​And I wasn’t the only one. Everyone I approached about the project found themselves immediately intrigued. The ghost and the cigarette. It is a collection of symbols that pulls at the creative subconscious…

​Smoke, the gateway to otherworld, the conduit to communication with the gods or the dead or our own deepest fears. Not just a conduit, but also a conductor, deadly in its own right, leaching the animate from our very lungs, blackening them, corrupting the core of our bodies until we can no longer draw in life from the air itself, smothering us.

​And yet smoke is also a telltale sign that at least once here there was life. For there was something to burn; there was fire. Fire that threatens, but also makes the complexity of human life possible. Fire gave us safety and community. Some even believe fire gave us language and story itself.

​And then there’s cigarettes. A symbol of humankind’s suicidal obsession with dancing on boundary between exhilaration and death. We have always flirted with the edge of existence, grinning victoriously down at the licking fires of the afterlife we believe cannot reach us. Though somewhere deep inside, we know we are lying to ourselves. Whether we push our bodies and minds nearly too far with our quest for career or for physical achievement or for artistic fulfillment, we taunt the Reaper. Until we slip, and he doesn’t.

​This is where the ghost haunts us. The reminder that there is no escape from that Reaper’s final blow. The ghost slips through the veil of smoke, no longer seduced by that tightrope walk mortals crave. The ghost reminds us of the eternal suffering that awaits after a life lived for selfishness alone. Or, too, it can tell of the love that can survive beyond the confines of the mortal coil, beyond the simplicity of feeble human logic. 

The ghost and the cigarette: that shifting, twisting place, just obscured from our vision. That place we know is there, though we try so hard not to acknowledge it. That place where death touches life…and life touches death.

Each author Maya and I have invited touched on this place in a different way. I invite you to join us by candlelight, by flashlight, or by firelight—a safe distance from stark reality. Sit down and part the pages. Let the dark narrow your vision.  Take my hand, or Maya’s, or Theodore’s, or another. Take that hand that reaches to you from beyond the smoke of one last cigarette, and let’s see for ourselves what lies beyond.

​Kay, the owner of The Artfull Garden, suggested to Tonya that she would be wonderful friends with Tina as they were both in the same time of life and both loved books. Tonya dug in her heels. Tonya did not like being told who she might and might not get on with. (Tonya was much feistier in those days!)
 
“You will really love her!”
 
“Will not.”
 
“Will, too.”
 
“Will not.”
 
“Will, too.”

​But finally it came to pass that Tonya accomplished her dream: she published her first book. Blushing and stuttering, she approached Tina about carrying this little blue tome in her shop. Tina was gracious and kind and welcomed Tonya and her little blue tome with open arms. With help from Kay, she and Tonya planned out the book launch for this book, SPECTRE OF INTENTION, and hosted it in Kay’s shop.
 
It was a wonderful success.

​This was not the only wild scheme that Tina would agree to over the years. (Tonya is full of those. But to be fair, so is Tina!) As Tina grew and developed her business and her outreach into the community, Tonya closed down Rustling Sage and turned her focus to book publishing, issuing three more tomes with Tina as her home bookstore for book launches, writing classes, literacy fundraisers, and a two-year author reading series. Tina even gave Tonya a key to the shop, she was there so often!
 
When it became apparent that Jacobsen’s had truly become a part of the Hillsboro community and needed more event space, Tonya and her family (along with their friend Brad Cameron) came down after hours and moved bookshelves, furniture, and books – lots of them. Tonya and Tina even snuck out of the motherly duties one night and redecorated the front end of the bookstore!

Overall, it is estimated that together Tonya and Tina coordinated nearly fifty events together in their five-year run as partners in crime. (Pictures below.) Running your own business, whether publishing or bookselling, is always an emotional rollercoaster. It was invaluable to have someone with whom to share the ride. But the bookselling industry has been in a tough place these last few years and it looks like that ride has finally come to an end. Tonya-and-Tina will now become Tonya and Tina (even though no one is quite sure which name belongs to whom).

​So farewell to my partner-in-crime.
 
And hello to my dear, dear friend and hello to the endless possibilities that lay before a brilliant, ambitious woman with dreams enough to build a community on!
 
“You will really love her!”
 
“Will not.”
 
“Will, too.”
 
“Will not.”
 
“Will, too.”
 
“Yeah, Kay. You are right. I really, really will.”

