Chapter 5 The Glassblower and the Hitchhiker

Chapter Five

The Glassblower and the Hitchhiker

      When the public radio station asked me to do a call-in discussion about Dreamwork, I was delighted.  It was the end of December.  The year had entered my birth sign of Capricorn and I was coming into a time of powerful rebirth of the light.  After finishing the program, there were a few people who had questions which couldn’t be answered in the allotted time.  I called each of them back later. The Glassblower wanted to know several things, first what did “Philo” mean?  That was easy, “it means love; it’s a Greek word.  Philosophy is the love of wisdom.”  He lived near Philo and that pleased him to know it meant love.  Then he wanted to know if waking life can be like a dream.  “What do you mean by that; could you give me an example?” I wanted to know.  He proceeded to tell me the story of how he and a friend had gone into the forest to take LSD and that everything was cool for a while, but then when his friend wanted to make love to him, he was confused.  His friend, another guy in his early twenties, seemed overly amorous when they sat in the nude together, like it was a dream or a myth or something like that.  “Maybe your appearance and demeanor constellated an archetypal image for him,” I suggested, “perhaps something out of Greek mythology.  It sounds like Pan and his satyrs reveling in the forest.  Do you have long curly hair?”  “Yes, I do.” He replied.  “How about a beard, long sideburns, and a moustache?” I asked.  “Ya, that’s me all right.” He said.  “OK how about body hair?  Do you have a lot of body hair, especially on your legs?”  The answer was in the affirmative.  “How would you characterize your moods?  Are you prone to moodiness, do you swing into depression and feel lonely a lot?”  That was true too.  I suggested that his character and the setting could have constellated the situation, sort of like a replay of a myth from ancient Greece.  It would feel very natural to someone, like the friend, who was unconscious at the time to act out the mythic action, especially if he were aware of the homosexual behavior of ancient Greek men.  The Glassblower was relieved.  I was amazed.  Here’s another intimate, unsolicited, life story.  What does all of this mean? 

      After a minute or two of breathing to ground myself, I asked the Glassblower the question looming larger and larger in my mind.  “How is it that you feel comfortable telling a perfect stranger such intimate details about an LSD trip?”  “Oh,” he responded, as though he was expecting my question, “I can tell you have a pure heart and that your love is unconditional.”  I was impressed, who is this guy anyway, some incarnation of Hermes or Pan? I thought.  So I asked the obvious,  “You can tell that over the phone, just by listening to my voice?”  His response was clear and without any hesitation, as though he had some sort of absolute knowledge source, “Yes, I can.”  That passage from the I Ching kept revolving round and round in my mind, the one about how spontaneous affection is the all inclusive principle of union in human beings.  This was a case of spontaneous affection for me.  Could I rise to the occasion and connect with this guy?  So I overcame whatever shyness still remained in my psyche and said, “Well, if you can tell that over the phone, then you are the kind of person I would really like to meet.  Could we get together sometime in person?”  “Sure,” he said.  He had told me that part of his goat-like nature came from being born under the sign of Capricorn, which is something we shared, his birthday was about a week before mine.  Then with the clarity of a psychic mind-reader, he said, “How about going to the sweat lodge together.  Aren’t you going to a lodge for your birthday?”  He knew I was a Capricorn, that I had shared with him.  Anyone who listened to the Dreamwork radio show would have heard that I practiced Native American Ceremonies and that my Seneca ancestors were masters of dream interpretation.  I guess I should have expected the Glassblower to assume I would celebrate my birthday in some sort of Native American fashion, but I don’t remember ever telling him about it.  Somehow he could read me psychically over the phone!  I had heard about these amazing kids they call indigo children and now I was going to meet one!

