Trip Back East

               I took a trip back east to visit my family, and to try to figure out whether we should move back there.  Charlie’s health is fragile and I might be able to get a good job.  Plus, the dry air and brightness of the sun are hard for me; I have to wrap up from head to toe in the summer and sleep next to a humidifier most of the year.  Even so, the thought of moving, leaving behind people and things that are precious to me, was a dismal and terrifying proposition. 

               I cleaned up around the lodge a couple days before I left and piled up stones for the fire so Charlie wouldn’t have to do it.  I looked around, and the small lodge captured my attention.  “Hey, come in here,” it seemed to say, so I did.  The spirits often bypass my head and give me information to store away until the need for it arises.  I could feel the lodge doing this to help me handle upcoming events, and I was grateful. 

               The morning I left, I got up in the dark to stretch before going to the airport.  Right outside the back door owls hooted and squeaked.  This had never happened before, and my heart leaped: medicine!   Owls represent the west direction to me, introspection, the unknown side of self, and healing.  It was a loving sendoff from the spirits.

               It was great to see my family, but Maryland seems like a different planet.  There is so much sacred water of life that it is hard to remember it is sacred.  The only place I don’t feel completely lost is in the woods.   Dawn comes fast and bright in Arizona.  Here among the trees it came as a gradual lightening of the night to watery gray.  Commuter traffic picked up and birds began to sing.  Jet-lagged and having trouble focusing, I went out in the back yard the first day to do a dawn ceremony. 

               I stepped into the woods avoiding brush and, hopefully, deer ticks.  There used to be a chicken yard back there.  All that remained was a fallen chicken coop; the rest was reclaimed by the forest.  I offered cornmeal to the six directions and thanked Creator for providing me with everything I needed to live.  I offered tobacco, thanking Creator for helping me become a better person.  I asked for help in meeting the challenges of the day in a sacred manner.  I looked around.  I felt the vast pumping and utilization of the sacred water of life; a light, sweet sensation of plants and trees joyously and harmoniously incorporating water into their beings and returning it to the atmosphere.  Out on the road people drove by on their way to work, human business being entirely separate from woods business. 

               I noticed a deer skeleton about six feet away.  A sense of inevitability settled over me.  Of course there was.  This visit was probably going to be like vision quest, with regularly appearing messengers.  The skeleton had a strong sense of power of some kind about it, so it had to be medicine.  I didn’t go near it.  I tried meditating about it without much success.   Death imagery scares me, and my fearful ego blocks accurate perception.  Well, it wasn’t going away.  Now that I’d seen it, what it meant and the changes it would help me make would become clear at some point.

               My job that week was yard work.  My mother can’t do as much as she once did, and I was happy to help.  This area was cultivated long ago, and the dominant tree species is tulip poplar – among the first to re-colonize it.  They have grown tall beyond belief.  Up in the tree crowns, immune to human land divisions, red-shouldered hawks called and flew about, making rounds of the neighborhood.  I meditated on this.  As beings, hawks embody focus on the mission, the kill.  Maybe I had a mission, and I needed to figure it out and focus on it.

               I went jogging every morning so I would be mentally, emotionally, and physically balanced for the day.   At home I use exercise machines to minimize orthopedic problems, but I can keep it up for a week.  On the second day I jogged past two young deer lying dead in the manicured grass by the road. Undoubtedly they had been hit by a car.  A couple of vultures stood nearby, their spirit selves emanating compassion.  I was jarred.  I had expected more medicine, but why did I keep finding dead deer?  I saw their spirits in my mind.  They greeted me with joy as they continued on their journey.  Life and death are the same, they seemed to say.

               For a couple of weeks before the trip, I kept thinking about box turtles, and how much I would like to find one.  When we were kids we found them in the woods and fields.  Knowing how much it excited us, my father brought turtles home whenever he saw them on the road.  We were invariably thrilled.  It was like finding treasure.  Each one looked and behaved differently.  Furthermore, they were extremely easy to catch. 