Most famous of their artistic creations were the Silver Eye of Guge, statues so cunningly crafted that no seam from their forging could be detected. The silver-eyed gods and goddesses were highly prized through out Buddhist lands.

What exactly transpired to end 700 years of culture and prosperity, we can’t be completely certain, but there are legends. In the legends, the Jesuits came. The last king of Guge welcomed them sometime in August of 1624 and encouraged them to set up a church in the city, even converted to Christianity himself. His brother, the abbot of the most powerful monastery in Guge, protested and finally declared an all out war. Aligning himself with neighboring Ladakh, the abbot betrayed his kingdom and guided the enemy through a successful siege. The king, unable to watch his people suffer any longer at Ladakh hands, surrendered. He, his family, and his traitor brother were all beheaded. 

It is believed that the cave in the walls of Tsaparang which holds the decapitated remains of thirty individuals is the final resting place of the king and his retinue.*

Guge did not long out live its king.

The Ladakh were harsh masters and nature grew harsher still. The last king had ordered work on an aqueduct that would bring water from the melt off of the holy mountain. Legend claims that this angered the gods whose lands lay between and they punished his hubris with the destruction of his kingdom and by taking away all the waters from the once bountiful land around the spires. Angry gods or no, the land soon grew arid and inhospitable and the descendants of refuges became wanderers once more.

And the kingdom of Guge vanished.

And with it, the art and the culture…the dreams of its people.

So Spake Me…

The abbot had his reasons. I’m sure the king did as well. Religion was just as much a game of politics then as it is now. In the end the reasons don’t really matter, we are only left with the results: the destruction of a heritage, the extinguishing of possibilities.

The abbot could not allow for other possibilities, other ideas, so he shut them down at the expense of all ideas. At the expense of life.

It is an ancient story, a heartbreakingly familiar one. One that continues daily from the destruction of Buddhist artifacts in Afghanistan to the taunts on the playground.

In those self-righteous days of my feminist youth, I believed that one day I would have to fight like a she-cat to maintain the possibilities of my future daughter. And in my heart-of-hearts, I believed I would lose against the prejudices of a society that could not allow other possibilities.

I never considered that it might be my son that would find himself shut off from so many of the wonders the world has to offer.

Don’t paint…unless it’s monsters.
Don’t write…unless it’s battle scenes.
Don’t think…unless it’s about sports.
Don’t dance…unless it’s the drunken bounce.
Don’t sing…unless it’s rap.
Don’t play music…unless it’s heavy metal.

Don’t stop to enjoy a beautiful garden. Don’t wear flowers on your shirts. Don’t let color into your wardrobe. Don’t enjoy the company of girls. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

Stay here in the little narrow space we’ve designed for you or we will wage war on you. We will taunt you. Or will we will taunt others who try to escape on T.V. or in books, so that you will fear to peer beyond these cardboard walls.

Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. So much beautiful art, so much amazing culture that we will never know. I see it disappearing already.

I can’t stop it completely. And I wouldn’t. We find a measure of our strength in life through our gender roles. And I would never deliberately subject my children to the taunts I endured when I walked in their shoes. (And if you think this sort of idea extinguishing can’t take a life just as well as the abbot’s armies, you are wrong.)

But what I lack in bravado, I make up for in unabashed enthusiasm. For what greater motivator has there ever been than joy?

Yes, my daughter, it’s fascinating that the Segway can stand on two wheels!
Yes, my daughter, you are powerful when you figure it out for yourself!

Yes, my son, you created a beautiful arrangement of flowers!
Yes, my son, you can fly to moon on the wings of your own voice!

Yes! Yes, you can.

Yes!

The island nation that once ruled as far as her boats could take her. It is a place where myth and history intertwine in a rich, misty landscape all too conducive to growing stories larger that the lives that might have originate them.

Arthur. Whether he rose from dream or flesh, he rose in a time when the Celts needed a hero to cling to. When the bands of Saxon mercenaries invited by Lord Vortigern became the swarms of Saxon invaders, when the Celts lost their homeland to these invaders, Arthur became the light, the courage, and the memory their righteous last stand against the godless savages.
 
We all know how creative memories can be.
 
Especially when we NEED to believe.
 
