Adaptable Rootedness: Visionary Revelations of Winona LaDuke

"The other thing I brought up here, which I happen to always carry around, is my corn. My father, he passed away about twenty years ago, he’s a pretty simple guy. He was from our reservations. He used to say to me, Winona, you’re a really smart young woman, but I don’t want to hear your philosophy if you can’t grow corn…

I grow corn…it’s like us, corn is all different…this is a corn that’s called a Manitoba White Flint…our Anishnaabe people…we’re the northernmost corn growers in the world. Corn is very smart, it can grow almost anywhere…"

Winona LaDuke, speaking at the 4th Annual Tar Sands Healing Walk

Truly, and now, experientially, the life of waking reality and the life of dream consciousness are one and equal. When confronted with the practical evidence of vision, with eternal meaning, a deep mystery of the soul unveiled in the shade of internal belonging, I know. So, when meeting with mystic voices whose souls are married with the beyond in a harmonious union of the opposites, dream and waking, the mind begins to know the path of the heart, of intuition, love and sound. As such, in SoJourn(al), I revision virtual experience through the lens of a unique self-knowledge, yet in so doing, I seek to inspire visions anew in visitors whose wanderings are never lost to the immediate necessity of connectivity, interdependence, and the shared internalization of the psyche, manifest. 

When I heard the humbling voice of Anishinaabe author, orator and activist Winona LaDuke, whose bountiful and beautiful mind I sought excitedly for a devout listening, she spoke of my dream. Her musing answered the image of my dream with a new vision of the Earth. When she spoke of Manitoba White Flint, the earth fell into the sky, and the sky grew below the earth, the waters condensed into air and the air evaporated into water, and dream became real, reality became a dream. In her hand she held my subtle imagination of nights in the solitude of my furthest inner reaches. Read ahead for the unshakeable truth, as she grounded my nightly revelation into the fine nourishments of sacred knowledge:  

“In the morning, eat of the red corn,” says he, Herbsman. An ear of red corn emerges as with the pleasure of an offering, gift or invocation from the mouth of a ground and tongue of a seed. One kernel, consumed, and my flesh lightens with the bread of fulfillment, and all my wishes humbled with regard to the constant water that flows to the life of all. Cleansed, opened, revived, moved and lifted, I listen, intent with respect. 

“At night, eat of the white corn.” As the morning eye of fire stares into my forehead barely above the horizon, I yet see a vision of the white corn in mind’s eye, unknown on Earth. The Herbsman continues to pour the clear-souled water of natural wisdom through the mystic wine of musical friendship over each and every pour with all movements and messages invoked, intoned, and conveyed with brevity, clarity and unity. 

Returning Home: Teachings of the Priests of Dream

Yet, as Winona LaDuke shared with all Healing Walkers, "some things are supposed to stay in the ground" and so, there are visions, dreams and insights that are meant to stay in the subtle realms beyond memory and imagination, beyond the creative manifestation of personal will and worldly attachment, beyond the attainments of knowledge, beyond the bearing of tradition. 

And in the Medicine Wheel tradition, so the dream of the red corn for the morning, and white corn at night affirms the basic principles of the Four Colours within the Aboriginal Medicine Wheel. The colour red, and the eating of the red corn, affirms the element of growth, time and developing the mind. Whereas the colour white, and the eating of the white corn, would affirm place, achievement, reflection, and spiritual understanding. Therefore, the advice by the Wise Herbsman of Dream, seems a revelation to practice a harmonious way of life, where the morning is equated to growth, and the night to reflection. 

More, corn also teaches that rootedness does not oppose adaptability. So, as people of this land, for and of ourselves, we learn to adapt anew, with a sense of rootedness that overcomes dominant cultural stereotypes of the stale, the old, the past, and the traditional, and instead seeks truth in the likes of our Western imagination, as in the mind of Tolkien who wrote, "The old that is strong does not wither, / Deep roots are not reached by the frost". Adaptable rootedness is the way of the wounded healer, the traveler, the wanderer who, as Tolkien wrote, is not lost, and who instead leads all on with a prayer at each step to the beating blood that flowers in the voice of a pure heart.  

_____________

summer tradition

mystery of love

bridge to ecstasy

eye for simplicity

endangered light

___________________

With Still Unborn Eyes

A presence belied in the soft air aglow with diligent drizzle
            From this, our American lighthouse heaven,
                        Alit with dream
                        in stories told by great-grandmother’s
                                    Life lived outside the pages of the “true”
                                                And into the truly earth-quaking
                                                of dream,

A silent praise now unforgiving in this one unkempt death
            Blowing past the burly crevasse of a listless youth
                        Climbing up past the gold icon in Biblical temptations
                                    To screw women into their darkest pain
                                                In a house filled
                                                with the semen of timeless wandering

Men whose throats burn with the soil of their unloved mother
            Croaking up agro-fossil drains
Reaching from modern skylines to prehistory,
issuing from our Christ-death

In the end of an age
            As inevitable as the reptilian fate in the everyday brain
Expanding with the feared herbs growing
like weeds in our Western mythology
Built in smoke
and the knowledge of Earth’s ever-forgiving
blessings
                                                Bringing America’s children reason
                                                to explore mind
                                                            In the socio-pathic
                                                            lie of success and money
As we corner the livid
daze of the booming war
                                                            Fertilized wombs
                                                            manifest
                                                               As
                                                               westward
                                                               suburbia

