I think of a story's source as a living spirit who arrives with her offering.  She may come with little more than an opening scene, a faintly outlined character.  Though her invitation is seductive, haunting and persistent, I am always reluctant to begin because I know her ways a little better now.  I know the trip will be arduous, that she is not taking me to the land of milk and honey, but a place of landslides, eruptions, creatures with ambiguous intention.  She breaks apart the ground beneath my human feet. 

The word Muse seems too tame a word for her, related to music.  Unless we are talking of the wild fiddling of gypsies, this archetype doesn’t work for me.  Perhaps Daemon is a bit closer to who companions me when I write.  Exhausting, unpredictable, insistent, and, yes, magical.  Something or someone that I called, or called me, and now stalks the house while I sleep.  I can hear the tap, tap of her hooves across the floor, see her impatient face peeking around the bedroom door. 

I know that she is teaching me what I most want to learn, taking me past the insufficiency of the ordinary, answering my longing.  But when she doesn’t allow me to have that second cup of coffee, take a shower, or ever build a fire when the house is cold, I pout.  My teacher said that I have to remind these old entities that I have a body, but I am hesitant to do so.  If she left, I’d be bereft. 

Once I begin to write, only she knows where the story is going.  My only job is to find the words, stay up late, forego the second cup.  I say this as if it is easy.  I protest, “No one will believe that!”  But she insists on the truth I don’t yet see. 

In fact, if I push away from the story she tells, it becomes barren.  No deep well.  No source except the shallows of my personality.  If I understand her correctly, she says I am a bigger self than who I think I am, and it is that self – that eternal soul – that she knows.  And the story, of course.  Always the story.  

I want to let you know that I am offering both novels in The Blue Child Series free on Kindle for the next two days.  You can go to Amazon or just click on my books page.  It is to offer them free that I signed up for Kindle Select, because I want the books to be read.  A friend said that the first book can be understood as ‘the calling,’ and that the second understood as ‘the journey.’ 

These books began in a repetitive dream.  Finally I strongly felt that I would have failed myself if I did not write the story.  In that way you could say that I was ‘called’ to write them.  You could say that ‘the journey’ was the process. 

The process has driven me deeper into what I know, but I also have to admit that at times – writing in the night or early morning – I wrote about things I didn’t know I knew.  As I re-read sections, I’d say to myself, “I didn’t know that.”  It is as if I was also reading the material for the first time.  Maybe this is how creativity works.

So here is an excerpt.  I have been careful about ‘spoilers,’ but this is from the second book, The North Road. 

“Charley puts more wood on the fire and sprinkles a dried herb atop, the one to keep the channel open to the sky.  He will need all the help he can call.  Next he takes off his clothes and lays them neatly on the cot where he sleeps and unbraids his long, gray hair. 

A pottery bottle rests on the fireplace hearth.  It is made from red earth gathered from a place below the border, a small area where clay and silica mix.  There in that precious place a night blooming vine grows; its lush flower is drawn in black on the outside of the small jar.  The paint used contains the flower’s nectar as does the oil inside.  Red grains of dirt so fine they are dust give the oil its color. 

From the fluted top Charley pours oil into his hands and starting with his feet rubs its red color over his body.  Last of all, he runs his fingers through his hair, working the oil from scalp to the end of the longest strands.  He smiles at how dark those are, how long ago his body made them. 

Charley leaves his hair loose and pulls his clothes on.  He does not know what will happen in the next few hours, or even the next few moments, but he is as ready as a man alone can be, his body prepared for death.  Or battle.  If he lives through what is coming it will be because the blue lady intervenes as Charley knows that his medicine alone is not enough.  Even with the decades of medicine people behind him, it is not enough”

In The Blue Child Series, particularly in the first book, On the Mountain, I included, indirectly, knowledge of the spiritual use of plants.  I did it in a sideways, elliptical manner, as this knowledge isn’t taught directly, and is in no book that I know of.  Perhaps I shouldn’t say that it is in no book, because I have found bits and pieces in old anthropology papers, that sort of thing.  In these it is as if the anthropologist doesn’t know what’s been told, as if they believe they are recording the fantastic and unbelievable mythology of a dying people. 

My grandmother knew the medicine of plants, and her mother before her.  They were so well-known that people sent a description of their symptoms over distances hoping for a return packet.  But, alas, my grandmother had two favorites among her many grandchildren; I was the favorite of her old age.  Snippets.  Hints.  No trips to the forest.  

But many years later, there came a woman into my life who knew my grief about this loss of medicine.  She knew the spiritual path of plants, and said she would teach me for the sake of my grandmother.  I couldn’t have guessed the arduous journey ahead, the miracles and marvels.  One of the most important things she taught me is that the plants are a path, one a woman can follow alone without the support of others, without the restrictions of religion.  The plants are community enough, she said.  

She also said that I could spend a lifetime of study on only one plant and not know all there is to know about it.  But that is how it is, isn’t it?  When we choose a path, or it chooses us, if we stay with it, we can go as far in understanding and experience as it is possible for a person to go. 

I like to think my ancestors chose this path of the medicine for me.  Or was it the plants themselves?  What I know is that they’ve taken care of me for a long time, that there are warriors among them, and those with gentleness more powerful than a mother’s touch.