​As I said, these people, my relatives, were unafraid to make big leaps to reach grand cosmological understandings, and they trusted their own experience.  They weren’t tentative if they suddenly knew the details of a distant event, whether in a distant place or time not yet arrived.  They believed messages of the spirit and acted on them.  No, they weren’t timid.  They didn’t need to be.   

Uncle Bud worked at Tinker Air Force Base as a civilian.  It didn’t take long before his bosses learned he had a special skill, so they sent him to missile sites when there was a persistent problem.  If he was left alone, he said, he could figure out what was wrong, though he couldn’t say just how he did this.

In WWII, papa, a lowly seaman on a ship, described something similar.  His sergeant took him to a lieutenant regarding some equipment that defied repair.  The sergeant told the officer papa could probably figure out what was wrong.  Papa said he could if they left him alone to do it.  And he did.

In my physics class in college, formulas defeated me, so one day, while taking a test, I grew frustrated and just wrote the answers.  My professor asked where the formulas were, and I explained.  She was curious enough to let me continue, and later told me that I’d made the highest grade of all her beginning physics classes. 

My college philosophy teacher said there are different ways of knowing.  Some follow the steps of logic and reason, but intuition skips the steps and ‘just knows’.  I think some of my family members do this.  We just know. 

If you ask the difference in understanding the solution to a problem and knowing something distant in time and place, or suddenly knowing the presence of evil, even of wandering into a place that is not always there, I can only say all these feel somewhat the same.  The arrival of answer or information or a sense of things is sudden.  And clear.  No doubt attached.

This doesn’t mean I always have discernment.  Or I am not sometimes grievously wrong.  It only means that when I have this sudden certainty, I can not think of a single time I was mistaken.  

Some in my family say this gift is because we are Indian.  Uncle Clyde said it was because we’re crazy.  I think some gifts follow bloodlines.  The gift is spiritual, and if it is not grieved by doubt and misuse, it does not depart. 

I'd be interested in your thoughts.

I love best my deep-in-the-night dreams, the ones with metaphors and symbols so dense they might as well be hieroglyphs.  I dutifully write the content, then go for a walk or drive through the hills.   Motion seems important.

I tell the dream I am going to speak it aloud, and I do, slowly, and in detail.  As I do, the dream unspins, the dense metaphors unfold, and I understand that the source of my dreaming is far more intelligent than my ordinary self.  If I pay attention, as I walk, or I drive, I enter a territory that is ‘here’ in this dimension, but not quite.  A ‘here’ that isn’t quite here, a truer place or a truer me than I usually know.  In this half-step away is the dreaming way of living.

No, I don’t believe creation is an illusion.  But I do believe reality can shift, and we can learn to choose the one we inhabit.  This one I enter when I am awake yet also in the dreaming world, the one in which I understand the language of spirit, understand the metaphor I inhabit, is far richer.   I am lifted, not confined to the body, or even the galaxy.  The ordinary world becomes sensual and delicious, a source of ecstasy.  Ordinary, but not.

The road is no different.  The elk still graze.  The crows shake off the rain from their brilliant feathers.  But the ‘here’ in which I and they are, is a dream world, one in which faith requires no effort, in which anything might happen, the road might take me to Zanzibar or Mongolia, or the delightful place that is my usual destination.  A cow elk lifts her head from the grass to look at me.  The eagle follows the car.  The metaphor has found me.

Books about metaphor are usually the territory of old, tired words, or at least this is so until we understand what is said.  The mind tries so hard to know, the same mind that is blown apart when finally it does.  Something within or behind the metaphor is always reaching, something that does not want anything less for me. 

The elk in the field must know about this, the eagle above the car, the trees bending over the road, even the pink fog between hills; they must know when I’ve arrived in the ‘here’ they inhabit. 
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The destination was always ‘here,’ so near, and sometimes so difficult to find.  But I know the terrain now.  I have the map.  And, if I do forget, the elk will remember for me, and the eagle above the car.       

Yes, this means putting aside the new book, a book that chose its name almost at the first word, “Beneath the Altar.”  I think I told you that the story originates from a dream I had at Mt. Shasta, but this book, unlike the others, did not write itself.  I struggled, and might have thought, if it was not for the dream, that I was writing the wrong book.