In the housed mystery of our yet undiscovered world
            Beneath each colonial home
                        Shot out of the ugly worldview
                                    Misplaced over the moral genealogy
                                             
In an ecological philosophy
            To dry the eyes of our spectral hosts
                        Who watch and wonder
                                    With still unborn eyes


This poem was featured in my most recent self-published chapbook, Act or Confront

The Original Meaning of Apocalypse

Apocalypse is originally from the Greek apocálypsis meaning "a disclosure of knowledge, hidden from humanity in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, i.e., a lifting of the veil or revelation" (source). Let today be a reminder that there is only one present, and all dreams, fantasies, prophecies and revelations ultimately bring us back to where we are in the here and now. Let us remember that today is always the first and last day. May the renewal of the seasons awaken our senses to the natural light of continuity and the breath of the living voice saying, "it's never too late to live for today." 

________

There he is. I introduce him. Aboriginal poet of the year they say, and the reception is warm. Mythologists and Dreamers convene for the day, to listen to his heart beat to the rhythm of all present to listen. His words ring true, clean and sound through the temple of the mind.

Homage to a poet by Giorgione

I cavort through the crowd. Childhood friends move like Romany artists, musicians, gamblers and comics in their smiling delight. The air is communal and warm. Friendships seep through our pores with a nourishing embrace of eyes.

_________

No broken gourd of misinformation,
            Cracked on the headless spine of an open carcass
                        Breeding divine fungi in the tawny mist,
                                    A tempting kiss stolen across the breath
Of a warring ocean disengaged from its godly host

...
Anger in the tempest of religious man,
                        A cork-bottled nightmare
Emerging suddenly from the abyss,
Encouraging the lion’s stare
            To recede from tropical gore
                        And inculcate the masses
                                    Into a final tour
...

 Impressing the abstract wonder of the fearless
                                    And preparing a light
                                                For here

excerpts from "find Inspiration!"

Prophecy in Dreamland and Other Spells of Creative Literacy

Portrait of Rasputin by Ana Theodora Krarup

"Unconscious actions, mass unconscious actions have certain momentums, something that Tolstoy tried to explain more philosophically in the narrative of War and Peace, how the individuals with their own lives could be carried off by history's great forced floods this way or that. He was trying to describe often what I encounter in my study of prophecy, that there is a wave of mass human stupidity that is carrying even intelligent people into its current, that is converging on a collision in the Middle East...what I get wrong also is a helpful study of how the human mind misinterprets a sign with its own expectations and hopes and I think it helped me be a better interpreter as well as a predictor of the future..." John Hogue on Whitley Strieber's Dreamland: Journeys to the Extreme Edge

I first read Whitley Strieber's Communion, which stretched my understanding of non-fiction as a young reader, surveying a gamut of fiction, history, philosophy, mythology in my family library. 

Another genre-bender, who influenced my appreciation for literature in a more grounded way, was Jack Kerouac, who together with Allen Ginsberg, prophesied a shift in American social norms through their collective literary breakthroughs. They had noted that in the second half of the 20th century, Americans would shift from their hardline Christian upbringing to a more Buddhistic sensitivity. 

Reading both of their writings thoroughly, I soon interpreted within their work an interesting relationship to what we now call prophecy. More than to pin prophecy within the highly skeptical sensationalism of conspiracy theory, prophecy, in a more mythological sense, is simply the attuning of the intellect to certain eloquence in creatively utilizing timeless wisdom and ageless archetypes, reattributing them as signs. 

More often than not, prophecy in mystic circles is not an outward momentum, toward predicting profane outcomes, but simply one of the many old ways toward self-realization. One is inevitably of the infinite. Popular prophets are heady mixes of conspiracy theory or what Terence McKenna called, "epistemological cartoons". In Hebrew mysticism, my understanding is that prophecy is a numerological science, beheld within the Hebrew language of the Torah, encompassing a unitive vision of interpretive science as it meets with spiritual practice. 

Recently, I viewed the film, Rasputin, which was another prophetic figure portrayed on the literature on my shelf as a young man impressed by the literati. Rasputin certainly opened the popular discourse of prophecy on the world stage, especially as regards political intrigue, out into broad daylight. His eyes still transfix. 

________

With a mug to mirror the inescapable frame of Kerouac’s joual-toughened jaw, bespoken with the silent glimmer of streetside grief, walking alone and alone for the infinite mileage of American wanderings, a cyclical tongue of ruthless freedom, to free the passions from the word-order of choice and splay will on the open pain of roadside heat with a thumb and a meek treasury of manly poverty 

Pauper by Petr Brandl

that drunken cry that rang throughout the humbling scope of spectral telephone wires following with the unheard voice of millions distanced by the wiry nerves of a social neurosis towards mobility, and with the rootless leisure of a need to travel as a way of being, that holy rope burned the traveler’s hands as the writing cooled mind’s belonging on a land of no-land opening

_________

“American body,

May you be cooled,

May the dog days of the final moon in your Roman clock tick no more,

May your fires be dampened in the Fall,

May your body always be replenished,”

“This is a prayer from your navel,

Your own son”

excerpt from "American; Columbian Men and Women at the Edge of Civilization and Meaning"