And we have always needed to believe. More story than history, only the vaguest scraps of historical data remain from this time of limited literacy and endless siege to provide any glimpse of the basis for the King Arthur legend. Was he, Artúr mac Áedáin, the son of a Scotch-Gaelic warlord? Was he, Arturus, the anthropomorphization of a forgotten ancient Welsh bear god immortalized in Ursa Major? Was he, Ambrosius Aurelianus, a Romano-Briton of noble parentage orphaned during the Saxon invasion? Was he, King Arthwyr ap Meurig ap Tewdrig, a Welsh King of the House of Bran? Was he, Lucius Artorius Castus, a Roman cavalry commander from the Scythian steppe? 

 
We can’t know truly know.
 
And yet we carry forward 1,500 years the mythological memory of this man as a symbol of the golden age of Albion.
 
Albion. The land of giants, of giant dreams and giant possibilities of the best humanity can achieve.
 
Arthur. The leader who fought at our sides to preserve this golden dream. The leader, who, despite his fall, despite our own fall into darkness through the weaknesses of our humanity, promises to return in our hour of greatest need.
 
We wait. We dream. And in our dreams we find our hope.
 
Albion: the promise of the Once and Future King.

So Spake Me…
The King Arthur myth has always fascinated me. For the story to have survived so long, so vividly in the collective mind of Western culture suggests to me that beyond the smaller, specific tales contained within it—the battles, the quests, the trials, and the loves won and lost—the King Arthur story contains a very special vessel: a promise.

 
That sounds so small and simple, but truthfully it is as large as the infinite human imagination. That vessel carried the dreams of the conquered Celts in Arthur’s own supposed day; it carried the dream of an idealized courtly world in the medieval/early renaissance days of Chretien de Troyes and Sir Thomas Malory; it carried the dream of feminine power in the more modern day of Marion Zimmer Bradley.

And then there is today. Here and now, when we receive the story once more through the eyes of Merlin from the BBC, it doesn’t matter that it isn’t high literature. What matters is that this ancient vessel carries forward the dreams of a new generation in the language of their own storytellers.
 
What I find most fascinating is which dreams this generation chooses to lay in the chalice. While I watch with my children, I see many: The dream that should the child strive hard enough, he can overcome a broken home, an unredeemable father and go on to become a good, even great human being. The dream that should the child stand resolute in her convictions and steadfast despite overwhelming wrongs, her wisdom will raise her up to a place of respect and admiration. The dream that we might all have the chance someday to cleave to an unwavering friend, one who stands by us throughout the nightmare days, and reminds us relentlessly of all we are capable of being.
 
In a time when so many feel lost, isolated by the trauma of a broken family, cut off by insurmountable debt, shut away by a social media society, these dreams of rising above, of finally being seen for who we truly are, of being valued soul-deep by a friend we can trust until death-do-us-part, these dreams are the chivalry of our own age.

Even 1,500 years later, we still need to believe.
 
We still need to believe in the promise of Albion, in the promise of the Once and Future King. 
 
And the promise is simple: 
 
Humanity can achieve amazing, beautiful heights, and though we may fall, we will find our way to rise up once again.

Let us begin with Merlin, the blonde-haired boy with no father whom King Vortigern ordered sacrificed in order that the king’s tower might finally stand. I know this tale well. It sits on the shelf in my son’s room in the voice of Jane Yolen. This young Merlin bravely saved his own life by convincing Vortigern that the tower fell each night because it was built atop two warring dragons. The king’s men released the dragons and the red slew the white in mortal combat, predicting the triumph of the Welsh over the Saxons.

Dr. Wood walks with us to the hilltop, overgrown with bushes and trees, only the faintest remnants suggesting an unnatural arrangement of stone ever stood watch here. Dinas Emrys, Fortress of Ambrosius, Tower  of Merlin, Place of Emrys. Follow the broken wooden signpost hidden by a thatch of greenery. Climb to the top of that hill and be where the legend began.

Let us end with Arthur, a leader to inspire the splendor of Camelot, a noble king who ruled from a round table where all voices were equal. Let us end with Arthur on the field of Camlann where he lay slain. Let us listen to him three times beg Sir
Bedevere to return Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake. Let us watch him float into the mists in the arms of his sister Morgan Le Fay as she bears him off to Avalon, our Once and Future King.

Dr. Wood walks us to the intersection of the Gaelic Fionn mac Cumhaill cycle of the magical sword,  the cup of eternal life, and the king who will rise again and the Scotch-Gaelic war hero Arturius (Artúr mac Áedáin) who died in the battle at Camboglanna, a roman fort along Hadrian’s famous wall. Follow our guide into a gentleman’s potting shed where the relics of this historic site lie propped against the wall remembering a time when they had housed heroes who would inspire hearts for thousands of years to come.

