I am pleased to announce my book, The North Road, is the winner of the TISBA (The Indie Spiritual Book Award) Award in the Fiction Category.

This book almost wrote itself, though it was written many years after learning the stories and medicine that are the primary threads through the book.  Some of the content I learned standing in the rimrock of the southwest while a woman told me about the stolen children.  As she and I looked across the desert from the village, I could see the children, feel the heartbreak.  But there was something else as well - I could see that the children were still alive; I could see their individual faces.
Other portions of The North Road include medicine I was taught when I was young, some I learned while living in the desert, some in the mountains.  But the story of the second sanctuary?  The children, who I had held in my heart for so long, began to speak.  Fortunately, I let them.  
Medicine is mysterious and magical.  We are surrounded by help.  Often it arrives unexpectedly, like this award.  In truth, I do not feel so much like the author of these books.  I feel visited by spirit.     

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.  

In 1978-ish I read Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko’s magical book.  Some reviewers said it was the first book by an American Indian writer that brought an AI style of storytelling to the written word.  Some said it should be counted as one of the best one hundred books in the century.  I can’t speak to that, but what I took from her is that underneath or inside ordinary life is the living story, the long version spreading throughout the dimensions of time and place, my critical role in it.  From this I began to take myself more seriously, my visions and dreams.  Some of the poems in A Language of Shape and Shadow are about this personal journey.

Ceremony is clearly written to be a ceremony, to have transformation effect on the reader.  Initially I was uneasy, even a little frightened as Spider Woman came inside and I could more clearly see the web of my life as she wove it.  First, of course, she took apart the false life I was living; she began to make something else, something bigger.  She wasn’t hesitant to tell me “no,” when I wanted to go back to what I’d had.  I’d invited her in and she was going to stay.  So, you can see that I owe Ms. Silko a lot; owe Thought Woman everything.

My books, The Blue Child Series, are not Ceremony; I don’t have Leslie’s genius, but they are a culmination of the journey I began in 1978.  And I have to add that some of the material does not seem to come altogether from me. 

Leslie Marmon Silko