               It was still early in the season and box turtles aren’t as common as they used to be, so I didn’t think it was likely I would find one.  I was cutting broken trees at the edge of the woods and dragging them off, when I spotted a turtle foraging in the vegetation.  I was delighted.  I was awed that the spirit world had given me this gift.  What was I to think about it?  Turtles carry their home with them wherever they go.   When I meditated on it, I felt a starburst of love.   On vision quest, I am always given the challenge of choosing to be in love or fear.  This was probably a reminder that I could do that anywhere, under any circumstances; and Creator is everywhere, east or west.  I wasn’t meeting the challenge very well on this trip.  I was feeling pretty fearful about the future.

               Every morning I did a dawn ceremony in the woods by the chicken coop and the deer skeleton.  On the fourth day when I was greeting the dawn, a deer across the valley snorted in alarm.  Over and over, the coughing snort echoed through the trees.  I couldn’t see him, but he obviously could see me.  It was another deer messenger.  At least this one was alive.  A bird overhead chipped in alarm.  It probably had a nest nearby.  I had a feeling about this snorting and chipping, this calling of attention.  It seemed to be saying that something was developing and coming my way.  Most likely, however, nothing would happen unless I faced my fears and turned my life and my will over to Creator.

               My mother, nephew, and I, drove down to my brother’s house near the Piscataway River to visit and go canoeing.  We canoed up the estuary and back, seeing great blue herons looking for fish, and a beaver lodge.  I felt kindly, encouraging warmth from the spirit of the herons.  The beavers seemed to tell me about joyous engagement in work which is harmonious with one’s being.

               Back at the house, my brother showed me a hive of dirt-dwelling bees he uncovered while digging under the deck to create more head space.  He called it “Mesa Verde,” which proved surprisingly apt.  It consisted of several rows of holes in the miniature cliff face my brother created, leading to chambers within.  The bees ignored us as they flew in and out, working on the hive.  My brother, having sympathy for living beings, hadn’t gotten rid of them yet.  Sometimes when I encounter bees, they buzz around my head, telling me I shouldn’t be there.  I trust this sign completely.  From these bees, I got a feeling of great activity and concentration on work for the purpose of providing a living, but with little personal meaning.  I felt strong aversion, like I’d better not lose myself in work like that.  It would take a lot of trust for me to turn anything down, though.

               My niece showed me a tree frog that she found in a crevice of the air conditioner.  Tree frogs are gentle creatures, soft and green, with sticky feet.  At night the males call loudly in the trees to advertise their presence to females.  I asked this frog about its medicine, and immediately got a sense of its soft, watery nature.  It reminded me of the water turtles we saw sunning on a log last year.  The sense was of the importance to them of water; that they were one with water, and could not exist without it. 

               There was a storm that night, back at my mother’s house.  In the morning I jogged down to the Patuxent River.   A stream rushed beside the road, and the river was running high.  I heard a pair of Canada geese calling in the floodplain.  They saw me and took off.  These birds in particular, I wanted to understand.  Their haunting cries spoke to me of Maryland and its waters, and perhaps these migrants could tell me if I, like they, should come home. Their spirits greeted me, and their message was one of functioning best and most effectively in an environment that fits.  For geese, it was here, evolved with the ancient rhythms of coastal waterways.   For me, though, the water of the spirit is what I yearned for more.

               I arrived back in Flagstaff after dark.  It was cool, but crickets were chirping.  I greeted my dear husband, ate dinner, filled the humidifier, and went to bed.  I was glad to be back.  It was easier to keep one foot in the spirit world in this stark, harsh land.  I could feel the wise, loving, presence of the Native spirits who once inhabited this area.  I missed them.  For some reason, there don’t seem to be any spirits of people back east, Native or otherwise.

               I couldn’t figure out what the deer skeleton meant, so I asked Charlie.  He said all places and circumstances are wonderful and terrible.  “You have to embrace everything just as it is rather than holding out for an ideal future that will never exist – that’s the bare bones of it.  You have a gift for working with people, and it’s your passion and your mission.”       

               A few days later while I was walking by a pond in the middle of town with a friend, a great blue heron flew over our heads.  Again, I felt encouragement.  “This,” it seemed to say, “listening and being spiritually supportive of other human beings, is what you should do.” 

               People stood quietly around the edge of the pond, fishing poles in hand.  Overhead an osprey hovered.  A redwing blackbird tried to drive it off, succeeding only momentarily.  The osprey resumed hovering, then dropped down to the water and caught a fish in its talons.  Beating its wings strongly, it flew away.  “Focus!” it said, “Focus on the mission!”