In my morning and evening journeys to and from this new calling, this old place of work, the story begins to talk.  In the back of my mind, it tells me things.  It says that the lost girl and her mother were helped by the Blue Child, which so far had made no appearance.  I am told that in the world beneath the alter, where I found Cora, there is another realm, where a brief visit is necessary.  I learn that time need not hold fixed the outcome of an ancestral tragedy.  Yes, I have said this many times, but perhaps I did not believe it as I should.

It seems odd to me that here in this small house in the trees, the story could not tell itself to me, that a sudden and miraculous event was required, a telephone call bidding me to a place I haven’t been in a while – a place I love, a place of miracles, with a spiritual name meaning ‘the return of the light’.    

I return to an old place of work – I think about these words and what they might signify.  What is true is that I do not return as who I was before; after all, four books have done their work on me.  But there is something about this that is necessary, essential, to the next book, its spiritual foundation.  
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Not just the next book, but essential to becoming the woman who can write it.  

​This is my season of gratitude, not only for deer and owls and coyotes and tiny birds with bell-like tones.  Miracles are everywhere around me, and I am as vulnerable to them as a child.  Something speaks and I hear.   

Driving through the woods, I look for elk in the fields, for the flight of the first bird, watch as first-light becomes sunrise.  Something is shown to me, and I understand.  The story is in the landscape, the curve of the silver moon against a black night, the slipping of snow from the cedar.   I am shown and I see.
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This vulnerability is terrifying, ferocious, consuming, and the only way to live.  I think about tonight’s drums, where I am not, but still I hear them.  I think about the songs from the hills, and I hear those, too.   

Life breaks us open.  More than once it takes me to the floor, and I rise new and clean. When I can stand again, I am not as I was; the ground beneath my feet is not the same place.  Something talks to me and I hear, shows me what I could not see before.
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I trust this. I trust this in myself and in you. 

It is a time of deep listening, and few assumptions, of watching birds and deer and coyotes and trees, the wind and the changing light, because the Spirit speaks to me through these.  Sometimes it takes my human mind a while to catch up with the complexity and power, the implications of the message, of the fundamental nature and scope of what’s arrived.  It is good to drive the back roads, or walk in the mountains so Spirit can reveal the whole.

Whatever the developing pattern, wherever the landing place, the revelation of Spirit has already altered the totality of my understanding, and my relationship to the Divine.  At seventy-three, my alignments have been changed. 

As I said recently, we are never too old for a miracle, but like all miracles the essence is on the inside, the sudden shift in understanding of the nature of Divine reality, nothing we can will, though we can certainly seek using what we already have. 
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I’ll end on a note that will be familiar to you – through the Holy we are so much more than we know.  We mustn’t let the past make us small, or people who mean to be helpful, but aren’t.  For this reason, I am careful who I talk to about this sort of thing, careful where I hang out, even what words I choose. 
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Remember, believe the Spirit even when all evidence is to the contrary. 

​We came upon an abandoned logging camp, a small operation of bunkhouse and not much more, so, of course, we went inside.  We remarked at the discomfort of the plank beds, the small table where men must have played cards.  A small dining room was adjacent to a kitchen with a big wood-burning range.  There we discussed meal planning for tired, hungry men, how hard it must have been to bring in supplies.

The last room was a tiny, square pantry, but what caught our attention was what was obviously a cold storage.  It had a huge handle on a big metal door.  So, we opened it.  Not all the way, mind you, because as we cracked the door we both turned to flee, so anxious to get out of the room, we knocked into each other in the doorway.  (Take comfort.  No babies were dropped.)

Outside in the sunshine we looked at each other, eyes wide with shock.  You couldn’t pay us enough to go back inside, we agreed.  Something terrible had happened there.

Over the years, in conversation with mama I sometimes brought up that day and what happened when we opened the door.  Her voice hushed, she’d say, “I don’t think we should talk about it.”   

