This morning is perfect. The spring has returned and winds are soft yet cool. The simple work of the day has begun of wheeling the trash bin down the lane with one hand while balancing a cup of coffee in the other. Pajama pants still on are tucked in to the tops of my borrowed wellies. I set the bin down beside the neighbor’s and check to see theirs is still full. Good. I haven’t missed the pick up. I follow my meandering spirit to the old pier to gaze out at the calm sea and the morning sun shining through the pink and white clouds.
It has been nearly a year since I left ‘home’ to find ‘home’. Turning my back on the craziness of city life and political tensions which humanity loves to fill the time with, often at the expense of good neighborliness and community. I have been a pilgrim, a gypsy, a traveler of a different sort for years now. Uprooted long ago by a calling that said be of service. Make yourself available for good. Don’t fight to change other people but go and build the world you know can be. Devote your energy to creating the new. It’s a romantic notion. The road is glamorous at times and lonely at others. It has been filled with uncertainty and grief. I have witnessed miracles and I have been filled with rage, confusion, anxiety. But in this year of losing myself and finding myself and losing myself again I have finally found a sense of self that has been struggling to emerge. Pilgrimage is nothing new. Humans have been doing it nearly as long as there have been humans on this earth. It is not a workshop. It is not something we pay other people to do for us. Being a wanderer, called from sacred place to sacred place, a weaver of things, ideas and threads of energy and understanding about the earth. It is not a product we can sell.
I came to Ireland to reconnect to the authentic spiritual traditions of my ancestors. I carry the medicine gifts of many people, many sisters and brothers in my life who have been a part of my journey in some way. Even those close to me may not realize, I carry all of you with me everywhere I go… Just yesterday, on my birthday celebrating by doing what I love most – looking for wells to tend in the landscape – I sat beside a massive pre-christian standing stone in a field. I sat with my tiny medicine bag – this one always filled with tobaccos from different places, and my pipe. The pipe comes from a Guarani community in Brazil. I carry Mapacho, sacred tobacco from Peru – some that is years old now from journeys past. Some of the tobacco is new, brought back by a sister just months ago who’s cats I minded as she went to do her most intimate work. The beaded necklace inside the pouch is adorned with feathers and seeds and is used like an instrument shaking, making sounds to free up our energy. It came from a medicine man’s house in Colombia who I visited 5 years ago. I was bleeding then, too. He and his wife welcomed me, allowed me to sit with my two companions in sacred ceremony when normally that would not have been allowed. I sang for him in the morning around the fire, and danced. Who would have thought? A dancing American shaman woman. He smiled. I thought he might be making fun of me in his thoughts, but in truth, I think he really just had never considered this possibility. We too have sacred roots.
I have been surprised by this again and again. On all the journeys and all the places carrying the messages of my teachers, knowing I am white, knowing they are not. I am aware that I am white skinned and I am aware that I am a woman. One of the leaders of a community deep in the wild of Colombia sat with me offering me stories and teaching and gave me things to share and to bring back to my people. He, like the man who’s fire I danced around, came from a traditional upbringing that said women on their moon cannot sit in ceremony. Pregnant women cannot walk behind the shaman, and all the shamans are men. There was still a story of how a medicine man had died because he ate food prepared by his pregnant niece. And yet this man shared openly with me things I would not have thought possible by his culture’s mind set. I asked him, “You do realize all you are sharing with me I will bring home to the women in my community and it is specifically with them I will share this knowledge?” He paused and said yes, and the others explained that I was now only the second woman he had made this offering to – the other woman was French. He then went on to say that in their tradition, their origin story said that the first shaman was a woman and she taught the men who then carried the lineage. He said there was a council now that had been formed within the tribe to consider, whether or not the women could be allowed to teach. He said, “I am sharing this with you now. My wife cannot teach this. But one day I hope she will.”
We are back on the hill at this massive standing stone and my Irish born sister is praying with her pipe she was given – a combination of parts – one part Welsh wood, one part sacred stone from Arizona. She honors the directions and the medicine wheel. She honors the sacred names of the guardians, both of Eiru and the Americas. I take out the small woven pouch inside my medicine bag, dirty and worn. Inside are things I rarely touch and only come out for special altars, but keep with me none-the-less. I spread the contents on the moss.
Inside is a white leather medicine pouch with pink gold and black beads that came from Mexico given to me by another American woman, Nina, born very near to my own hometown, who brings people ‘home’ to the pyramids – and to their integrity. Next I retrieve a carved whale from my sister Kellie who I have known for 15 years or more and that came from Kauai where she brought me to come pray with the people and visit the sacred valley of the Nepali Coast. I learned secrets about the island – of Anahola and of Polihale. Now she helps to hold the space for the children that are fighting for our future and the Earth in court. One of my most sacred objects, I carefully unwrap from the lamb’s wool that protects it – a single mighty eagle talon that found its way to me by sister Anna. We had met in California a year or so prior and barely spoke in a room of 150 people busily trying to discuss agendas over several days. We both carried some inner knowing, some inner wisdom that it was the medicine of the eagle that had arrived in that meeting that was calling our attention, yet others who only sought power over the situation at hand neglected to hear. Some time later, she carried this all the way back from Mongolia, some say the place of the first shamans of the human race, where she was invited to dance – with an eagle – for a majestic marriage ceremony. She passed through NY just one night on her way back from having danced this sacred dance of nature and it was as if she had been guided there just to bring this gift to me. How humbled, how humbled I was. I remember distinctly the night she sent a message she was coming, signing it “In Her Name”. Even she remarked, she had never been guided to write those words to someone before. And yet here we were in acknowledgement of the sacredness of the exchange. Finally, around my neck sits a lapis lazuli. The deep blue stone that came to me from India by a sister also born near me, yet who I met in upstate NY and then re-met in Kauai. She is another water protector and one of the most beautiful artists that I know. That stone stayed in my medicine bag for about a year before I wore it. And when it was finally time to bring it out, I wore it for a special public ritual when we came out to dance for the well being of the water. It became a sign and signal of my devotion to protect the water, and potent medicine it is.
My Guarani pipe sits in front of me, alongside the tiny bits of tobacco I have left from my brother Atonwa, a kind, strong brother from the Mohawk community in Akwasasne. He gave me the gift of this tobacco years ago and only now that I have carried it so long and so far do I really understand it. These tiny leaves were prayed over so many times, before they ever came into my hands. They were given to me as we sat on what was originally his tribe’s land in the Schoharie Valley in upstate NY. It’s a place with a stunning sacred waterfall where Panther Creek meets Bear Ladder Road. There I learned what it meant to tend a sacred site. Years of patience. Listening. Trying to understand it. He gave me that gift after we shared a smoke praying at a natural altar overlooking the sacred waterfall. I had only recently come to see myself as one who had ‘people’ – Irish people. We spoke about this relationship of generations past of Irish and Native Americans – and I committed in that moment to my brother, in a most sacred way, to continue what my ancestor’s promised, to honor that sacred relationship. We shook hands, he thanked me, and offered me this sacred tobacco. And now that tobacco is here, and has traveled all over Ireland being used in the way that it was meant for, to make offerings to the land and the guardians of it. To send up prayers to Creator. And now I sit with my Irish sister holding her pipe from Arizona and we send our prayers up to the ancestors of this sacred land in honor of the relationship between nations that has endured across the ocean for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
These gifts are only some of what travels with me. They remind me of all the prayers I have prayed in this life. And for a moment, every now and again, I can sit with them and rest in that I have somehow managed to become the person I sought to become.
This morning is perfect. The spring has returned and winds are soft yet cool. The simple work of the day has begun.
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