A Thread of My Tale: Part I

We could say it started when my mothers gaze first beheld my fathers.

We could say it began when the Sun courted the Moon across the sky.

We could say it was thrust into being when fire first revealed himself to the people,

or when grunts distilled into language,

when songs were sung to the springing of the world,

or when caves were our most holy places.

Our tale is woven with all those whose feet pressed the earth, whose blood cried out in honesty, who birthed, who served, who crossed the Milky Way, before us.

There really is no clear beginning and there will be no clear end, simply various doors we pass through; octaves of being.

Certainly to our human psyches we know when one has come and one has gone- our hearts lamentations and joys don't let us forget.

Yet there is a mythic dimension of our deep selves, who see's with greatly different eyes, feels more with animal paws than hands, and lives from a much larger and older framework than our typical, personal, modus operandi.

Each is beautiful and completely necessary- we are multi-dimensional beings, after all. One shade of blue just won't do. We get whole spectrums of rainbows, sounds, feelings, hunches, flavors.

If I had to pick a place where this particular telling of this particular tale initiates, an orientation point, so to speak, I would have to say that it crawled up out of a very old and forgotten hole in the Earth, got my attention and never let up.

We might as well call it: Mystery.

Because that's real clarifying, right?

Well, welcome to my life.

The Call

After I had begun traveling (my first love) I realized I had been become 'opened' in some way, to life- to some dimension of life that is almost unspeakable. People in my world at the time scratched their heads (some of them are still scratching:) as they would listen to me reach for words to cloak my experiences in, as I efforted to 'make sense' of what was distilling within me.

Naturally, I moved. Not away from the people I loved but towards a new chapter that could hold me in a way the old shell could not.

Here, I counciled with one of my most powerful teachers to this day- My Aunt Lisa. My wise woman, herbalist, gun toting, don't-even-think-about-fucking-with-me while wearing a sweet pink dress matriarch (one of my matriarchs).

We shared many an evening, month and year in the joy of true companionship. She spoke to me of many things and transmitted even more, silently, through her aqua green eyes, her "you can't out-fox the fox attitude" and the living tale of her trails.

Then she died.

But we had so many dreams to yet share. So many mountains to climb. So many mysteries to journey into.

One of the things I knew was that I was called to journey into the realm of ceremony. Now, this wasn't like now times where you can find an ayahuasca ceremony in any given city on any given day. It wasn't around, or if it was, it was very underground and I for one, had not met anyone who had ever done one, let alone someone who could help me understand what this unshakable thing was that wouldn't let up.

I envisioned I would have to save up money and go travel to the amazon or somewhere else real wild and pray to find a trustworthy teacher to show me ... I didn't even know what.

But, given enough time and space to inoculate the field- it happened in a much easier fashion. (Im thinking of my friend Christine and how she said to me one day, "Spirit has great ideas!" Ha!! much better than mine, that's for sure)

A year or so after Lisa passed, I was calling about an apartment to rent in a coastal Florida town and the guy who answered the phone said- "yeah, great, Id love to show you the place but Im headed down to do a ceremony with a Shaman in Miami, can I get back with you next week? "

My jaw dropped.

I said, "What!!! You have to take me!" and the next month he did.

This is Craig. He would become one of my greatest homies of all times. Rest in Power, Dear One.

(By the way, now a days it would take a lot for me to go to a ceremony with someone I didn't know. Like, no. Not going to happen. There is a certain type of protection offered to naievty, sometimes. At least in this case. )

So the plant medicine chapter of my life opened and worked on my soul in chthonic and immeasurable ways. And continues to.

I feel honored and humbled to count certain master plant elders as my teachers. These days, I approach them slowly, sparsely and with as much readiment as I am able to muster. They are extremely potent guides.

It was at one of these ceremonial meetings that something happened to me, again. I was touched, reached out to in invisible ways and altered in a manner that I knew I could never go back.

Whatever it was, I accepted The Call.

The next phase (if i can even call it that) was and is anything but linear.

When people say the road is tough, they are not kidding.

"You didn't come here to sit around and eat TV dinners." Ha! Thats one of my elders who would come along real soon. He would say things like this and it always made a lot of sense to my soul.

So Im saying it here to you.

So what if it's hard. So what if you don't know what to do. You don't know where to go next.

You didn't come here to sit around and eat TV dinners.

Take a breath. Be patient. Trust. Simply ask, "what's next?" and Listen like it matters.

And more to come soon...