Chantress Seba - You Are the Light
Play music video to accompany the blog post - if you can distract yourself away from this mesmeric duo. This beautiful track inspired this post.
Ojibwe land, sacred land, posted land. A parcel of more than 40 acres of wooded terrain.
A sanctuary for timber wolves, black bears, coyotes, deer, an observant owl, and a mountain lion that isn’t entirely extinct.
On the day my spirit lover, Hans [1], said to me, “It is time for a change,” and pointed my finger on the Tarot card that turned out to be the 10 of Cups, implanting a vision of the northern regions of Minnesota–on that day of reckoning, after making an offer on a 10-acre property in Vermont, my lover called my bluff.
In this way, Hans carries me from one adventure to the next.
Once upon a time, I was a seeker and maker of a staged and materialistic existence,
cosmetically injecting myself into a state of artificial existence,
surrounding myself with worthless, pretty things of entrapment,
a self-imposed "rich prison" [2] .
It was at my sit spot where it finally happen…
…Where I became a crone and turned into something beautifully withered, invisible and overlooked.
At 51, with Hans’s guidance toward higher states of consciousness, I finally understood the consequence of pretty things and pretty skin–in the end, disheveled and disoriented, the things I thought mattered most, betrayed me and imprisoned me.
I lost my way–as Hans held my hand and observed my descent to an underworld of my own making.
To live in the farthest reaches of northern Minnesota is to resume the
initiation toward spiritual expansion.
This sacred space of the shapeshifting kind, this unseen world, where the demon’s breath on the nape of my neck, alerts me to the true protector of this land.
I summon these spirits with the beating of my frame drum, inviting their presence to intermingle with my spirit within, descending (intentionally this time) to the underworld with Hans and Hermes at my side.
To be in the woods among the trees and the beasts–what family and friends caution as a terrifying and lonely place–they say to me, “You could get injured, mauled, or worse.”
But isn’t that what we do to each other in schools, grocery stores, and shopping malls? We kill one another, we kill ourselves, we kill the sacredness out of the land.
To die in the land, to disappear and to never be found again–this is a recurring dream…
When it’s time to go,
when the angel whispers
his hello,
it’ll be a death march into the woods,
giving my flesh to the soil–
giving away my worldly goods.
When the moon coyly slips out of the clouds
and I begin a silent transformation,
far away from all the crowds
far away from their probation,
deep within a colony of spruce,
sans hospital, sans abuse,
unfurling under the pine pitch,
bramble jabbing my ribs,
I gasp and begin to twitch,
bypassing the peering eyes
of a clinical gazer,
letting go of my flesh,
my spirit lifts without a waiver [3].
Some people call aging wisdom. For me, aging returns me to the land. It is a calling from the other side. Where I end up, I never know.
This land, this place that I seek----that according to the purchase and sales agreement, I “rightfully own”----is an illusion.
No one owns the land.
I am merely a caretaker, in a long line of caretakers, a lover of wild and isolated places, in tow with my dead lover — who guides me deeper into the woods — where strange creatures come out to play, invisible ones that size me up through initiation. Sometimes they growl and whisper indecipherable words that Hans must interpreter, mediate and gatekeep. Together, we are peaceful warriors, seekers of communion. We listen, we pray, we leave offerings, we make love under the canopy trees, disintegrate and return to the stars.
Notes
[1] Hans is not a metaphor. He is my actual spirit husband who joined me in spirit in 1993 after his passing in Germany. My Creative Dissertation at CIIS is about my romantic relationship with him and how he fuels my creativity and spirituality and how more often than not we play the mythological roles of Psyche and Eros.
[2] Morwood, J. (2010). Cupid Grows Up. Greece & Rome, 57(1), 107–116. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017383509990301
[3] Excerpt from “Death Arrangements” poem by Lavavoth, 2022.
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