Tuesday, November 23, 2004
Depravity of the Best Kind
This afternoon our family reached a new level of depravity. Sarah and Eyvonne decided to prank Ian. Of course this required complicity from the rest of us Qs.
Ian is one of us who remembers what is probably a past life, somewhere in Ireland, which he insists is call Eyre, in the 1400s.
He talks about castles and wars and the general mayhem of growing up the bastard son of a noble. One of the things he hates most is memories of heads on pikes outside the city walls.
The reason we know that is soon after he came into the system we attended a renaissance festival, thinking Ian would be right at home. He enjoyed it on some levels, like the food, but mostly it confused him. They had an elephant you could ride and he was somewhat frightened of that until we explained what it was and that it was just for fun. Right after that he really freaked out. One of the vendors had a bunch of wig heads on stakes decoratively placed in front of his booth. When Ian saw them he thought they were real.
I don’t think we’ve been to a renaissance fest since.
Anyway, for Christmas one year Eyvonne and the rest of us Qs gave Ian a tiny doll head on a metal rod. Just as a memento. Really. We made a little banner with his name on it to hang below the head.
So. That’s the backstory.
Sarah is studying cosmetology. She has three life size wig heads with which to practice hair color and cutting techniques. Are we getting the picture here?
Ian was asleep inside. We woke him up telling him Eyvonne need to talk with him. As he took ops he got a sense that something was afoot. As he and Eyvonne rounded the corner of the house he saw a “headless’ body laying in front of three heads on sticks. It was great. Just for a moment we had him. It was Sarah lying there with her coat pulled up over her head that got him. Then he laughed.
“The only thing wrong is they’re tongues aren’t stickin’ out,” Ian commented.
Inside and out hysteria reigned. It was great.
It was even funnier was when Owl’s bass player parked hi car right next to the heads and never flinched. He’s so used to the level of insanity around here it didn’t faze him.
I mean come on, wouldn’t you ask? “Hey, what’s with the heads on sticks?” Maybe he was afraid of our answer.
Yesterday when he arrived we were peeling bark off a 16-foot sapling. Just another ordinary day.
Owl and Thunder’s friends were kind of indoctrinated at an early age. Once we had a plastic soda bottle filled with sand suspended from the ceiling over the kitchen table. Given a push it would swing in an unvarying pattern trickling sand, creating the same design over and over again. We ate in the living room for a couple of weeks.
“What is that?” one of their friends asked.
“It proves the earth really does rotate,” I said.
“Oooohhhhh.”
Another time we constructed a 6-foot-tall papier-mâché dragon. Our horses would escape their pasture and wander up to the porch to beg for treats. Our house was a place where anything might happen and frequently did.
No one else’s parents allowed them to skateboard in the kitchen, swim as soon as the ice was off the lake, or finished water battles by spraying a hose through a kitchen window.
Owl and Thunder built shelters in the woods and moved out of the house for a while every summer. I wasn’t supposed to know where they were camping even if I could see them. They no longer existed as my kids. They went feral. I did however notice they still liked chocolate chip cookies enough to sneak in and swipe them off the cooling racks.
The whole prank thing started when they were little. They waited until they thought I was asleep and threw plastic glow-in-the-dark bugs at my bed. I retaliated by short-sheeting their beds.
They curled life-size rubber snakes under the covers at the foot of my bed. I waited in the darkened hallway to lightly touch their bare feet with a feather duster.
Owl turned off the light outside the bathroom door and stood right outside it so I walked right into him. I put life-like fuzzy mice in his dresser.
You get the picture. April Fools Day approached performance art at our house.
This Halloween Sarah and Mer unrolled six rolls of toilet paper festooning Owl’s bedroom. He rigged up a buzzer to Sarah’s closet door. It went off a 1 a.m. when she and I were the only ones home.
“Q, help!” she shrieked. “There’s smoke alarm going off! Help!” She was practically dancing in my bedroom door.
I woke up laughing. “Owl gotcha,” I managed.
Life’s short. Have fun.
Laughing can cure damn near anything.
We hold onto that when we hit a dark night of the soul. Those still happen to us. They don’t make us feel suicidal anymore. We know there is laughter waiting for us just over the next ridge. We just need to stay safe until we get there. Getting there can be hard. In the fall we still get more than melancholy. Part of it is the shorter days. So we work under a UV light. Sometimes we overdose on light and then we can’t sleep. We get wound so tight we can’t concentrate. Never overdose on UV rays. It’s worse than caffeine.
