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AM OBSESSED WITH MAPS and directions. The key to my internal map appears to read something like this: East: A healer learns through wounding, illness, and death. North: A dreamer learns though deception, loss, and addiction.
West: A musician learns through silence, loneliness, and endless roaming. South: A poet learns through injustice, wordlessness, and not being heard. Center: A wanderer learns through standing still.
Where within me do I continue to hold that contradiction?
I do not want to be haunted by that which I cannot speak.
Then speak. Grow poetry in the debris left behind by rage. Plant so there is enough for everyone to eat. Make sure there is room for everyone at the table. Let all of us inhabit the story, in peace.
I wonder at physicians and a medical system that would keep anyone, especially a physically and mentally healthy woman, on such a powerful antipsychotic. She raised four children, essentially by herself; she worked several jobs, waitressing and cooking, and moved about the world with a dynamism that belied mental instability. What were they attempting to kill in her? Did she say no when she was supposed to say yes?
When I speak, when I create, I am afraid of failing my art, my people, my family. I cannot render with the delicacy, fierceness, and tough beauty in which I perceive. I have failed many times what was given to me to do. I call out, as I have many times before in these moments: Why did you give me this legacy of poetry, this music, this body, this place from which to speak when I don’t look and act the part, and am not the best representative of my people or anyone else, and you made me a woman, when women’s voices and worth are not regarded in this society in which we are now living?
Yes, I know failure, he nods. I can’t tell you about being a woman, he says, but God loves all of his creations. Not one is above the other. Let’s sit together and listen. Then we will pray for a path that will lift up the people, all people, including all the beloved beings of creation. You will find yourself in that lifting up.
The church reminded me of those social clubs in school that I would never be part of because my parents divorced, we were Indian, our house wasn’t kept up to the standard of everyone else’s home in the neighborhood, and my mother worked.
The psalm, “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” came from other tribal communities, far across oceans and deserts. Poetry could travel, just like birds or airplanes. It was a prayer poem of protection. It was most likely accompanied by music.
The Twenty-third Psalm is a poem from people who knew the earth. From people who, much like the Navajo, tend sheep and in doing so learn respect for the plants, animals, and elements with whom we live.
There is no one way to God, no one correct spiritual path, no one way to write poetry. There is no one roadway, no one-way Bering Strait, no one kind of flowering plant, no one kind of tiger, no one way to knowledge. Diversity characterizes this planet, this galaxy, this universe.
In that church, a story about Noah and his sons was turned into a moral tale on why dark-skinned people were not worthy of the respect and care afforded t...
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I wanted to save my mother, but I was bound. I was learning that you cannot save anyone unless they want to be saved. You could lose everything, even yourself, in your failed efforts.
I walk back in time to help make a coming-of-age ceremony for Girl-Warrior. I construct a doorway where sunrise is a line above a dark blue horizon. Her grandmothers and great-grandmothers gather around and speak. The ancestors appear here to help because she is one of us. She is us. She is worthy of love, of tenderness, of all that she needs to create a future. The world lives within the cradle of her hips. She is every girl, this girl.
“Be exactly who you are,” they tell her, “in your becoming.” They remind her she is holding tremendous power, and power has two sides. It can harm or heal. To hold such power can be difficult; that’s why we need guidance in ritual and ceremony, especially at this age, but at any age, for power without grounding and sharing can destroy.
“As you enter this doorway of womanhood,” they tell her, “you must keep the fire going of vkvsvmkv, or spiritual belief. You must seek and acquire a spiritual understanding of life. Your relationship with your Creator is central. You must tend it with quiet and communion. Turn your eyes and ears inward and listen. Begin every morning, tending this fire.
“Emetvl’hvmke is community. Your body is a community of organs, all living with consciousness, that work together to house you in this story. Community is those with whom you live, from home to school, to your tribal nation, city, or state. You must remember to place community interest and benefits ahead of individual and personal gain. “Always be kind and humble. Eyasketv is humility. No one is above the other. “Vrakkueckv means respect. Respect this gift of life, and in doing so we respect ourselves and others. “Fvccetv is integrity. Be honest. Tell the truth. Keep an ethical stance. If you
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If our grandchildren are evidence of our fulfilled dreams, then our grandparents are the dreamers and storytellers from whose imagination we arrive here.
