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Hello, Friends
A late night yearning for pizza had me going out into the darkness tonight. As I stepped outside and shivered, I felt warmed. Odd you say. Not really. Not if you knew of the winter I almost died of pneumonia ... and of my mother's tales told to me as I lay coughing in the cold darkness.
My mother was half Lakota Sioux and half Irish. She learned young the harsh truth that sometimes nightmares invade our waking hours to swallow our world. Haiti is just re-teaching that lesson to some of us.
I, too, learned it early in my childhood. My mother and I found ourselves living in a basement apartment during one of the worst winters in Detroit's memory. Money was scarse. Food, too. Warmth even more so. Then, the power went out. For days.
To keep my mind off the numbing cold and my worsening cough, my mother told me tales spun from the legends of the twin worlds of her own youth . As I lay shivering under my blankets in the darkness, a magical world slowly took shape within my mind. And I was lost in wonder.
Souix legends contested with the fae and foe of Irish myth. And the cold became only the chill embrace of Estanatlehi, the ghostly Turquoise Woman. Mother told me that while Estanatlehi's touch was cold, her heart was warm.
So the colder I got, the more it made me feel loved, for I knew that an unseen someone was only hugging me closer. And within the shadows at the far corner of my bedroom, I could almost make out the hulking form of the guardian of all good children, Hibbs, the bear with two shadows.
My mother taught me to love winter. It is a season when you feel the bones of the landscape - the loneliness, the solitude of it. Something waits beneath winter -- the whole story doesn't show -- much like the strangers you meet.
And to tell the tale my mother whispered to me in the cold shadows is why I wrote the 80,000 word Native American/Celtic children's fable, THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS. Her world is one that you cannot reach by car. The mind is the only vehicle that will take you there. The only fuels you need are imagination and the ability to still dream.
A late night yearning for pizza had me going out into the darkness tonight. As I stepped outside and shivered, I felt warmed. Odd you say. Not really. Not if you knew of the winter I almost died of pneumonia ... and of my mother's tales told to me as I lay coughing in the cold darkness.
My mother was half Lakota Sioux and half Irish. She learned young the harsh truth that sometimes nightmares invade our waking hours to swallow our world. Haiti is just re-teaching that lesson to some of us.
I, too, learned it early in my childhood. My mother and I found ourselves living in a basement apartment during one of the worst winters in Detroit's memory. Money was scarse. Food, too. Warmth even more so. Then, the power went out. For days.
To keep my mind off the numbing cold and my worsening cough, my mother told me tales spun from the legends of the twin worlds of her own youth . As I lay shivering under my blankets in the darkness, a magical world slowly took shape within my mind. And I was lost in wonder.
Souix legends contested with the fae and foe of Irish myth. And the cold became only the chill embrace of Estanatlehi, the ghostly Turquoise Woman. Mother told me that while Estanatlehi's touch was cold, her heart was warm.
So the colder I got, the more it made me feel loved, for I knew that an unseen someone was only hugging me closer. And within the shadows at the far corner of my bedroom, I could almost make out the hulking form of the guardian of all good children, Hibbs, the bear with two shadows.
My mother taught me to love winter. It is a season when you feel the bones of the landscape - the loneliness, the solitude of it. Something waits beneath winter -- the whole story doesn't show -- much like the strangers you meet.
And to tell the tale my mother whispered to me in the cold shadows is why I wrote the 80,000 word Native American/Celtic children's fable, THE BEAR WITH TWO SHADOWS. Her world is one that you cannot reach by car. The mind is the only vehicle that will take you there. The only fuels you need are imagination and the ability to still dream.
May some of your dreams come true today. Roland
Hello Dear friend and spiritual brother!
ReplyDeleteI love your Blog Site. The Picture reminds me so much of what I have seen of Northern California in the redwoods, sequoias, or Oregon, yet it could be from say Vermont, I don't know, do you. It immediately reminds me of Robert Frosts poem, I don't believe it is "The road less travelled". Instead of being Lazy by looking up the true title of his poem, I am lazy which can be a virtue, haha, the poem you will recognize immediately, as it his perhaps most famous poem. I know it was mandatory reading in school, where he is in a horse buggy in the deep woods and snow, and stops awhile for the heavenly view, and then moves on, with the words of his "I have miles and miles to go before I sleep". The pic reminds me so much of that, and I absolutely love your Blog Title. Its somewhat reminiscent to me of the one of two novels I started yet have never finished, which is titled, "In the Trenches", and is about the almost metaphysical and phantasmagoric view of Los Angeles, especially the poor masses that predominat the population of the City of Angels. Thanks for sending me this link, it will be fun to follow and I am looking forward to it. Hopefully soon I will get that driving willpower to spend more time on my computer. See a short email for the rest. I just wanted to visit and say excellent going my friend. Robert Marcotte always your friend, confidante, and scholary student.