So Spake Me…
My children know more about funerals than weddings. And just recently we were back in Idaho at the family homestead for another. Our family has its traditions. A remembering before the funeral, a potluck after. It’s a time for stories, a time to reconnect with family members you’d nearly forgotten you shared a story with at all. A time to remember you are not alone in all of this.

It can be a bit surreal, not just dealing with the unreality of the loss you’ve just been dealt, but that expansion and contraction of time where you share a closeness
just as much through what passed before your memory began as through what   passed since last Christmas Eve—divorces, health scares, the blossoming of children into young adults, the fading of the parental guard into infirmity…or  death.

And the loss of our story.

 I can see that field of corn stretching on for miles under that vivid blue sky. I can picture the bull snake my uncle vacuumed out from behind the wash machine for my screaming aunt. I can picture the coyote that took down their loyal dog, because for him it wasn’t a game. It was survival.
 
It was survival. The fierce determination, the relentless drive that kept my mother, my uncles, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents chipping away at that ruthless land until they had claimed more than a thousand acres of sagebrush for fields and roads.

A tiny little cottage in the woods next to the original schoolhouse. My great-grandparents and then my grandparents lived in that schoolhouse. So much history there.

The trees that held my grandmother’s beloved owls; the spooky root cellar where my eldest uncle would snitch jars of jam, the outhouse (indoor plumbing simply wasn’t private!), the stone shed my uncle burned down with the burning barrel still placed like an altar before it as a reminder for every grandchild who came after.

The pig sty that held pigs as big as horses (I swear!). A random garden gate leading to nowhere but the memory of a mythical strawberry garden.  An apricot tree draping over the passage to a henhouse that purportedly once held hens.

So many places for cousins to scheme and to dream. Under the draping bows of the pines, we hid from prying adult eyes and lived other lives. On the wooden slider swing painted a peeling turquoise we sang and laughed and gossiped. Never underrate gossip. It is those stories which an inter-related scatter of individuals into a family strong and united.

Those places. The landscape of our stories. Dr. Wood might take us to a tidy dollhouse home with neatly painted siding and precisely trimmed trees. He might tell us that here once stood the original schoolhouse handed-down through generations until the lack of regulation on methane gas pollution from the neighboring dairy farm drove the final owners from their home. He would show us a place devoid of a red and black shag carpet, with no bear skin rug from the night a black bear wandered into camp and scared the pants off my uncle and my grandpa. No part of this pristine new property would be constructed of the stone picked by hand from the fields (where it grew faster than the weeds!).

There’s nothing left for the archaeologists to dig up. The new owners cleaned up thoroughly after us.  The only remains are the small woods that my great-grandpa planted for my great-grandma out in the middle of the Idaho desert. But those trees no longer hold shadowy secrets of generations beneath their bows. In fact, they look embarrassed to be there with their skirts hiked up so high you don’t have tilt your head to look up them.

So I sit instead up on the hilltop of my cousin’s family homestead and I grip his shoulder as he looks into a future without a father, without a grandfather for the children of his newly broken home. I hold tight my other cousin who suffered the same loss only three years before. I look out into the huge crowd at the top of this hill and I look out across the miracle miles of fields that no longer belong to my family, but are still so painfully beautiful to me, and I know that we will carry our own story forward, maybe not with perfect accuracy, but with perfect meaning: watch the damn burning barrel when you light it, bust your ass until you’ve created a miracle in the desert—even if it takes generations, never stop learning (even if you have to move into the local schoolhouse to do it), and if family calls—because a good Orth never actually comes out and asks for help—you drop EVERYTHING and you go.
 
Because in the end, family is everything.

Here’s to my family, from Idaho to Oregon, Colorado, California, Texas, Germany, and beyond. Through all the times we didn’t think we’d make it through, to amazing joys that have set our hearts free for that one perfect moment.

This story is ours.

Additional Reading
Michael Wood's In Search of Myths and Heroes - King Arthur
Wikipedia: Dinas Emrys
A Date with Dinas Emrys
National Parks: Dinas Emrys
Wikipedia: Camboglanna
Wikipedia: Historical Basis for King Arthur
Wikipedia: Fionn mac Cuumhaill




 
 


 

There is a place in the world where that is more true than any other, where the residue of ancient lives is thicker, richer in the dense, dry soil than anywhere else on earth. 
             