Those with strong family and community ties tend to run in the direction of home when there is trouble.
Ritual is how we make a community, how we open the door for respect for the source of life. Ritual nourishes our young men and women with the resources they need for spiritual growth for development. Even a poem can be a ritual, as can a song, or a book.
If I take away all the mothering expectations implied in the word “mother,” then my mother becomes a human being. I make peace with my personal story of mothering. I am honored to have served my mother. I am honored to be a mother.
When we were colonized, female deities were deliberately disappeared from our indigenous stories. There is no female figure in Christianity’s Trinity. Mothers lost their place next to the fathers. They were treated as property. Those roles in society filled by women and mothers, positions like teachers and childcare workers, became the least
Does each generation carry forth the wounding that needs to be healed, from mother to mother, cooking pot to cooking pot, song to poetry, and poetry to beadwork, until one day in eternity we will understand what we have created together?
Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time.
When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.
Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.
Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.
Call yourself back. You might find yourself caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse. You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return. Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.
Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It will return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be so happy to be found after being lost for so long. Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes.
Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.
WE KEEP OUR VIBRATION HIGHER by prayer, by kindness, by taking care of what we were given to do, by cleaning ourselves of negative thoughts that originate within or come from others, by cleaning with water, by humility, by being in the real world, away from concrete and square buildings, by speaking only that which holds truth. ◆
Even a lost place within yourself is a place, albeit liminal, a kind of border town. You can make a temporary home if you need to from found materials and shreds of forgotten dreams, and you can even dress to appear somewhat ordinary as you run away, a refugee from yourself. I rolled up the map of my known world and set it aside for some kind of strange autonomy.
I question the reasoning behind a cultural pantheon that includes no female power figures in the leadership circle, when the natural world shows us that no life is created without male and female power joined together.
I remember the story of the gang of rogue male elephants in Africa who roamed the lands killing just to kill. This was unusual behavior for elephants. This gang had been raised without fathers. Someone who recognized this corralled them with an elder male elephant who taught them. When they were let loose again into elephant society, the desire to sport kill had left them. They now had understanding. They had guidance that gave them a sense of family.
I’ve learned in all my years of living and traveling the world that most people in this world mean no intentional harm, be they two-legged, four-legged, winged, or finned. But when they do, pay attention. You will know who they are by the signs.
She’d warn me to beware of popularity. You cannot stake a life based on fleeting standards set by a fickle populace. She told me not to be dismayed in situations where I present and speak and am disregarded because men do not listen to female voices.
She reminded me that we have to believe in ourselves. We cannot expect men to want to listen as they are used to listening only to themselves. In her time, women did not occupy this kind of public space, but in my generation, women would.
still, even if your mother, father, relative, partner or friend is over a hundred years old, the leaving means they are going from you, and their disappearance will make a hole in your earth story.
Her manner of reading welcomed everyone into a circle. She told me once that when she wrote, she imagined a circle of woman around a fire. She would speak, listening for words to make change, to draw people closer together to investigate what they had in common, as well as their differences.
So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive
She taught me that there is no separation between being a poet and being a mother and a lover. All are warrior roles. Audre Lorde’s wisdom songs folded into the consciousness of my poetry.
there is no end to the quest for justice, for knowledge, and remind me to make poems to hold everything that slips past the failure of memory, of love.
I believe every poem is ritual: there is a naming, a beginning, a knot or question, then possibly revelation, and then closure, which can be opening, setting the reader, speaker, or singer out and back on a journey.
When I write, those old voices inspire me, and surprise me with what they know. Maybe that’s how most wisdom works. Sometimes it can be corralled into print, in languages in books, but it lives more abundantly when spoken and welcomes a place to live on earth.
I wonder who influenced Walt Whitman to release poetry from the highly stylized European forms, to make a poetry that flowed like the winds rippling over vast fields of leaves of grass.
What a wild dilemma, how to make it to the stars on a highway slick with fear.
Humans were created by mistake. Someone laughed and we came crawling out. That was the beginning of the drama; we were hooked then. What a wild dilemma, how to make it to the stars on a highway slick with fear.