      The Medicine was leading me to Philo, toward love, literally to the town of Philo and then down through the forest into the town where the Glassblower lived.  This twenty-three-year-old Capricorn had magically tuned into my psychic space.  I was going to a Sweat Lodge the day of my birthday and I was risking a lot by deciding to take a stranger with me.  I was going to meet him and then drive this excitingly strange psychic Glassblower with me into my world.  He was turning twenty-four and I was turning fifty-six.  And yes, he did look the part of Pan, I guess just as much as I looked the part of Hermes, Pan’s father.  Actually I was his father’s age.  We talked about his family.  His dad was a Russian Jew.  His mom was an upwardly mobile Roman Catholic, who divorced his dad when the boy was nine.  By the time he was fifteen, growing up in Malibu, his mother was suspicious of his friends and was monitoring his phone calls.  When she discovered he was smoking marijuana, she turned him in to the police.  Ironically this did two things of importance, (1) it made it very easy to get drugs, since it put him in contact with other youth who were doing mushrooms and LSD, and (2) it began his psychological counseling history.  He learned a lot from all that therapy and decided that his medicine was LSD.  He was, like many of the young people in rural Mendocino County, a pot grower and proud of his product.  I wasn’t smoking any more, so we agreed to visit the Sweat Lodge in a clean manner.

      Down where the Glassblower lived were some of the most beautiful old growth Redwood trees I had ever seen.  Their forest community was very secluded.  My host showed me his incredible glass pipes, which never touched the lips and consequently didn’t spread disease. He had learned his trade from his friends down in Malibu and would still be there, if an accident hadn’t befallen his mentor.  Evidently the older man had rolled out of his loft onto the floor below, rupturing his spleen.  They found him dead in the morning when the crew arrived for work.  With no more warehouse in which to work, the glassblowing guys had moved north to grow “herb” as it was now being called.   He had a studio in the back of his house where he continued to produce pipes for sale at Reggae concerts. 

      After the Sweat Lodge, which was over ninety miles away, the Glassblower and I went to have our birthday dinner at the Greek restaurant with my spirit family.  My protégé He Calls Owls met us there; as did Deer Woman, whom I supported on her Vision Quest.  We ate and much to my surprise, Deer Woman knew several of the dances the musicians were performing.  She had learned them on previous travels to Greece.  Neither He Calls Owls nor The Glassblower had seen a belly dancer before, nor had they eaten Greek food.  For The Glassblower it was a great Birthday celebration.  He missed his family as did I and we made family for each other.  We said good-bye to Deer Woman and He Calls Owls.  When we drove home and stopped for gas, the snow was falling.  My young friend from Southern California was fascinated with the size of the snowflakes, which were as big as silver half-dollars.  Some were as big as silver dollars, but only someone my age, who grew up in Idaho would be able to make that comparison.  The Glassblower was acting just like any little kid who experienced enormous snowflakes, he was trying to catch them on his tongue.  It looked so fun, that I joined him.   We were having a great birthday party and so was Coyote!

      As we traveled deeper into the forest, the snow was getting deeper too.  The Glassblower offered me a couch on which to spend the night, but my granddaughters were in town.  I wanted to be home the next day, so I left my friend at his cabin in the woods.  As I got closer to the main highway, I began to realize that Coyote’s trick was the snow.  I was driving along the seacoast where it rarely ever snows.  Imagine what is happening up on the mountain where I live is what I should have been thinking.  By 2 am I had to stop and put chains on my car.  When I did get going, I was lucky enough to have to follow the snowplow up from sea level to nineteen hundred feet.  We moved at the amazing rate of 15 mph and made the 35 mile trip in just over two hours! I was exhausted.  Having become accustomed to driving in the snow, I risked driving further up the mountain road to my duplex.  After making a fire and sleeping beside it, I was happy to have had such a wonderful birthday party.  According to the Chippewa Medicine Wheel, I am a Snow Goose!