And we still have flashbacks. I suspect Pleiades is having them but I can’t talk to him so I don’t know that for sure. He doesn’t seem inclined to talk much to anyone yet. It’s a waiting game.
I complained about feeling exhausted today.
“He has trouble falling asleep,” Eyvonne said.
“Who?” I asked missing her point.
“Notastarsystem,” she said. “He has a hard time relaxing.”
I put my head down and groaned. How many times do we have to go through this before I remember the drill? Newbies almost always have sleep problems. They are also typically the last with ops or awareness as the rest of us falls asleep. It’s an especially common pattern for a protector. The ordinary noises of the night resonate right through them. The responsibility can feel overwhelming. Going to sleep feels like abdication of that responsibility.
Eyvonne says Pleiades startles awake numerous times before he eventually falls into a deep sleep. Passing trucks, the dog whining in his sleep, Owl dropping a shoe on his floor above our ceiling, the phone ringing. Anything can prompt him to alert.
At one time such vigilance served a purpose, giving us time to escape from our bed and hide or switch to avoid knowing what was happening. To newbies it still feels like that could happen.
Eyvonne falls asleep stroking his back so he knows she’s still there.
“It’s all right. You’re here with me.” She repeats again and again.
At some point he’ll begin to know that’s true. Then we’ll have something to work with. It’s making me crazy that I can’t talk to him. I’ve got to figure out why this is happening. I know in my gut nothing will get better until we can talk.
A long time ago el heard a baby crying nonstop inside. No other Q could hear the baby. Only el. It nearly drove him crazy knowing there was a l’ilone alone and uncomforted outside the system. He searched everywhere. He found places we didn’t know existed or had forgotten long ago. But he couldn’t find that baby. Stonebaby found her.
Once he understood what was making el so sad he told Eyvonne he knew where the baby was. She asked him to pick the baby up and comfort it. Stonebaby did. He cuddled her and brought her into the light and warmth of the system. He even conjured up a bottle and fed her. We wept with relief.
But Notastarsystem isn’t an infant. His memories are far more difficult to unravel, his needs harder to meet. If only we knew what his needs were we could at least help.
I can sense what he’s feeling when he’s nearby. But since we turn and walk away from each other whenever we meet I’m not making much headway on that front.
The thing I sense the most from him is a heaviness of heart. Sadness. Like he’s carrying a burden he can no longer bear alone. He’s come to the right place. Maybe when he builds up enough trust with one of us or with Eyvonne he’ll let it go.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
Ian is one of us who remembers what is probably a past life, somewhere in Ireland, which he insists is call Eyre, in the 1400s.
He talks about castles and wars and the general mayhem of growing up the bastard son of a noble. One of the things he hates most is memories of heads on pikes outside the city walls.
The reason we know that is soon after he came into the system we attended a renaissance festival, thinking Ian would be right at home. He enjoyed it on some levels, like the food, but mostly it confused him. They had an elephant you could ride and he was somewhat frightened of that until we explained what it was and that it was just for fun. Right after that he really freaked out. One of the vendors had a bunch of wig heads on stakes decoratively placed in front of his booth. When Ian saw them he thought they were real.
I don’t think we’ve been to a renaissance fest since.
Anyway, for Christmas one year Eyvonne and the rest of us Qs gave Ian a tiny doll head on a metal rod. Just as a memento. Really. We made a little banner with his name on it to hang below the head.
So. That’s the backstory.
Sarah is studying cosmetology. She has three life size wig heads with which to practice hair color and cutting techniques. Are we getting the picture here?
Ian was asleep inside. We woke him up telling him Eyvonne need to talk with him. As he took ops he got a sense that something was afoot. As he and Eyvonne rounded the corner of the house he saw a “headless’ body laying in front of three heads on sticks. It was great. Just for a moment we had him. It was Sarah lying there with her coat pulled up over her head that got him. Then he laughed.
“The only thing wrong is they’re tongues aren’t stickin’ out,” Ian commented.
Inside and out hysteria reigned. It was great.
It was even funnier was when Owl’s bass player parked hi car right next to the heads and never flinched. He’s so used to the level of insanity around here it didn’t faze him.
I mean come on, wouldn’t you ask? “Hey, what’s with the heads on sticks?” Maybe he was afraid of our answer.
Yesterday when he arrived we were peeling bark off a 16-foot sapling. Just another ordinary day.