Wonderwerk Cave.
             
At the edge of the Kalahari Desert, this cave extends nearly a mile into the hillside with lives buried in the strata beneath your soles going down 20 feet into the earth. 

The murmurs begin at the surface. In the front area of the cave, we find the memory of 1909 homesteader P.E. Bosman, his wife, eleven sons, and three daughters. Here are the flagstones they laid to keep down the dust; here is the crevice in the cave wall where they built a make-shift oven to cook their meals;
here in this corner they stored their food.
             
Ending 130 feet deep into the cave, even earlier residents left their stories on the walls. Paintings done in ocher, white, and black, along with wall and stone carvings hint at the steady emergence of symbolic thinking and the evolution of ritual which in turn, some suggest, begat that very fundamentally human art…the art of language.
             
Walk along these cool, dry stone walls back into 1,000 years of painting, 10,000 years of engraving. Pass beyond Bosman’s temporary home. What lies in the 2 million years below and beyond these surface layers? 

Because of this dry air you breathe, we can see so much of what was left behind perfectly preserved. We can watch our ancient hominid ancestors divide the cavern’s spaces between the piles of soft plants gathered in their sleeping quarters for their bedding and the tool-making areas where we can watch their technologies evolve from simple flake tools through more sophisticated stone hand axes up through the more refined technologies of bone and wooden arrow points. Alongside these practical tools, we see eggshell beads emerge, decorated water flasks, and finally pottery and animal evidence of a shift away from hunter-gather living to sheepherding. 
             
Layer, by layer, by layer.
             
Through the dark.
             
How did they make their lives so far from the sun? How did they shape tools, mend clothing, care for their children in utter darkness?
             
Fire.

 And here is where Wonderwerk Cave takes on a significance even greater than its 2 million years of archeological history. Wonderwerk Cave holds the oldest evidence of humankind’s controlled use of fire. It dates our ancestors—mostly like Homo erectus—as using fire to cook food at nearly 1 million years ago. 
              
Charred bone fragments from rodents, antelope, and horse-like mammals, along with charred plant matter, and surface fracturing of ironstone, whisper from the depths of the soil of a huge change on the horizon for our ancestors. The technology of fire brought safety from predators, the ability for groups to set up long-term camps in caves such as this one, safety from severe cold, and modest protection from insects. Cooked food offered a form a pre-digestion that allow greater use of nutrients for non-digestive functions—such as fueling our increasingly creative brains and larger bodies. It is during this time our ancestors also developed smaller digestive tracts and molars, leading some anthropologists to believe that the evolution of our ancestors’ very bodies may have been molded by this new technology.
             
But there is something else a little less tangible that fire gave us as a species: a center, a place to gather and come home to. While we sat around the campfire, we evolved something more than bigger brains and smaller stomachs. We evolved our humanity. With time spent around the campfire came an evolution in social dynamic, ritual, language, an ever-increasing encyclopedia of group knowledge and custom. We passed along our wisdom; we stretched our creativity; we created the stories that defined us as a people.

And through these stories we became a people.

"The control of fire would have been a major turning point in human evolution. The impact of cooking food is well documented, but the impact of control over fire would have touched all elements of human society,” said Michael Chazan of the University of Toronto, one of the researchers at the Wonderwerk site. 
             
"Socializing around a camp fire might actually be an essential aspect of
what makes us human."

There is something magical about a campfire. Beyond the warmth and the light which are so welcoming in the cold, dangerous uncertainty of night, there is something about watching the hypnotic dance of the flame transform a simple piece of wood into something other: smoke, ash, and neat cubes of coals.

Food cooked over those flames tastes different somehow, brighter, more distinctive. Is that the elemental heat of the fire or the patience in tending it on the spit, the stick, or in a small foil packet at the edge of the coals? 
             
Stories and songs mean more there, shared so closely in that pocket of light. The flicker of flame across faces deepens the mystery, enlivens the emotions. The day is done, the soul is settled, and the words, the notes are meant for this select company alone. After they are sounded, they settle into the flame, swirl up through the light and the heat-warped air, and take their place in the forever of the stars.

May you make a moment tonight and remember the magic.