      Throughout that year I was driving forty-five minutes each day to work.  There were lots of birds and animals to enjoy as I drove up and down the grade.  It was like traveling on a dragon’s back.  The road kept moving, sliding down the hill into the river.  The crews were constantly fixing the roadbed.  They still do even after spending millions of dollars.  The road is resting on a volcanic area which shakes and shudders like a dragon having a bad dream.  The drive gave me lots of time to ponder my situation.  It had been nine months since the first Peyote Ceremony.  An inner change was taking place, sort of like being pregnant with possibilities.  I had been seeing my counselor weekly for two years and we had been talking about patterns, family strategies, and feelings.  I had noticed how, for most of my life, I had used alcohol and marijuana to numb my feelings.

      If you read the literature about substance abuse, there are some studies which show peyote to be an alternative therapy in alcohol addiction.  What I noticed personally was that I was no longer smoking marijuana at all and that my use of alcohol was social and minimal.  I was also more aware of my surroundings and much more sensitive to the words and actions of people.  It was May.  A year had passed since Gabriel had labeled me Coyote.  I was driving the Native American kids home from tutoring at the tribal center when I stopped at an intersection.  Across the street and headed in the same direction we were going was Josh, the 4 day Mormon Missionary/Surfer, whom I had lost track of the year before.  Josh had his back to us.  Then just as I was beginning to drive through the intersection, he spun around and eyeballed me.  I raised my hand in acknowledgement.  “Who was that?” asked the young Indian boy sitting behind me.  “Just a student from the college” I replied.  “Ya, right!” he said.  I was annoyed by his response, what did he mean by that anyway? 

      In order to get a different perspective, I often try to imagine what it would be like to see through another person’s eyes.  What was the kid behind me experiencing?  He was watching the road, since he was in driver education and was checking out my driving.  He could be thinking, “Everything is running smoothly and slowly as usual.  The old man is driving carefully.   There is a guy walking down the street with his back to us.  Suddenly he turns, like there is some kind of energy passing between Michael and him, like he knew we were there.  This is a non-ordinary experience!  This is stuff my grandma, Bear Woman, talks about.”  Popping out of this thought experiment, I had to admit, maybe this kid has a point.  It was the first time I had ever noticed something like that happening.  How often does someone see you with eyes in the back of his head?

      For graduation ceremonies at the college, I loved wearing my regalia.  It was like being back in medieval times when all the college dons wore their gowns every day.  My Masters gown had special sleeves, which, I was told by an elder colleague, used to hold prayer books.  The hood was just that, a hood.  If I pulled it down in front,instead of letting it ride across my shoulders and drape open in back, the pointed hood could be pulled up over my head.  I looked like a medieval monk in that gown.  Later the Masonic, flat mortarboard hats were added.  Imagine carrying mortar up stairs on your head to build Cambridge University in England.  Well I was now more than a Master of Philosophy.  I was the Teacher of the Stories of Life and my token was Meyalo’s feathered headband.  I strapped it to my mortarboard.  I grabbed my walking stick of local madrone wood with a two-pronged deer antler attached to the top so they looked like primitive antennae.  I was ready for the college graduation ceremony.

      My conservative colleagues weren’t too happy with my costume.  Lots of frowns among the black robed faculty.  The graduating students on the other hand loved my rebelliousness.  They stopped me, thanked me for teaching them, told me they were proud of their native heritage and proud of me for reminding everyone there were indigenous people with their traditions here too.  I used my staff like a pitchfork when a colleague asked, “are you going to stick me with that?”  I obliged her fear with coyote glee, not hard mind you, but firmly.  She shook her head like she had just encountered a crazy adjunct faculty member.  My colleague the deer department head was amused, he played the King in the college musical The King and I, so his flare for the dramatic was being reflected by me.  Perhaps he regarded me as a piece of performance art.