Owl and Thunder’s friends were kind of indoctrinated at an early age. Once we had a plastic soda bottle filled with sand suspended from the ceiling over the kitchen table. Given a push it would swing in an unvarying pattern trickling sand, creating the same design over and over again. We ate in the living room for a couple of weeks.
“What is that?” one of their friends asked.
“It proves the earth really does rotate,” I said.
“Oooohhhhh.”
Another time we constructed a 6-foot-tall papier-mâché dragon. Our horses would escape their pasture and wander up to the porch to beg for treats. Our house was a place where anything might happen and frequently did.
No one else’s parents allowed them to skateboard in the kitchen, swim as soon as the ice was off the lake, or finished water battles by spraying a hose through a kitchen window.
Owl and Thunder built shelters in the woods and moved out of the house for a while every summer. I wasn’t supposed to know where they were camping even if I could see them. They no longer existed as my kids. They went feral. I did however notice they still liked chocolate chip cookies enough to sneak in and swipe them off the cooling racks.
The whole prank thing started when they were little. They waited until they thought I was asleep and threw plastic glow-in-the-dark bugs at my bed. I retaliated by short-sheeting their beds.
They curled life-size rubber snakes under the covers at the foot of my bed. I waited in the darkened hallway to lightly touch their bare feet with a feather duster.
Owl turned off the light outside the bathroom door and stood right outside it so I walked right into him. I put life-like fuzzy mice in his dresser.
You get the picture. April Fools Day approached performance art at our house.
This Halloween Sarah and Mer unrolled six rolls of toilet paper festooning Owl’s bedroom. He rigged up a buzzer to Sarah’s closet door. It went off a 1 a.m. when she and I were the only ones home.
“Q, help!” she shrieked. “There’s smoke alarm going off! Help!” She was practically dancing in my bedroom door.
I woke up laughing. “Owl gotcha,” I managed.
Life’s short. Have fun.
Laughing can cure damn near anything.
We hold onto that when we hit a dark night of the soul. Those still happen to us. They don’t make us feel suicidal anymore. We know there is laughter waiting for us just over the next ridge. We just need to stay safe until we get there. Getting there can be hard. In the fall we still get more than melancholy. Part of it is the shorter days. So we work under a UV light. Sometimes we overdose on light and then we can’t sleep. We get wound so tight we can’t concentrate. Never overdose on UV rays. It’s worse than caffeine.
And we still have flashbacks. I suspect Pleiades is having them but I can’t talk to him so I don’t know that for sure. He doesn’t seem inclined to talk much to anyone yet. It’s a waiting game.
I complained about feeling exhausted today.
“He has trouble falling asleep,” Eyvonne said.
“Who?” I asked missing her point.
“Notastarsystem,” she said. “He has a hard time relaxing.”
I put my head down and groaned. How many times do we have to go through this before I remember the drill? Newbies almost always have sleep problems. They are also typically the last with ops or awareness as the rest of us falls asleep. It’s an especially common pattern for a protector. The ordinary noises of the night resonate right through them. The responsibility can feel overwhelming. Going to sleep feels like abdication of that responsibility.
Eyvonne says Pleiades startles awake numerous times before he eventually falls into a deep sleep. Passing trucks, the dog whining in his sleep, Owl dropping a shoe on his floor above our ceiling, the phone ringing. Anything can prompt him to alert.
At one time such vigilance served a purpose, giving us time to escape from our bed and hide or switch to avoid knowing what was happening. To newbies it still feels like that could happen.
Eyvonne falls asleep stroking his back so he knows she’s still there.
“It’s all right. You’re here with me.” She repeats again and again.
At some point he’ll begin to know that’s true. Then we’ll have something to work with. It’s making me crazy that I can’t talk to him. I’ve got to figure out why this is happening. I know in my gut nothing will get better until we can talk.
A long time ago el heard a baby crying nonstop inside. No other Q could hear the baby. Only el. It nearly drove him crazy knowing there was a l’ilone alone and uncomforted outside the system. He searched everywhere. He found places we didn’t know existed or had forgotten long ago. But he couldn’t find that baby. Stonebaby found her.
Once he understood what was making el so sad he told Eyvonne he knew where the baby was. She asked him to pick the baby up and comfort it. Stonebaby did. He cuddled her and brought her into the light and warmth of the system. He even conjured up a bottle and fed her. We wept with relief.
But Notastarsystem isn’t an infant. His memories are far more difficult to unravel, his needs harder to meet. If only we knew what his needs were we could at least help.
I can sense what he’s feeling when he’s nearby. But since we turn and walk away from each other whenever we meet I’m not making much headway on that front.