McGregor Museum Kimberly: Wonderwerk Cave

Encounter South Africa: Wonderwerk Cave

Wikipedia: Wonderwerk Cave

Million-year-old ash hints at origins of cooking

Hot Find! Humans Used Fire 1 Million Years Ago

Evidence That Human Ancestors Used Fire One Million Years Ago
 
Scientists find signs of ancient man-made fire

But always in the stories it falls. As the Thunderbird, it merely crumbles away after many snows—though the people are warned not to look at its stones lest they anger the Great Spirit. As the gift of the Great Spirit, it is destroyed by his two sons, Klickitat the Totem-Maker (Mt. Adams) and Wyeast the Singer (Mt. Ranier), as they battle for the love of a woman—either Mt. St. Helens or Sleeping Beauty
Peak. Whether the lovers were originally mountains or became mountains as punishment for their destruction depends on the teller.

And as for the peaceful bridge between the two quarrelling peoples? They were not able to cease their wicked ways and when the woman their father offered as an example of peace and harmony became instead further fuel for their jealous rages, the Great Spirit struck down the bridge they did not deserve and transformed the chiefs and the woman into the snow peaks of Mt. Adam, Mt. Ranier, and the lady Mt. St. Helens. Even this did not stop the brothers quarrelling as they continued to hurl rock and fire at one another causing the channel of the Columbia to
narrow and roughen into the Cascades of the Columbia.
 
And so, in most of the stories, the Bridge of the Gods ends in rage and shattered hearts…and in the bitter disappointment of the father.

So Spake Me…

My family and I spent the weekend on the Washington end of the modern bridge of the gods at a resort called Skamania Lodge. If you’ve never been to the Columbia Gorge, it can be difficult to imagine a landscape that could inspire such huge stories: a thunderbird that could span the width of a major river, volcanoes hurling their rage like jealous lovers, scenery so lush, dramatic, and awe-inspiring that it could bring a brief peacetime to two resentful and greedy brother gods.
 
This is the landscape of wildest imagination and vividest daydreaming.
 
Of course, in order to hear the stories the soil and the stones have to tell, one must first be still. This does not included being rushed from the breakfast buffet to the hiking to the swimming pool to the badminton—oh, damn, we missed the s’mores making—to the museum to the gift shop to the burger joint. And there we go…back out of town!
 
Breathe.

I wondered at the end how I could have been right in the heart of Nature at her greatest and still not felt a part of nature. Speed, for certain. And the rain, of course, which tended to chase us indoors. The prepackaged experience was another. A hiking path so carefully marked, offering views of the
golf course, of homes. 
 
Sometimes I’ve noticed I feel deliberately chased out of nature. The woods behind our home have become the natural habitat for indigents and drug-addicts who attack young girls. At the resort, the sense that you had to keep moving so as not to be in the way of other hikers coming along behind, the feeling that you MUST stay on the trail to preserve the habitat. No scrabbling up a hillside just to see where it went. No making tubular confetti out of snake grass just for fun. There are too many of us now. If we enjoy it to its fullest, we’ll destroy it.

I remember nights beneath the trees, watching the black branches brush across the stars and stir the clouds around the moon. I remember drinking in the
wind like it was more necessary to my survival that food or water. I remember peace and I remember songs and I remember daydreaming so many impossible possibilities.
 
Will my children ever experience that? Will they sit out on the back porch and watch the woods sway? Or will they have to come in because the cloud of mosquitoes from the too-warm winter probably carries West Nile virus. Too many of us. All boxed in.
 
So much rushing, always rushing. From school to homework to practice to class. Slow down, my little love. That’s right, I see the superhero in the plaster swirls on your ceiling. I see the stars on the cowboy’s revolver. I see your wishes in the flicker of the streetlight. I feel that wind, that spirit-filling wind sweeping in from your window.
 
There, my little love, there’s the rustle of the branches, the shushing of the leaves.
 
Be still. Listen…

 
Additional Reading:
 
Indian Legends of  the Pacific Northwest
 
Tragic Triangle: Love Story of Loowit
 
History Link: Bridge of the Gods spanning the Columbia Between Skamania County and Cascades Locks, Oregon, is completed in 1926

First People: The Legends – The Bridge of the Gods
 
Wikipedia: Bridge of the Gods


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_the_Gods_(land_bridge)


 

But even as the boy showed his eagerness at the quest, his grandfather added a warning: every fourth generation a warrior set out to win these elk dogs. None had returned. The boy’s willingness did not fade. He had once been deaf, once been abandoned and shunned. He did not fear the long, hard, and lonely road. He had walked it before. And for his grandfather, the chief, the one who had
opened the door of hope to him, he would do anything to reward that act of kindness and love.
 
