a new time when the waters would flow freely.' 

This legend about Hot Springs  was being brought to life by Chief White Eagle of the Neches Cherokee Nation.  He had made it his mission to establish a welcoming center for all peoples who sought peace and harmony there.  After its heyday as a spa resort in the late 1800s, the historic town faded; its waters were captured below its streets and its springs were capped.  The water resources became the property of the Federal Government, their use constricted by the usual bureaucracy.  Although you could drink the waters from special fountains around the town and bathe in them in some of the grander hotels or at a rather rundown health spa (a new one has been established since), their healing power was no longer free flowing. 

The Chief's mission was to develop his Cherokee Longhouse as a place where all people, thoughts, ideas, and cultures could come together. No matter what our beliefs and where we come from, he said, we are all on this earth to love and respect each other and our natural resources.   His center was in a prime location across from the Convention Center, one block from main street.  This had led to some friction with city developers who'd rather see a Starbucks on the site. The center aimed to offer native ceremonies and healing practices, along with classes and demonstrations in silver smithing, flintknapping, and use of herbs.

The Longhouse building was in process of renovation and it looked like they had run out of funds. The dusty window display had attracted me but it was closed on a previous visit.  This time, the wizened old cowboy looking after the shop did his best to make us feel welcome and we hung around until the Chief appeared. Despite obvious tiredness and many hidden problems, he invited us to share a friendship pipe with him and to receive a special crystal healing.  He said they had encountered some difficulties regards support from the community.  Then he showed me a small grotto of natural rock and crystal in the basement of the tribal center where he was beginning to dig through to the river under main street, to free the waters. 

I didn't like to ask him what he would do if and when the waters rushed through.  Progress seemed slow and the goal unlikely but I appreciated his passionate mission.  While standing in the spiraling stairway that led down into the ground, I experienced a moment of deja vu with Chief White Eagle.  My ancestors for sure came from Scotland he said and I agreed, though I do not know this to be so.   White Eagle said he wanted to bestow me with the name Kelly Rose.  If he was a snake-oil salesman, he was a likable one.  We contributed to his rent due that day and enjoyed a hot tub soak in eucalyptus by way of return.  I regret that I've not yet gone back to see how he got on.

Soon after, while researching this encounter, I came across the history of Chief Bowles and began to follow some intriguing connections.  My English mother's maiden name is Bowles.  The Cherokee Chief was born in North Carolina in the year 1756, the son of a Scotch-Irish trader by the name of Bowles and a Cherokee mother. He was described as a magnificent man with English features; light eyes, red hair, and somewhat freckled. The Bowl was thirty-two, when he became Chief of the town Running Water in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He and his people later moved to the valley of St Francis in southeast Missouri. In 1811 there was a violent earthquake which they took as a sign that Great Spirit was warning them to move to Arkansas.

Around 1820, Chief Bowles moved to Texas.  The twelve associated native tribes there had been promised a million acres by then Texas President Sam Houston. Succeeding President Lamar wished to reclaim this land and a battle ensued between the Texas Cavalry and Cherokees. On July 16 1839 Chief Bowles signaled retreat. Wounded in the leg, he started to walk from the battle field, but was shot in the back. The old chief sat facing the company of militia and the captain placed a pistol to his head and killed him. The Chief's body was left where it lay, unburied.  Chief Sequoyah led the survivors to San Fernando, Mexico where they remained for a century.

In 1967, hurricane Beulah changed the the course of the Rio Grande river, creating a 200 acre island in the middle of the river. The United States said the land belonged to Mexico and the Mexican government sold it to Chief Little Bird on Shoulder, a direct descendant of Chief Bowles.  Little Bird on Shoulder established the Cherokee Nation-Neches Tribal Headquarters there on Los Indios island. Chief White Eagle was designated to open tribal centers in the United States beginning in Hot Springs, Arkansas.   For seven years before I met him, the Chief had been attempting to establish  that building in downtown Hot Springs National Park to be used as a cultural and trade center.

My own journeys through Texas, Missouri (where I had chosen to settle), and Arkansas (which had magic for me), began to take on a strange significance.  I wondered if the lingering connection I had had with Scotland since I was a student at Edinburgh and the strange rootlessness I felt until I arrived in Spring Creek valley deep in the Ozarks, were expressive of my ancestral legacy.  Perhaps my ex-husband's Choctaw heritage (this tribe was among the associated twelve in Texas) was linked into this too; and we were playing out those histories of peace and war.  A few years later, I dreamt about the death of a red-bearded man who has associations for me with Chief Bowles.

'Chief White Eagle said that Hot Springs is one of the most sacred places on earth. Indigenous people referred to it as 'The Valley of the Vapors.' There are 52 hot springs with 52 different temperatures with 52 different algae creating 52 colors of the water which correspond to the 52 systems in the body. Each spring heals a different system. He said before the white man that Native people came from as far away as the Mayans all the way to Alaska to bath in the springs. There was one agreement among all the tribes:  no weapons, tribal animosity or bad vibes allowed in the Valley of the Vapors...' [from the travel diary of a peace group from Jamaica that happened upon the Longhouse the same year that I did].

I do not know where this story will take me next, since like the tribes I feel I have lost my roots once more. I do feel that I have been called to the watery but hidden place that is the Ozarks to explore the magic and mystery of water as healer and creative force, and to do what I can to inspire recognition of its value.  The Ozark bioregion formed 3 billion years ago when much of the land was covered by water - it has an old wisdom about it.  Said Chief White Eagle: 'We are all gifts and we have been gifted to each other. It is not so much what we are called, but that we answer our call.'  Winter is the time of the White Eagles on the rivers here and I am looking for them.