The thing I sense the most from him is a heaviness of heart. Sadness. Like he’s carrying a burden he can no longer bear alone. He’s come to the right place. Maybe when he builds up enough trust with one of us or with Eyvonne he’ll let it go.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
Walk in Beauty
Death fascinates us as a society. The more removed we are from it the more fascinating it becomes. Violence and war seldom visit our doorsteps. On one terrible day terror stalked our nation. We shared that horror. It was too real. It intruded into our living rooms and lives, imprinting itself on our collective psyche.
A month earlier we’d traveled to New York with a group of Native Americans to celebrate International Indigenous People’s Day at the United Nations. Our group had artwork displayed in the lobby. Chief Arvol Looking Horse and Chief Jake Swamp and other dignitaries would lead part of the day’s ceremonies. We’d traveled a long way before the city’s familiar skyline came into view.
“Look at that. Those are the Twin Towers,” I said uninterested travel-weary kids. “You may never have another chance to see them.”
I made them look at the towers. Some of them lived far from New York and might not be here again for years. A month and two days later the towers fell.
We had relatives living in the city. It almost felt selfish to worry about our relatives in the face of such horror. Theirs were the faces we longed to see among the survivors, dreaded we might not. It was long into the evening before we heard they were safe. Then we wept.
As a nation we were urged to normalize our lives. Forget fear. Ignore grief. Go to the mall. Buy something, you’ll feel better and save the economy. It’s your civic duty. Outrage and anguish was muted by cash registers. Show patriotism by shopping at Sears and Penny’s. It was obscene. It wasn’t normal. It was collective dissociation.
Outrage still resurfaces impotently across the country as bluster in bars, violence behind closed doors, and a notwar waged in a desert.
What happened to Q’s original child is a similar symptom of society’s persistent flirtation with death. A less harmful expression is our national obsession with shows like CSI. Humans long to know death intimately, to solve the greatest mystery of life: why live at all if we must die?
The more removed we are from death the more explicitly we express it in our art, words, actions. Movie villains no longer die gracefully off screen, they melt in excruciating detail. People know all about human anatomy thanks to movie magic. The goal is not to heal, or to draw accurately. Its morbid curiosity. Ours is a necrophiliac society. Check it out, only the most extreme behaviors actually involve mutilation or abuse of a corpse. Among the wider range of symptoms is a fascination with death.
“Hey man, that’s killer!” “If you don’t quit that I’m gonna kill you.” “You got a death wish or what?”
Death takes us discreetly in sterile hospital rooms surrounded by machines. We’d be far less violent as a society if we washed our own dead, cut our hair in grief and wailed our pain to the elements.
Our father made sure we understood death by killing kittens while we watched. Chickens were far more dramatic, running in circles around the chopping block spurting blood from severed necks while their heads crowed silently from the ground, eyes blinking.
Occasionally we were forced to act out death, confined in small coffin-like spaces. Sometimes spiders were dumped over our naked body before the lid was closed.
There are few responses to this that leave you sane. Not being mentally present is effective. It worked for us as long as we avoided small-enclosed spaces.
Before we knew what Stonebaby and Die-die spared us we feared spiders. The tiniest spider loomed large in our sight. A single strand of spider web could stop us cold.
Spiders are honored creatures in many Native American stories. Spider spun the web of time, created the tapestry of the universe. We couldn’t help it; we shuddered every time we saw an eight-legged. Even understanding how our fear originated didn’t purge it.
We finally made our peace with spiders during a healing sweat. There are always spiders in sweat lodges. They love the nooks and crannies of sapling and bark. Imagine your worst fear teeming everywhere in your church. It was make peace with spiders or never sweat again.
Soon afterward we made peace with them we had a dream of an immense spider standing guard over our bed. She expanded to cover our entire house. Millions of normal sized spiders filled the floor all around our bed. I woke up, amazed I wasn’t screaming in fear.
The dream’s vision continued even though I was now awake. Eyvonne woke too and listened as I described the unfolding vision. As Spider grew larger she changed from rich blacks and browns to white. With Spider among my spirit protectors we are no longer the least bit afraid of her smaller embodiments.
“So how big is your spider?” Eyvonne asked.
“Bigger than the house,” I said. “She protects you too.”
“So now we have to walk everywhere because your spider won’t fit in the car?” she joked.
Suddenly we were hysterical at 2:30 a.m. Laughter is good any time. It’s life. It puts death in perspective.
