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.