For another Arkansas story by Sara, see Beauty and Harmony on Vision Spa Retreat

The Desert House: a story

      
'That tamarisk', the realtor said, pointing at the feathery green-grey tree generously shading the north side of the house, 'is probably home to a king snake'.  A harmless snake, I knew it would slither out to scout for less-friendly members of its species each evening.  A  king snake was a good omen.  Also called 'salt cedar' that tree would drop a mess of needles and kill any plant under it, the woman derisively informed me.  'Take it out straightaway'.  I knew to be wary of her.

Just as the guardian king snake hides in the debris around the tree, there are layers to sift through before truth and purpose are revealed.  The friend who lived nearby in the high-class gated community where he re-posed for a while to make millions had been victim to that.  As summer came harshly in, he had dug up the trees on his newly acquired plot and shifted them to spots more preferable to him - slowly and shamefully they died.  Then squirrels arrived and dug up his ground cover, as if in subtle vengeance. 

In the picturesque seaside town on the southern Californian coast where I had been living, awkward yuppies strolled restlessly up and down in front of the chic restaurants and boutiques and homes they owned only at weekends.  Pacific Coast Highway lived up to its grand name - cutting beach-goers off from the sand, giving sightseers fast passage.  Local newspapers wrote sad articles about the planned suicides of dispirited bohemians who had hung on, and brash mansions encroaching on unruly cottages. 

The little oasis my new husband had rented for decades had been sold to developers; and we were out.  A  cheery contractor told us the owners intended to rip out its heart, chop down the trees, and add the expected generic features.  Our visitors had always commented with delight on the zany cracked tiling, the brilliant stained glass set into wonky windows, the friendly plants creeping through the vent panels, the bejeweled spider's webs.  They didn’t notice the absence of a dishwasher; but the new arrivals would.

So we were taking a look at a place the agent called 'way out there'; Cost-co and nouvelle cuisine were a half-hour away.  You reached the ranchito either by rounding the mountains at the base of which date palm oases drank up the water that crept through an active fault line; or by the long waves of a road that crossed Sky Valley, as broad as its name.  On the corner of Happy Valley Drive, a low-slung brick house with a wide wooden porch nestled behind brave desert plants. 

The place seemed to offer an oasis for any desertion of the soul.  This desert defied its outward appearance with its underground supply of water; just as even the saddest or baddest of us have deep-running souls waiting to be drawn upwards.  In the front yard was a huge rock pool fed by natural hot water from an artesian well drilled almost 500 feet into the floor of an ancient ocean.  I had the odd experience, standing in the spacious hallway at the center of that desert house, of ley-lines converging.



How easy to imagine peaceful nights closing in over the ring of mountains, candles around the pool, hours of whispered thoughts for bright stars that died long ago.  Human stars, I learned, had stayed there to escape from false adulation.  But the owner was a spiky cactus holding prospective buyers off.  A film set-designer, his breakfast bowls were patiently placed, and never filled in the weeks we went back to view; a paintbox and paper with bright splodges were laid out pretentiously on an artist's desk.  

Back in the coastal city, a well-meaning society lady invited me to join her women's book club at the latest grand hotel.  We gathered in a room of mirrors to stretch in lackadaisical yoga under the sweet approval of a young woman and then rocked along with a black African-American dancer.   I realized that my spirit would dry up in such a place.  The desert needed no mirrors in order to show me myself.   The expansively empty talk that lifted me up and dropped me down like a gullible girl might fade there.

To see life in the desert you must look long and diligently - the tracks of snakes, the camouflages. In the rundown office of the buyer's agent, I went through the form for house-buying.  Sheryl was voluble with local blah.  Changing her tune to match our hopes, she was sure we’d be a great success, sure the waters were wonderful, sure of everything and proof of nothing.  Too many mistakes on those forms for me  - my partner thought she’d called me, admiringly, 'Miss Eagle Eye'; I heard 'Miss Pickie'. 

Sheryl and Joan, the seller's agent, were dealing with a touchy owner.  They were nice only up to a point, the point with the money.  Money was behind all those expansively empty words I heard.  When it didn’t come tumbling out of the glittering pinball machine at the pull of the lever, they were off to the next station.  I didn't want to be mistaken for a pinball machine.  The local native American Indians were gambling on it, drawing the crowds to their gaudy casinos along the highway to the desert. 

The house was not for us, though I still think of it.  Of how certain places stand on geological power points that I can feel, and others may not.

(Adapted from an essay by Sulis/ Sara Firman, written November 2001.)  

For more on snake medicine see Snakes (two poems by Sulis).

Winter colors: the spirit of place

In the world of home interiors, natural tones, are often boring neutrals.  Yet the natural world is never boring or neutral.  Even in winter, colors abound.  One winter, when I lived in a cabin beside an Ozark creek, I decided to enliven my white-walled living space.  I didn't anticipate that, not only would it end up being an interior I felt more at home in, but that the change would also blurr the boundary between my indoor world and the outdoors. 

When I scanned the color-wheel for paints, I thought I was selecting on the basis of the ceramic floor tiles, the artwork and fabrics that were already in the space.  I wanted colors that would bring out the less visible, accentuate the least obvious.  Many of the paintings in the room were seascapes and the fabrics and furnishings came from exotic countries - none of it was typical of the rural Ozarks.

The colors I chose had names like Veiled Violet, Heart of Palm, Complimentary Cream, and then a combination of all of these merged on one wall in a textured faux finish (one of my ex-husband's skills).   Admiring the results, I noticed that these names could be 'localized' as Stone Violet, Sycamore Skin, and Switch Grass.  The glass doors overlooking the creek, reflected this subtly changing color palette.