      The coordinators sat me next to a disabled colleague who was a Marriage and Family Therapist.  She had an electric wheel chair, which shook her back and forth every so often to keep her blood circulating.  She found my headband and deer staff amusing.  We had become good friends over the preceding year and I liked sitting beside her jiggling vehicle.  The ceremony had begun.  Then it happened.  Josh walked into the gymnasium late.  He climbed the bleachers all the way to the top and, like an eagle, began scanning the audience, graduates and faculty.  I was watching him intently, wondering what he would do.  When he noticed that I was watching him, he stopped scanning and locked his eyes on mine, smiling.  That’s when I knew I had done something I swore I would never do.  Just like my father, who either couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge body language, I had rejected Josh’s request for relationship and abandoned him.  I had become my father.

      At the reception after the graduation ceremony, I checked out my perception.  I knew I could be projecting my feelings of rejection and abandonment onto Josh, but then maybe he just wanted and needed me to be in his life.  When we talked about how he felt the year before, and how we had parted company, I discovered that he did want a relationship.  He was just too afraid of rejection to ask me in words.  His actions were very loud and clear.  They were saying, “I like you.  I like being with you.  You see me for who I am.  Nobody has ever cared for me like you do.  I wish you could have been my Dad.”   I must have been picking up those messages subliminally, because I was frightened by the intimacy but unable to feel my fear.  Working with my therapist had cracked open my armor enough to let the truth in.

      One of my strategies to survive my wife’s jealousy of my students was to cut off the relationship at the end of their studies.  Students who continued to take my classes had a longer relationship, but it always ended when they transferred to the university.  I never kept up relationships beyond that ,because I would want to pull them into my family life.  That had happened years before in Southern California during my fall into the underworld during Sabbatical.  A beautiful, blond surfer, who was into Alan Watts and cosmic consciousness, managed to get into my inner space during that time.  He was the perfect student, younger brother, and uncle for my kids.  He taught them to surf, fish from the pier, and loved to play with them.  He even took the whole family hang-gliding in Mexico.  My wife was wary of him at first assuming that he was my lover, but after he managed to hang around and befriend her as well, she changed her mind.  I even suggested the Surfer would be an ideal man to baptize our son, but that was going too far. She wouldn’t accept him as our youngest son’s godfather.  That was too extreme.  What would our colleagues say?  He did introduce me to LSD and expanded my awareness exponentially.  We lost track of him when we moved to Northern California.  When I found him by following my intuition in 1996, he told me “I knew you loved me and that someday we would meet again.”  With him in mind I told Josh, “I will never abandon you again.  I will always be there for you, no matter how far we travel, I will only be a telephone call away.”

      Although I tried to integrate my new spirit son into my biological family, they wouldn’t accept him.  I tried dinners and movies, both things my children enjoyed.  But they were very territorial about their dad and were not going to share me with anyone, at least that’s the way it felt to me. Their message to me was, “If you are going to hang out with him, don’t bother to hang out with us.”  As I discovered more about my Eagle Scout’s troubled childhood, I saw how much his life was a mirror of mine.  We had the same abusive, abandoning, rejecting, alcohol and drug using family of origin systems as our developing environment.   We both had Mormonism in our lives and suicidal ideas as young adults.  We both had hidden indigenous genes, were dreamers with prophetic dreams, and painful childhood illnesses.  Our intuitive abilities to perceive the attitudes and private images of others were frightening to most people.   We were so much alike, that not hanging out with Josh would be like rejecting and abandoning myself all over again.  I couldn’t do that.  Whatever the consequences would be, I was going to follow my heart!

      On the evening of the total eclipse of the sun in 1999, I had planned to cook dinner for Josh and his girlfriend.  I had to work late at the tribal office attending a committee meeting.  When it was over, I called Josh.  He informed me that his rare blood condition was acting up and he had a fever.  His girlfriend was there taking care of him, so I told him to go back to bed and we would get together another time.  I called my estranged wife to see if she wanted dinner and conversation on that August evening.  Her answer was clear, “No, I would rather work on things here, and by the way, I don’t want to be married to you any more.”  Stunned that the obvious had finally happened, but not prepared for it, I said, “OK, I’ll talk to you later,” and hung up the phone.  I gathered my things, locked the office, and got into my car.

