I could use some help by Zoebess Blog entry

Blog: My Secret Life
by Zoebess

I could use some help

looking for a shaman

Date: 5/16/2008 1:18:46 PM ( 16 y ) ... viewed 2603 times

In my morning meditation an old friend came to visit and in a
near blinding brightness, stood on my path, holding a light
which caught my attention...

I was surprised, mildly and pleasantly, to revisit
a memory and a calling from a time that has gone before
when one morning I was walking under a canopy of trees
which lined Swan Creek which lies in an area of Missouri
which is untrammeled by man and backs up to the Mark Twain
National Forest. I was living on a farm there, with 4 horses
and a mule, and all assortment of wild things which came
out at night, and lots of bluebirds, and hummingbirds which
came to the 7 feeders I hung in the trees there, hence the
name, Hummingbird Hill. To get to where I lived, you had
to cross 3 concrete pads across the creek and after a
good rain, the creek began to gather up speed and momentum
and no longer resembled a creek more so a raging river
which only with great folly would anyone consider crossing.

The day I walked down to the creek, it had been raining
for days and the creek swollen out of its bank for days
and the sound of it, I can remember even now, as it was
a roar and as music to my ears. The sound moved the air
I walked through, and the rain dripped from foliage of
the trees 25 feet and more above me. I was in no hurry
as I knew from the sound of it I would still not be able
to cross the creek. There was a sweetness to the isolation
in such times and it was only out of curiosity and wanting
to watch the water move that I found myself going to the
safest edge to admire it as it rushed by.

The road to the creek was dirt and over the years had been
graded down, inch by inch, to clear it from debris of other
times when flooding had gouged it and filled it with debris
of wood and rock. Over the time I had been coming to the farm,
it had probably lost a good foot of surface, and still, like
clockwork, after a major storm, a man with heavy equipment
would appear and clear the way again. This morning, I walked
along the road and the flooding had not yet reached it and
the way was smooth and the dust soaked but not even such
that my foot left more than a mere footprint.

As I walked my thoughts were nothing special. I was blissed
by the noisy silence and of particular note was the brilliance
of the different shades of yellow and green where the sun
filtered through the tree tops. The day was my own and I walked
slowly. Once at creekside, the sight was not a disappointment
and I stood there, much as people might stand beside Niagra Falls
to admire the sight and sound of so much water rushing by. I could
see where the trees and rocks which the creek had moved in its
hurry had begun to press up against the concrete pad and that
water jetted up and over them with great speed and a powerfulness
that nature is to be admired for and we are so often humbled by.

At long last, perhaps a half hour had passed and I had absorbed
my fill of the sound and sight of the water and turned back to
retrace my steps. As slowly as I came, even more slowly, I returned,
as by this time I was deeply meditative and the white noise had
filtered out any worry or stress I had brought with me. On the road,
in the middle, where just previously, I had walked, there lay a
turtle. The turtle was not alive, and was bigger than my palm.
Its shell appeared to have been bleached by time and as I stood over
it, peering down, I could not help but be mesmerized, my first
thought being, I had never seen a dead turtle, much less one that
appeared as if by magic, in my path.

I bent, deep at the waist, and peered at it from the front and
the back. I could see each bone was exactly in place as if it
had literally just stopped and died where it had stood. I was
not anxious to touch it as I knew without any doubt that it had
not been there when first I had walked that way. No, certainly,
this was something of high strangeness as no one that I had seen
could have put it there either as no one had come down that road
for weeks and certainly not in the hour I had spent walking to
the creek and standing there soaking in the sound.