My family has many stories of ghosts, stepping into other dimensions and trying to sort out the route back, or, sometimes, find it again.  But, I don’t think I’ve ever met anything like what was in that locker.
I, naturally, was the one with my hand on the door; I the one who pulled the handle.  All I remember is darkness.  Black. Black.  

Before I whirled to run.

But, what if we played a different game, one that doesn't have anything to do with money?  What if the youth got to take two steps closer to the prize if they knew traditional songs;  if they knew how to keep a canoe upright in the water, knew the tides and winds for long distance travel; if they knew how to weave ceremonial gear; how to make medicine from plants.  What if two steps were allowed for making an important contribution to the family.  Maybe three steps if they knew their lineage.  And maybe you could claim the prize in one giant step if you said you knew how to pray.

And, don’t even get me started on the prize at the end of the field!   What kind of thinking is that?! There is one prize and you are all in competition to get it!  Really?  So much for diversity, for different strengths and inclinations, different spiritual gifts.   

Before I retired, we sometimes did an exercise similar to this with clients.  What is wealth in Indian Country, we asked.  How does a man or woman come to gain respect?  

Don’t be mistaken, I rush to add.  Money is wonderful.  I love having a bank account and a comfortable house.  But let’s not get confused; there is a difference between having money and being wealthy. 

I want to be careful what paradigm I let inside my mind, and whose game I agree to play.

Circles, and other shapes, elongate and rotate to become flowers, one rolling into another, shapes and colors that are themselves meaning and message, furling and unfurling.  The slow opening of a fern, the baby coiled in the mother’s stomach, a flower lifting its head.  In these, Sara understands the gesture of human hands, the patterns of flight and the movement of fish.  

Underneath, blue veils unwind to display threads of brilliant red and gold, a purple shimmer, a woman’s shawl. Sara knows she is watching the heart of creation stream across the boundary of time, the essence and nature of what is to be, what is, and what was.  Not substance as we know it, but ecstatic consciousness aware of itself; she knew herself to be separate and whole  and perfect in this flood of beauty, because, exquisite as the images and their meanings are, they are subordinate to the euphoric love emanating from the pool.  If love were distilled, the result would be this lake at the heart of the mountain, a lake that isn’t water. 

Tears run down the watcher’s cheeks.  Whatever needs to be forgiven has already been.  Whatever the longing, the answer has already arrived.  Confidence is not lost and gained, because trust in the unnamable is absolute.         
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Still, kneeling, Sara bows her head.  “I am here, blessed one,” Sara says.  “I am the watcher, and I am here.”    

​The dream last night talked about transformation as the killing of consciousness, of what was, and the awakening to the new.  It didn’t just talk about it, I felt the process.  Writing the other books did not bring me to this.  Or if they did, I don’t remember.
 
I had asked the Dream Maker, “What is the point of the cave at the top of the mountain, the lair of the mountain lion.”  Finally, this morning, she answers.  As usual, when it does, I think, “Oh, of course.”   

In truth, it is only recently that I knew something of the cost of writing, or the humbling gift of it.  Or, have I said all this before?  Some people find this in weaving, in carving or some other act of creation.  Some have the power of voice to wake others, the divine inspiration of their spoken words  rouse the heart.  My gift is writing.  Alone in the woods between the hours of the deer and the coyote, the eagle and the owl.

Sometimes, my courage fails when the dive seems a little too deep.  I am afraid, and I pray.  I remind myself of my bloodline, the vivid intensity of my people, those who knew the value of the right way to live, and had the courage to do it.  So, in faith, I pick myself up.  This is what I’ve been given to do, the means of my becoming, the gift I deliver.  I asked, and this writing was the answer, the deliverance, the means, as well as the gift. 

Yesterday, back and forth I walked the property.  I talked out loud.  I tell the trees how beautiful they are.  The sky is blue with tints of lavender.  An eagle finds me.  And suddenly comes one of those moments promised to the faithful, and I was filled with love so fierce and consuming, I am stunned. 
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To be human!  To be on this amazing planet!  To participate in the intense truth of it, of us!  

I am grateful for you and others like us.  I believe in you, in your courage.  I celebrate your calling, and acknowledge the demands of your  work, your art, your gift.