      It had been a month since my second Peyote Ceremony.  At that ceremony, on the 4^th of July, the magic mirror really hit me in the face.  I met a man there who was married to a Greek woman who had accused him of being an abusive vampire and forced him into a year of mandatory anger management counseling.  “That could have been me,” I thought,  “the only difference is that I went voluntarily, but what a difference!  He was still blaming his wife.  She came from a stable, middle class, (yes, just like my wife) Greek family.  He was a wandering South American Sufi turned Native American Road Chief who expected his wife and children to camp out in tents and accept poverty.”  Sounded very familiar.  I could imagine how frustrating that would be for a woman like my wife, who was used to being treated with respect by her father and uncles.  The culture shock of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants marrying Greek Orthodox Christians whose lineage goes all the way back to Plato and Aristotle must have been mind boggling.  I was thinking, “Western Europeans took the patriarchal thing to extremes, especially in America.  In Greece women were welcome in the taverns, the whole family might be there eating and celebrating.  Not in Victorian Utah.  There the woman’s place is in the home.  What must it have been like for this Sufi’s wife in Native American circles?”  All of those thoughts were running through my mind as I drove onto the freeway headed north.

      Midway between the freeway entrance and the next exit was a young man with his thumb in the air.  He was dressed in a crimson red, long sleeved shirt, corduroy pants, and a huge trail pack with a sleeping bag on his back.  As I passed him, I kept saying my wife’s mantra, “We don’t pick up hitchhikers; we don’t pick up hitchhikers; we don’t pick up hitchhikers.”  Then another voice said, “But this one’s OK!”  I pulled over onto the apron and backed up.  He wanted a ride north of my home where he was attending school.  Since I was going that way, I would be glad to drop him in town where he could easily get a ride the rest of the way.  He was a blond, Dutch looking young man like the picture of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates that my mom put over my bed when I was a kid.  We had traveled north about a minute or two when he said, “Why don’t you let me out on highway 20?”

      “But highway 20 goes down to the coast.  I thought you wanted to go north into the redwoods,” I said trying to straighten things out.  He looked thoughtful and asked, “Isn’t there an exit for highway 20 up about five miles?”  “Yes,” I said, “but it heads east over to the lake.  Don’t you want to go north?”  “Just drop me off there at the exit.” he replied.  “Where do you really want to go then?” I asked.  “There’s a prayer service I want to attend in a place called Potsville” was the reply.  “Potter Valley?” now I was incredulous,  “which church are you attending?”  “Well,” he said after a long pause, “it's not in a church; it’s a tent service.”  Hum, I wondered how I had gotten Billy Graham’s Revival Meeting Tent into my space? I certainly don’t need rednecks riding with me very far. . . . . . .  But there’s something wrong with this picture.  It’s Wednesday, the first week in August and it’s the eclipse of the sun.  Fundamentalists don’t have tent meetings on days like today.  Coyote must have something to do with this.

      “OK”   I said, “so the tent service is in downtown Potter Valley?”  “No, it is seventeen miles up in the mountains above Potter Valley” he offered.  “What’s the name of the church that is putting up the tent meeting?”  I wanted to know.  None of this was making sense.  There was a very long silence before he spoke.  Then he said, “Native American Church”.  “Really?” I said, “do you see that double garnet in the stone on the dashboard?  I got that to remind me how my heart opened during my first meeting of the Native American Church.  If you can find the Meeting, I will take you anywhere you want to go.”  After all, I had nothing better to do.  I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. My wife of thirty plus years just told me she wanted a divorce.  What better way to spend the evening than hunting for a needle in a haystack.  Without good directions the meeting could be anywhere within a 17 mile radius of the valley.  “Don’t worry, there will be signs,” he said.

