Page 122 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

are beautiful.) Flowers blossom, offering nectar; now come the butterflies and bees, who feast, and

pollinate. Giving and receiving. Any being, I came to see, who adopts the currency of gratitude and

generosity as a way of life will, by definition, be beautiful. Regardless of whether the world is ugly or

beautiful around them, they will be beautiful.

This was my birthright: a way of being so deep within the energetic flow of the planet that I did not

have to spend years learning it. I only had to remember; to sink within something that not only already

existed in nature, but also within humans, for we are all of the earth. This currency is familiar to us.

When we are within it, we feel right.

After a time, a crow flew by. I picked up my backpack and walked slowly down the river path to my car.

I had taken no drugs, no mind-­‐altering substances. I’d eaten plainly for several days. But my hands on

the steering wheel were transformed. I saw the wrinkles, the aging lines. I saw myself, a woman of

graying hair. My movements were calm. I smiled at children as if they were my own. The beings I saw—

humans, trees, river, even machines—were not alien to me. Nothing was made of anything that was

different than what I am made of. No thing on the earth was the same as it had been before. My eyes

were undimmed. I had become bright.

The next morning I spoke the strange tale of the squirrels to our gathered circle. Valerie was silent for a

moment. She was a woman with extraordinary understanding, and I’d come to trust her instincts. Still,

her next words astonished me. She said she’d just been told my medicine name. She stood and put her

hands on my shoulders. She said that the squirrels have been with me a long time. And that the spirits

were telling her that my medicine name was Grandmother Squirrel.

Well, no. It had never occurred to me to want a medicine name. I was not a shaman. I did not want to

misuse someone else’s tradition. I was here simply to break down the walls in myself. But there was

Valerie, eyes shining. She said that in the name was my long-­‐relinquished kinship with the kind and

beautiful creatures who had reached me in the woods.