I stood in front of the turtle and peered into its shell from
the front, seeing that its head and neck, each bone remained
in place and yet, how could this be?? As my thoughts and
questions began to form, a voice came over my shoulder, "You
can die going too slow, Zoe". I stood up immediately and turned
in the direction of the voice. There was nothing to see. I turned
again to the turtle and a deepness of understanding began to well
up in my psyche. I did not understand where or how or from when
this message from spirit had come to me but it was the loudest
message I had heard through my own resolve for months which was
to hide out in the hills and to escape the noise and chaos of the
world I found outside of the wilderness. There, my days were spent
climbing the mountain to a sacred spring where I would sit and
meditate and imagine the Indians who had come there to do what
I was doing, from times as ancient as the beginning of the water
pushing its way through the rock and earth to become the spring
and waterfall it had become. It was my piece of heaven on earth
and many times I had considered leaving but then the part of me
which indulged myself would say, no, this is where I feel like
time has slowed to a crawl and there is nothing I am missing living
in the wild, no television, no stores, no people. When I stepped
into the yard in the late evening, deer shared it with me. In the
early morning, the horses would come to the fence and call out to
me to come and hand out gentle whispers of affection. Still, now,
as the rain continued to drip overhead, I was met with yet another
version of the writing on the wall, where the hand of God says,
"MY WILL be done".

I gathered up the shell and carefully placed all the bones in the
bowl of its body, while on one hand feeling I should leave it to
disappear where it had come from, and yet, wanting to keep it as
proof of my cosmic wake-up call. I walked back to the farm, a little
quicker, and with a resolve to change my life.

That choice and my decision to move back to town seemed to
precipitate more than a few major shifts. One was that through
coincidence, I met a Toltec Shaman. It was as much a surprise
to him, I think, as it was for me to open my door one night to
a man who had driven for hours through a major blizzard to my
home. He peered at me in amazement. "Now I know why I had to
come", he said as I let him in. My friend, who he had come to
meet, was there to greet him and had warned me that anything
could happen, but under no circumstances should I let him "put
a bag over my head".

Longer story short, he did not have to put a bag over my head to
teach me what he felt I needed at that time. He did ask me to
come where he worked in Mexico. His healing room was carved out
in a cave and he asked me to come and study with him. I still do
not regret my choice to say no since I was still healing myself
of my cancer crisis and the silliest thing I was thinking at that
time was that the water in Mexico might be an issue for me. My,
what obstacles the mind can find when it is seeking ways to slow
one up.

He left me with a list of ways to contact him and a Mexican opal
which he told me would help me understand more as it contained all
the colors needed for healing. For his part, he had that morning
fallen down a flight of stairs and after his friend had reset his
ribs in my healing room, I watched him fold his legs up underneath
him and go into a trance and "talk to the pain". The two of them
left for Mexico the next day and that was the last I saw of him
until this morning, in my mind's eye, he stood beckoning to me as
I meditated. I wondered how he was and how fate would bring our
paths together again, and for what purpose. The information he left
with me is somewhere in the archaeological dig of my life which is
my storage where, after each nomadic wandering, I press another
layer down and wonder of the day when I will excavate it all and
settle down again. Knowing google has a way of connecting people
I am writing this out so that someone may know him and will send
word, although truly, if he drove up the drive in an hour, I should
not be surprised...ggg. More likely, perhaps I will see him again,
in my dream time, although nothing would surprise me~!

The clock has been ticking and the surprise of these circumstances
are that the shaman I had been living with knows of this person
although not where he is and fate brought us together in this
remarkable small window of time and now after years of "catching" her
wisdom, I do feel ready to look for the fork in the road so-to-speak
and head into the unknown.

Funny how today I realized that my holy grail of desire was to
return to Missouri and to embrace the vibration of the limestone
caverns and the rivers there, and family and friends. I thought
nothing could alter that desire and yet, in a single blinding
moment, I see that I can be led away, perhaps along an unwritten
course, a course not rehearsed in my mind as so many homecomings
are to those who are weary of travel and long for home. Today,
the taste for adventure and the unknown is in my mouth and
something has stirred in my heart and mind, a longing, a longing
to see my friend found that snowy night years ago. I feel a part
of him must surely still be waiting for a visit from me.

His background, since I have found there to be a gazillion people
of the same name....as a child of three his family turned him over
to the Toltec elders who raised him in darkness to be a shaman.
His name is Alejandro S. and he is a Toltec Holy Man. He is an
elderly person, easily in his late sixties, perhaps older. If
someone knows him and would pass his info to me, or my info to him,
I would consider it an act of great kindness.

blessings and gratitude,
Zoe

-_-