So the boy learned the ways of men, the proper medicine for the journey. The elders crafted him a shield with symbols of protection; he cleansed himself in the sweat bath and learned the ways of pipe and prayer.
 
The chief himself packed the dog’s travois and chose the day of his grandson’s departing. That day before dawn, he took him to the edge of the village. There he cleansed him with cedar and sent him on the path.

The  journey was long and hard. At every lake he stopped. The spirit people of the lakes greeted him one after the other in their own terrible ways, but he remained steadfast. Impressed with his courage, they each pointed him onward, promising him nothing.
 
The Great Mystery Lake.
 
Was he ever to reach it? The boy and his dog now struggled not only against not knowing and impossible hope, but also against hunger, thirst, weather…and exhaustion.

And then they stumbled up to the shore of a huge lake. No spirit people stood guarding it, no living thing walked or glided along its edges anywhere. And the boy knew they had reached it. And there he and his dog finally gave into their exhaustion and collapsed into a deep sleep.

Opening his eyes to the dazzling midday sun, the boy found himself facing a beautiful young child. The child told him that his grandfather had been expecting him. “Please come with me,” he said. Then he sprang up and transformed into a shining kingfisher. In a flash of color, the bird-boy dove straight down into the lake.

The boy stood at the edge of the water. How could he possibly follow the bird-boy without drowning? Was this some trick? But then he reminded himself he had  accepted the risks when he had accepted the journey. He jumped into the water.
 
It parted for him. He found himself descending the lakebed into a small valley with a beautiful white tipi at its center. The kingfisher flew down from that tipi and transformed back into a young boy. He invited him into his grandfather’s home. The boy dined on fine delicacies with the white haired spirit of the lake until his great hunger was satiated. Then the bird-boy took him out into the valley.

The elk dogs!
 
The boy marveled at their speed, power, and beauty. The bird-boy beckoned him onward and taught him the glorious freedom on riding on the great beasts’ backs. Then the bird-boy beckoned him closer. “I want you to have what you have come for.” And he told him how it was to be done.

A glance at the spirit chief’s feet would grant him a wish. Like the hunting of a cautious animal, it took patience and alertness, but finally the boy was rewarded. Not feet at all, but the hooves and legs of an elk dog! The spirit chief quickly re-covered his legs and asked the boy what he wished. Having been properly counseled, the boy asked for three things: his rainbow-colored quill belt with the songs of the elk dogs, the medicine coat with the magic for catching elk dogs, and a herd of the elk dogs themselves.

The spirit chief exclaimed at his boldness, but granted his wishes, including a rope of white buffalo hair for catching the beasts. The chief explained carefully how to claim the herd for his people. For four days the boy would walk north without looking back. The elk dogs would not follow. On the fourth day, the elk dogs begin to overtake him on the left. Still he could not look back. When the last of the elk dogs galloped past him, he would lasso the last and ride it and the herd would become his own.

Bidding farewell to his hosts, the boy followed the spirit chief’s instructions,  waiting until the last great beast galloped past to leap astride him with the help of the medicine coat and the lasso. Then he guided this thundering herd of proud, wild buffalo horses home to his people and to the pride and wonderment of grandfather, the one who had believed.

So Spake Me…
Sometimes we come to these shores in our lives. We carry the many stories of our lives with us, in packs upon our backs. We gaze into those glittering waters. We know we have to step forward; we know we have to set those packs down on the gravelly shore and take with us into those waters only the results of those stories, not the stories themselves, those excuses cannot come with us.

 It is time to enter into a new personhood, if not the transition from child to adult, then the transition into a new time-of-life. Will the lessons be enough to part the waters? Will we have gained the boldness and cleverness to win the prize at the bottom of the lake? Will we be able to make peace with the secret selves the spirit of the lake will reveal?

I stand again on this shore. I’m looking into the water and this time I find myself very confused. Perhaps I have been too many people in these past decades. In my pack, I hear them like the shrieks of the banshee, trying to make sure their lessons are heard before I once more set them aside. A painfully shy child, a ruthlessly ambitious teen, a broken young adult, an idealistic new employee, a strong and awed wife, a terrified mother of an infant, a careful, listening mother of small children, an independent housewife of a travel executive, an ever-learning teacher of the next generation of writers.

