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June O'Brien – Author . Fiction . Non Fiction . Poetry
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Not all Medicine is Mine

11/15/2013

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Not all spirits are mine to understand.  Not all places are mine to investigate.  Brave as a lion when I was young, I have learned to temper curiosity with wisdom. 

A few years ago I drove a along the Deschutes River where it rushes between steep rimrock bluffs.  On impulse, I turned up a dirt track that quickly reached a dead-end against a stone wall of tall vertical up-thrusts, shaped something like the pipes of an organ.  I got out, walked to the edge of the wall, peeked around, and was immediately overwhelmed by a high-pitched sound that reverberated around the little amphitheater.  The further I walked into its circumference the more intense the sound.  It penetrated my body, my skull where it seemed to rock from one hemisphere to the other making me dizzy.  I hesitated, but still, if anything, I am curious, so I walked further.  In the center of the little area the intensity was so amazing that I grew uneasy.  I wasn’t sure what was afoot, what the effect on me might be.  Still.

I traced the sound to a very small pool of water where hundreds of tiny frogs were ecstatically singing as one.  Their combined voices reverberated against the stone surround, breaking tones into finer and finer vibration.  I was relieved.  In her frog-shape, nature was busy.  Nothing more.  The frogs ignored my approach and continued to shake my cells. 

A bright color caught my eye and I went to investigate.  It was a child’s yellow toy.  Next to it was a soldier’s helmet pitted with bullet marks, several shell casings.  Both sat on the charred remains of a small fire.  A shiver ran up my already trembling spine.  My mind raced for explanations, but what was clear is that I was in a place where I didn’t belong.  Someone else prayed here.  I did not need to understand.  I did not need to know more.  I needed to leave. 

At the outer wall I paused, rocked back and forth across the plane of the entrance.  At the outer edge I could hear the sound, but if I rocked forward slightly, it was a different story. 

I don’t need to categorize what I experienced, what I saw.  Instead, I need to know when something is not mine.  I need to leave some questions unanswered.  I also need to know when to leave.  I think of this as an issue of spiritual boundaries; me and not-me. 

Along the river were plants I know, rocks who love me.  I stopped to talk with these.  I went to rimrock who is an old friend, to the stones where I once left a poem for him.  Walked up the sage-filled valley where I’d met the spirit deer, where I tracked the coyote in winter, where hawks and eagles nest.  I stopped in the mountains, collected Usnea, washed in my favorite cold creek, the one who once warned me about the road ahead. 

Mine and not-mine.  Boundaries. 

 


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Medicine and Science 

11/3/2013

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I remember when I read for the first time about non-local causation, the surprise of the physicists about their spinning electrons responding to each other even when separated.   I remember my surprise at their surprise.  I thought, “Grandma could have told you.”  And my father and mother; I could have added my bit.  It seemed to me that in large part science and I did not inhabit the same world.  Going through the old medicine journals as I have been doing brings this up again. 

Medicine.  I think about those signatures of nature that allow us to send messages to each other, even across the world.  I think about the elasticity of the psyche, its reach, the color it sends me when there is trouble; the color of spiritual truth.  Of jealousy.  When I look at old art or architecture, I can see that I am not the only one that knows this language. 

I have an old porcelain pin of the Blue Madonna made in Eastern Europe a long time ago.  She has very clearly defined points of light on and outside her body.  If I imitate her; if I find those places on my own body, in my own aura and then, holding these, I meditate, something happens.  I enter a state I didn’t know was possible.  I find the source of her wild heart in containment.  Her quiet exultation. 

I can do a similar thing with temples, their ceilings.  Something very old is encoded in the strangest places.  Joseph Campbell knew this.  My teacher did too.  She was American Indian, but her cultural knowledge did not prevent her from exploring the messages from other cultures.  In fact, it showed her how.  Sometimes she would tell me to meditate on an image she brought so I could tell her what it meant.  By meditate, she did not mean only looking.  She meant spiritual penetration.

When I do this, my world expands.  New realities open, new teachings surprise me.  The language of spirit is clearer.  The coyote comes to say goodbye.  A beloved plant allows me to see her spirit with my eyes.  In the forest I see a creature not in a biology book.  When this happens I know that I am not to be caught in the small places the dominant culture offers.  The filter there is too confining.  This one that calls me, though immense, is only one.  But it is enough.  I can spend a lifetime emerged in it, and not know all there is. 

However, the medicine I know is not without structure.  It has its requirements; training is not for the easily daunted.  The novels I wrote are based in these principles as invitation into a process, or to support a journey already well under way.  They are meant to point to what is possible.  They find their home with kindred hearts. 

Just as a house can be awakened to spirit, just as place has its spirit, and as plants have their affinities, so are the books awake.  Their roots are fixed in the Other so that they can become living food, medicine.  They will talk to each reader differently.  If they’d been written as descriptive formula, they would have lost this quality. 

Though I am not yet writing a third novel in the series, I am still on the journey, am already in Mexico with Blue.  She hasn’t said why this is necessary.  I hope she knows that I do not speak Spanish, much less any of the indigenous languages.  I feel her prickling ‘talk’ at the back of my mind.  Perhaps Spanish will not be required. 

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    June O'Brien is an author of fiction, non fiction and poetry, living in the Pacific Northwest.

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We hunt the soul's path in the underbrush,
up the limestone hills, in the dark rivers between stars.
The Blue Child Series
June O'Brien – Author . Fiction . Non Fiction . Poetry
Shelton, WA 
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