​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.       

I study.  I think long thoughts.  I walk the floor.  But when understanding finally comes, it is in terms that are beyond my intelligence.  I am blown away to become a sprinkling of stars across the rift.  I ‘get it.’  I ‘know’, even if I struggle to put what that is into words.  

In the Sundance Tree, I knew something about the human relationship to the mythological World Tree, the axis under which so many of the world’s mystics came to revelation.  That tree with medicine at its root, and the rift at its top, with the spiraling ascent of sage, or bird, of the soaring of the spirit past the finite to the infinite.  I am not a Sundancer, but I take from this something profound.

With the arrival of this sort of experience, I have left the known.  Ask Jung.  Or Campbell, who studied all the worlds mythologies and religions, who criticized Christianity.  Listen to what his wife reports about his response to the cross above the door in the hospital room where he died.  “I get it,” he said.  Or something similar. 

My point is that sometimes we don’t choose the metaphoric context for the conversation with the Divine.  Something peripheral, or abandoned, chooses us.  It becomes the medium.  And sometimes, just as we almost have it nailed down, it slips sideways.  We try to hang onto both the shore where we’ve been and the unknown to which we’ve been mandatorily invited.   Not possible. 

We let go to become the ascending smoke, the prayerful bird, the watcher above the world.  We become prayer that moves through us as a continual stream.   Praying.  Prayer.  No difference.

We become like the old people.  Aunt Molly praying as she made biscuits.  Papa walking through the woods, one sentence directed to us, the next to God.  The medicine man telling a joke as he mumbles to the plants.  The singing fisherman.  The listening weaver.   

Ordinary.  Extraordinary.  Never leaving the connection, always in a distant place, a state of being, no matter the task at hand.    Only this.