Is it simply too many voices that I hear? Is that the confusion? Partly. That long list is but a sliver of what clamors from behind. But the rest of the confusion is more complicated. A body whose threatening possibilities slowly become reality. I have friends who face much worse and I draw from their strength. We all have something. Knowing what’s coming, I take responsibility and prepare to minimize the effects. But an identity divided between vital youth and aging limitations is baffling on a daily basis.
 
Another is the knowledge that I have become what I set out to be. No matter where things go from here, I have become a professional writer. I have become a member of a strong, close family. I have become a member of beautiful, supportive community. I’m not sure I know how to put away the weapons of tooth and claw and just enjoy and nurture these things that a quiet part of my mind never believed I was capable of having. And maybe that quiet part of me is responsible for that aspect of the unsettling.
 
But the biggest quandary as I lower my pack to the lakeshore is the unsuspecting  jarring I constantly receive in this newest journey. I feel comfortable and confident in who I’ve become…until I run up against external perceptions. And then the I am forcibly shown a picture of myself that does not match my own perceptions nor those that I’ve grown accustomed to others holding of me. I am surrounded now by people who do not know my stories. They do not know the excuses behind my ideals, attitudes, and actions. And so they make their own. And I am left feeling disjointed and awkward…and confused. Who is this person that they see? How does it relate to me and who I am trying to be? Is this a sign that I need to adjust my path? I find myself squatting at the edge of the water, poking at it with a stick, wondering if I’m really ready to follow the bird-boy into the unknown.
 
But then I drop the stick and push back to standing, a small smile playing at my lips. After more than thirty years of playing in the world of story, I should  know better. Whether they know the epic tale that has led up to me, or just glimpse a page of the saga, no two people will ever come away experiencing the same story, the same me. And as the hero of my own journey, I know where I am going. I will follow the bird-boy—in my own way, in my own time. I will listen to the threshold guardians. I will keep the warnings that resonate and discard those that sound only of fear. I will step into the water.
 
There are secrets down there waiting to be discovered.

Additional  Reading
 If you would like to read the whole intricate and beautiful story of the orphan boy who brought the elk deer to the Blackfeet people, visit First People.

Twenty years.
Twenty years into the journey we return. We come in the guise of middle age, wearing the dust of so long a road, so many selves created and discarded. We come wrapped in the critique and the support of the hundreds we’ve met along the way. But for all their love and advice, they could never truly know all of who we are. They were not there when we began:

Amidst canyon and sagebrush, in the cradle of a one-stoplight town.

Among those who helped shape our original story.

Among friends.

Welcome home.

So Spake Me…
There it is. My own personal creation story, my myth. And it is so very startling how archetypal the actors, events, the places of our legends become in just twenty short years. My memories have become aged snapshots, grainy and uncertain in their detail. Only the most vivid of the defining moments remain and as I gaze back at them in my mind, I can’t help but wonder how much of the truth remains after so many retellings.

I wrote Mo’s speech as the welcome piece for the reunion book, looking forward to the reunion, looking at those snapshot memories anew. With the fears of youth set to the side, curiosity rose up in its place. Slowly, steadily my classmates transformed into one hundred and thirty-four books I had never finished and “What happened next?” became the nagging question tugging at my mind every time I stumbled across a Facebook post, an old photo tucked in an worn children’s game, or a dusty yearbook I’d glanced past for years without seeing.

And when the nights came? 

The stories were more fascinating than I could have possibly expected. Probably because they mattered to me. These people, I knew how hard they had to work, how far they had to climb to get where they were now. And the peaks they had conquered! Business owners, Air Force pilots, PhDs, researchers, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, flying high in the big city, settling cozy in the small towns, even planting roots in our own hometown to keep her thriving.

So many stories. Each story so new and yet so familiar. So many glimpses at the archetype I had become in my classmates’ own legends—the girl I had once been seen from new eyes. Each glimpse so surprising and so sweet.

And when the nights were over?

I left with a bit of sorrow at the stories left unheard, at the renewed connections I knew would fade once more. I left missing my people.

But I also left happy. 

I am so proud of the people I come from, how they have grown no matter what path they chose.

When these images, too, become faded with age, the details blurred and uncertain, I hope I can still draw from my myth, from my memory, this timeless truth: I come from good people. Good people who are still out there in the world spinning their fascinating stories and sometime soon perhaps I will get to hear more. 

And that brings me the profoundest comfort.

Welcome home.