My job as system protector is easier now. Did you know spiders have eight eyes? Who better to watch over you?
Spider spins the threads of our life and weaves our strands into the universe. Spider teaches: Elan Kumankwah; Mitakuye Oysain; We are all related.
In the Dine creation story Spider Woman uses her saliva mixed with red, yellow, black and white clay to create humans. She attaches a thread of her web to each person, a gift of creative wisdom. But most forgot her gift. Three times Spider Woman destroyed the world with great floods. Only those who remembered her gift survived to climb through Mother Earth’s womb into the next world.
The Seneca believe Spider created writing. And she gifted the Lakota with dream catchers to melt away nightmares and negativity as morning sun dries dew from a spider web. The Anishnabe (Chippewa) say Spider Woman wove silken dream catchers over each baby's cradleboard. When the Anishnabe people were scattered by settlers Spider Woman had to travel long distances to find them all. To ease her burden the women made of dream catchers of willow and sinew.
We’ve come a long way in the last ten years. We are weaving our own life now brighter threads among the dark and faded ones. We are clipping frayed ends and mending tears in the light of a new day.
Although remembering brought understanding which enabled our healing there will always be triggers to our pain. No time machine exists to erase the past. Healing isn’t about forgetting. It isn’t really even about forgiving although without that step you get stuck in survivorship.
Healing is about being strong enough to know pain and keep moving forward. It’s helping Spider Woman weave the dream catchers.
I believe now what Eyvonne says: “Nothing happens without a reason.”
We endured sexual, physical and emotional abuse in childhood that conditioned us to accept rape, emotional abuse and domestic violence as normal in adulthood. We survived. It’s up to us to make our life meaningful. It’s up to us to walk in beauty.
We treasure the essence of our life.
Last night as the sunset’s golden light glistened off strands of spider web strung between ferns as far as we could see into the woods. They wafted with the breeze glowing, almost on fire. You couldn’t take one step without encountering a silken strand.
“Deities. If we’d seen that before we’d never have set foot in the woods again,” I said.
“And now?” Eyvonne asked.
“Beautiful,” I whispered.
Prayersong
You are confusing
What is important
With what is not.
Look around you.
You are confusing
Starvation with
Something it is not.
Look around you.
Are you hungry?
Do your children cry?
Around you is there beauty?
Open your eyes,
You have confused
Starvation with plenty.
You have created beauty
Walk in it.
Open your eyes,
See plenty,
See beauty
Walk in it.
Harvest what you need
Leave some to grow
Give some back
Open your eyes
Look around you.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
A month earlier we’d traveled to New York with a group of Native Americans to celebrate International Indigenous People’s Day at the United Nations. Our group had artwork displayed in the lobby. Chief Arvol Looking Horse and Chief Jake Swamp and other dignitaries would lead part of the day’s ceremonies. We’d traveled a long way before the city’s familiar skyline came into view.
“Look at that. Those are the Twin Towers,” I said uninterested travel-weary kids. “You may never have another chance to see them.”
I made them look at the towers. Some of them lived far from New York and might not be here again for years. A month and two days later the towers fell.
We had relatives living in the city. It almost felt selfish to worry about our relatives in the face of such horror. Theirs were the faces we longed to see among the survivors, dreaded we might not. It was long into the evening before we heard they were safe. Then we wept.
As a nation we were urged to normalize our lives. Forget fear. Ignore grief. Go to the mall. Buy something, you’ll feel better and save the economy. It’s your civic duty. Outrage and anguish was muted by cash registers. Show patriotism by shopping at Sears and Penny’s. It was obscene. It wasn’t normal. It was collective dissociation.
Outrage still resurfaces impotently across the country as bluster in bars, violence behind closed doors, and a notwar waged in a desert.
What happened to Q’s original child is a similar symptom of society’s persistent flirtation with death. A less harmful expression is our national obsession with shows like CSI. Humans long to know death intimately, to solve the greatest mystery of life: why live at all if we must die?
The more removed we are from death the more explicitly we express it in our art, words, actions. Movie villains no longer die gracefully off screen, they melt in excruciating detail. People know all about human anatomy thanks to movie magic. The goal is not to heal, or to draw accurately. Its morbid curiosity. Ours is a necrophiliac society. Check it out, only the most extreme behaviors actually involve mutilation or abuse of a corpse. Among the wider range of symptoms is a fascination with death.
“Hey man, that’s killer!” “If you don’t quit that I’m gonna kill you.” “You got a death wish or what?”
