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THE BONE GODDESS |
I was the first one. I am
this land, and you no longer know me. Ah well. So what. I've been here a long time. A long time.
In the beginning, I was alone. Alone in this place. Me, and Old Man
Mountain, sleeping beneath the hot sun. Running beneath the young sun,
waking up the People in my country: Ho, Hare, Snake, Mallow, Saguaro. There were
more People then. Some have gone, never to return. We spoke together then, laughed more.
These ones, they think they own the place.
Ha! They dig and dig, but they will not find
me!
Listen, I will tell you something, since you have come here with your hands empty.
You
are full of holes. Sometimes a person stands up over dinner and just walks outside and
keeps on walking into the sun, and does not know why. There comes a time when you have
given so much of yourself away that there is nothing left, when you have become
transparent, when you can be seen through to the bone, when your spirit has become woven
into bad things.
That's when you find yourself in my country.
Walk into the desert and sit beneath a cholla and be silent, and notice the shapes of
bald mountains. Old Man, sleeping. The shape of his shadows, the shape of the sky, the
color of shadows. That is when you must find beauty in a cholla, crack in the sun like an
old bone. That's the time when you must collect your own shadows.
I may help you. Bring your offerings if you wish, I will give them to the Bird People,
the Mouse People, walk in the shimmering heat, the silence, you may find me.
If I want you
to.
I may tell you stories that wrap themselves around old bones, quartz and turquoise,
pottery shards, stories of Snake and Coyote and cracks in the land like a spiderweb, full
of light.
And
I may not.
I was the first one. This is my place.
Storyteller Index