I’m gonna take the time now, my spiritual and intellectual Sisters and Brothers to enact my own version of Recapitulatory and Stalking efforts. I’d have never done anything like I have over the last 18 years if it hadn’t been for my sister the LadyHawk and what the don Juan Matus drove Mr. CC to write about so forcefully. You see, I don’t want to forget myself in all this. If it hadn’t been time for the Spirit to move in my life of many lives, I would have not known yet what it was like to desire spiritual freedom. My Manitou experience has been as much “me” as my raising my boys and continuing a professional life through a series of personal crisis. All I can say is what I shall transcribe verbatim from what I wrote on Manitou 17, on 012306. The next 5 – 6 weeks I will leave the tonal world as muchly as I can, pausing only now and then to “check in” with the dream I continue to call my everyday reality. I say these things because it is you all who have exposed me to realizing this illusive “Dream” realization which I have been reading about on the TNF, Soma, Magical Passes and Omnium Garden forums. Thank you all for saying things as you see them. You are brave and witty, provocative and challenging.
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“”Prologue – Two Moons: Now is the time for One who chooses to remember the future. A future of two moons …. A future of high grasslands and their wind-blown prairies. It is a time for peace. It is a time for laughter.
Chapter 1 – Dreaming – I remember a time, before I was a man, when I dreamt of being a man. I was brave and strong, courageous and exciting and I knew no bounds. This was a time before time became priceless to me. This was before I knew fear. This was even before I found love, before I would know my End, my Rest.
…….. later on, a score of years later or more, I still dreamt of being a man and even, at times, thought I was one. But I knew inside that I was still dreaming, dreaming of what I pictured myself to be. Yes, that same man of courage and valor, pride and power. I knew something was missing, though. Something really big. Something that would surely make me a man. I just knew it, or at least, thought I did.
Chapter 2 – Wondering - A couple of weeks ago I was out in my backyard checking my bird feeders. Underneath one of them was huddled a small sparrow. She seemed healthy-looking but she sat so still and seemed to be staring off into space. It took me quite suddenly into a sort of sad mood for her gaze reminded me of how my Mom’s eyes were a few days before she passed away. They were open but not looking. I knew that little sparrow would never make it another day into the winter coming. I remember now thinking that maybe I should smash the little thing right now and save her from the freezing or crunching cats teeth which would surely come that day. It was not the first time I had been faced with such a choice.
But then I saw all those other sparrows near the end of my yard, waiting silently in the brush for me to leave the feeder which they knew I kept full for them. It made me wonder how those little creatures survived so easily through an Iowa wintertime. But it wasn’t so easy at all. Guess I’d never thought about it before, like so many other things I’ve just never thought of. Maybe I was too busy dreaming.
Chapter 3 – Believing - My 2nd sensei was a man who had studied in the Far East and had made many traditions of that exotic land part of his own nature. I was telling him one day about a psychology book I was reading which asserted that “self hate” was the prime ingredient in the mental makeup of most antisocial and neurotic people in the world. By the quizzical look on my friend and teachers’ face I could tell he was having a problem grasping this strange concept. “Hate ourselves? But we love ourselves! Maybe so much that it often clouds our eyes.” His response to me, initially, was very revealing and almost healing for me. I had always assumed, in my study of the human species, that psychological problems were quite widespread and deeply engrained in our psyche. It had not dawned on me until that very moment, now over 25 years ago, that all our characteristics are taught to us, as if they were the basics of math and language. In a few very short sentences this old fellow had opened my eyes as surely as had the little apparently-doomed sparrow. What I had thought I knew was only a transient belief, something in my vast inventory of confusion.
Chapter 4 – Commencement - The air is icy tonight as I secure my lodge flaps and retire in this waning full moon. The eerie fog brightens the nearby trees from my fires’ glow. I sense the thickness of the moment has heightened my senses to what will transpire in the weeks to come into the next moon, the Fullest Moon of the year. I’ll think about those little birds that still twitter at this late hour, probably immersed in their own dreams of full corn fields under a summer sky. Maybe I can “uncloud” my ego for a while and huddle by this wonderful fire and wonder.
Chapter 5 - Again - And, again, my mind quiets with a smile that knows another dance will be perfect and without nothing. Plans well laid are restful times before stacked logs blaze high again. Only the owl hoots as small four-legged begin to stir in wakeful dreams. I am at peace, finally, in my sleep. All that moves, for right now, is the fog I call. “The Wall”.
Chapter 6 – This is the only “quiet time” of the Manitou. Like when a prize fighter lies down on his locker room bench just moments before a big fight. He knows his training is over for this fight. It’s just too late to worry about anything.
All is ready and a stillness overcomes me like the frozen night.
Climax -- And I wonder now, almost laughing to myself as sleep overtakes me and I can see the Full Moon with my every cell …. Maybe I should have asked that little sparrow something, but she is gone now.””
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So, on this 010207, I return to the silence of preparation which only this time of year, until the Full Moon of Groundhog’s Day, can bring.
I return to a place which one day I will not come back from.