Death takes us discreetly in sterile hospital rooms surrounded by machines. We’d be far less violent as a society if we washed our own dead, cut our hair in grief and wailed our pain to the elements.
Our father made sure we understood death by killing kittens while we watched. Chickens were far more dramatic, running in circles around the chopping block spurting blood from severed necks while their heads crowed silently from the ground, eyes blinking.
Occasionally we were forced to act out death, confined in small coffin-like spaces. Sometimes spiders were dumped over our naked body before the lid was closed.
There are few responses to this that leave you sane. Not being mentally present is effective. It worked for us as long as we avoided small-enclosed spaces.
Before we knew what Stonebaby and Die-die spared us we feared spiders. The tiniest spider loomed large in our sight. A single strand of spider web could stop us cold.
Spiders are honored creatures in many Native American stories. Spider spun the web of time, created the tapestry of the universe. We couldn’t help it; we shuddered every time we saw an eight-legged. Even understanding how our fear originated didn’t purge it.
We finally made our peace with spiders during a healing sweat. There are always spiders in sweat lodges. They love the nooks and crannies of sapling and bark. Imagine your worst fear teeming everywhere in your church. It was make peace with spiders or never sweat again.
Soon afterward we made peace with them we had a dream of an immense spider standing guard over our bed. She expanded to cover our entire house. Millions of normal sized spiders filled the floor all around our bed. I woke up, amazed I wasn’t screaming in fear.
The dream’s vision continued even though I was now awake. Eyvonne woke too and listened as I described the unfolding vision. As Spider grew larger she changed from rich blacks and browns to white. With Spider among my spirit protectors we are no longer the least bit afraid of her smaller embodiments.
“So how big is your spider?” Eyvonne asked.
“Bigger than the house,” I said. “She protects you too.”
“So now we have to walk everywhere because your spider won’t fit in the car?” she joked.
Suddenly we were hysterical at 2:30 a.m. Laughter is good any time. It’s life. It puts death in perspective.
My job as system protector is easier now. Did you know spiders have eight eyes? Who better to watch over you?
Spider spins the threads of our life and weaves our strands into the universe. Spider teaches: Elan Kumankwah; Mitakuye Oysain; We are all related.
In the Dine creation story Spider Woman uses her saliva mixed with red, yellow, black and white clay to create humans. She attaches a thread of her web to each person, a gift of creative wisdom. But most forgot her gift. Three times Spider Woman destroyed the world with great floods. Only those who remembered her gift survived to climb through Mother Earth’s womb into the next world.
The Seneca believe Spider created writing. And she gifted the Lakota with dream catchers to melt away nightmares and negativity as morning sun dries dew from a spider web. The Anishnabe (Chippewa) say Spider Woman wove silken dream catchers over each baby's cradleboard. When the Anishnabe people were scattered by settlers Spider Woman had to travel long distances to find them all. To ease her burden the women made of dream catchers of willow and sinew.
We’ve come a long way in the last ten years. We are weaving our own life now brighter threads among the dark and faded ones. We are clipping frayed ends and mending tears in the light of a new day.
Although remembering brought understanding which enabled our healing there will always be triggers to our pain. No time machine exists to erase the past. Healing isn’t about forgetting. It isn’t really even about forgiving although without that step you get stuck in survivorship.
Healing is about being strong enough to know pain and keep moving forward. It’s helping Spider Woman weave the dream catchers.
I believe now what Eyvonne says: “Nothing happens without a reason.”
We endured sexual, physical and emotional abuse in childhood that conditioned us to accept rape, emotional abuse and domestic violence as normal in adulthood. We survived. It’s up to us to make our life meaningful. It’s up to us to walk in beauty.
We treasure the essence of our life.
Last night as the sunset’s golden light glistened off strands of spider web strung between ferns as far as we could see into the woods. They wafted with the breeze glowing, almost on fire. You couldn’t take one step without encountering a silken strand.
“Deities. If we’d seen that before we’d never have set foot in the woods again,” I said.
“And now?” Eyvonne asked.
“Beautiful,” I whispered.
Prayersong
You are confusing
What is important
With what is not.
Look around you.
You are confusing
Starvation with
Something it is not.
Look around you.
Are you hungry?
Do your children cry?
Around you is there beauty?
Open your eyes,
You have confused
Starvation with plenty.
You have created beauty
Walk in it.
Open your eyes,
See plenty,
See beauty
Walk in it.
Harvest what you need
Leave some to grow
Give some back
Open your eyes
Look around you.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot
