I am quiet.  I do not go to the mall or eat in a restaurant.  If I need to buy food, I go and return.  I don’t let myself be diverted by other errands and possibilities.  When I am in deep prayer I keep myself in the territory of the Holy.      

Before I begin, I prepare the container that is used only for the medicine plants.  I attune my awareness for what is coming.  The plant and I are in alignment.  We are one.  We are enmeshed.  She talks to me and I hear.  She opens my eyes even before I begin.  I never doubt what comes. 

And in this long relationship, sometimes a plant will come of its own accord to take care of a problem, or open a means.  Medicine can be subtle, but she can also rattle the house.  She brought me to this home in which I live, and told me how to take care of the land.   She gave me my last job before retirement, and told me when to leave. 

There are those who know the plants in ways far different than I do.  They are deeply engaged in knowledge about which I know only a little, but the medicine I understand is what the Divine sent to me.  When the offer came, I was so amazed and grateful I leapt at the opportunity.  I worked in the early morning, at noon, at dusk and midnight.  I sat in the rain with the barest cover.  I dipped in winter’s water. 

I find no contradiction between this medicine and Sundance, Longhouse or Christianity.  The Creator is large enough to hold all these.  But each has its own strictness and if we throw away this or that of the teaching, we cut away the root, the possibility of deepening intimacy.  Sometimes it is much later that we understand why a tiny bit of the discipline is as it is. 

The plants are powerful.  As some of you know I enjoyed Joseph Campbell, but was dismayed to hear him say one day that cultures focused on the plants did not have the depth and range as those focused on the animals.  I remember smiling, thinking that even Joseph had his limits.  Anthropologists and mythologists were not told everything, and, even when they were, they had no reference for understanding some of what was said. 

There are times when I return to what I know as if I was new to it, to humility and love and gratitude.  I renew my commitment, recall all the times my life was saved, my family pulled from the brink, the visions and visitations, the dreaming. 
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When I do this, the light shifts, the floor of some places becomes covered with lapping waves.  I am not pulled into fear and dismay and confusion.  I am not diverted from the Divine. 

I have been given great gifts from my bloodline, my childhood teachings, the spiritual path of plants, the presence of drums and songs.  Because these are alive in me something is expected in return – to hear, to see, to be quiet and  know in the presence of profound gratitude.  

The pleasure of those experiences when I was younger somewhat rested in my need to be reassured beyond doubt, and the mountain’s kind answer.  I needed her to tell me she was still there, always had been, always would be.  I think I don’t need this as much as I once did as doubt doesn’t plague me, so she brings the mountain to me, the rushing water, the deep mystery of the slack tide under moonlight and beneath the hovering presence of the mountain.

Yet, that urgent need I once felt to arrive in the mountains before first light, occasionally comes in other ways.   Last night, just as I was ready to sleep, I abruptly swung my legs to the floor and tore the house apart looking for the drawing of a female Old One that a friend drew for me some time ago, black ink, simple and compelling.   I am terrible to give things away and forget, so I tried to imagine circumstances in which I might have done so again.  I couldn’t have.  I wouldn’t have.  Not her.     

As these things are apt to be, I found her finally right where I’d already looked several times.  I am reminded of how it is sometimes when I am searching for a particular plant – I look and look and look, then find it at my feet, there and not there.  She makes me laugh.  Sometimes.

So, the mountain found me last night, not as tracks in the snow, the bear’s den under a dry bank, not as song in the trees, but as an emergency of unreasonable feeling, a compelling urgency.  I am wondering if the Old One wishes to have a role in this new book, if the story of the mountain, any mountain, is necessarily incomplete without her. 

Or is she here, again, in the woods around the house?  Has she come to take care of trouble?  Is she looking for a place to rest?  Tonight, I’ll go outside and talk to her, listen to what she has to say.  If she calls me into the trees, I will go.  I will look for her place in the story. 

I trust her.  I trust the calling of the mountain, her bright song of starlight on snow, the falling of her water from fresh to salt.   I have been here before, felt the creep up my spine of someone watching, looked over my shoulder to meet her loving presence. 
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And the Old Ones, the children of the mountain,  savage as they can be, I have never know anything from them but love, though it is true that sometimes I have gone outside at night and been clearly sent right back into the house.