      Well there were all sorts of signs.  There were white paper plates with red plastic ribbons. He checked those out and got back in the car discouraged.  I had decided that the logging road was the best bet, so we took that.  Then there were the animals.  A brown and black ring tailed cat ran across the road in front of the car.  “I wonder what that means,” he said.  “Do you really want to know?” I challenged.  “Yeh, really.” He was getting to be fun, so I said, “well in the medicine wheel, those kinds of animals usually represent trust and innocence.  They are symbolic of childhood when we see only up close, directly around us like children do.”  And then another sign appeared.  Dusk was falling, a sign we would probably be too late for the service, since typically they begin at sundown.  My rider was noticeably anxious.  The next sign was an open gate at the seventeen mile marker on my speedometer.  I pulled in, but my passenger protested.  “No, no, not here, let’s go down the road more, down there,” pointing further down the main road.

      I stopped the car.  Turned off the motor.  Took the keys out of the ignition.  Turned to my frightened passenger and said, “You don’t want to go down this road onto private property, because it’s harvest season.  You don’t want to be seen as a ripper, who has come to steal the farmer’s harvest, right?”  “Yeh, right, let’s just go down there,” he said shaking from head to toe. “Look, I have lived here for sixteen years and an open gate in the middle of harvest season is an invitation to enter, believe me.  If they didn’t want us in here, the gate would be locked!  I tell you what I am going to do.  I am going to get out of the car and walk up there to the rise and look down and see if I can see the Tipi.  OK?  Can you just sit here a moment while I do that?” I asked him calmly.  “Yes,” was his reply.

      From the rise I could see the Tipi and the shadows of the people sitting around the fire.  I called to my frightened hitchhiker and asked him to come up.  I wanted to ask him if he could see his friends.  He walked up to where I was standing and I asked him what he could see. “Nothing” was his reply.  Now I was confused. I could see the Tipi filled with people, but he couldn’t?  “Well,” I was trying to think quickly, “you see that light up the road?  I’ll bet they have a phone and you can call your friends from there.”  He was willing to do that.  As we approached the light, he started recognizing people’s cars.  We parked and he was greeted by one of his friends.  He explained his delay. “My plane was delayed two hours from Denver, so when I got to my Dad’s house, they had already left.  I hitchhiked eighty miles and then this guy Michael picked me up and brought me up here!”  It turned out that he was the Road Chief’s son and was wearing the red shirt expecting to take care of the fire that night.  We were told the meeting had started.  That didn’t stop the Dutchman.  He took me up to the Tipi door and scratched on the canvas.

      Soon a dark skinned man appeared, talked to the hitchhiker and went back inside.  He told the Chief, “your son is outside with a man; they want to come in.”  I heard a garbled response that sounded like, “We’re eating Medicine now.  They can come in when we’re done.”  I told my young friend, that I didn’t need to sit up; it was enough of a miracle that I picked him up and that we found the spot.  Besides I had to work in the morning.  “No way,” was his response.  “They’ll find us seats, they better.  Look what we’ve done to get here!”  And they did.  He sat beside his girlfriend who pulled out a brown and black hawk fan at midnight, which looked just like the ringed-tail cat.  They were sitting in the south, the place of trust and innocence on the Medicine Wheel, just like I had told him.  I was sitting beside the Fireman’s wife in the east, symbolic of the far seeing Eagle.  I was thrilled to be sitting up.  I needed it.

      That night I ate lots of Medicine on my empty stomach.  I was grieving the end of my marriage and the hope of reconciliation with a woman who could never accept what I was doing in the Tipi. The Medicine was very helpful.  I could feel energy flowing through my body. The woman beside me had a swollen ankle.  Once when someone was passing by they almost kicked her ankle.  I instinctively put my hand down to protect her.  I felt energy flow out of me into her ankle.  I hadn’t intended to do anything.  It just happened. I noticed that if I raised my hands with my palms to the fire, it felt as if more energy would flow through me.  A few weeks earlier, I had begun studying psychic abilities.  I was in the middle of the course for psychic healers.  My new studies opened me up to the possibility there were unexplained phenomena.  In previous years, my analytic left-brain would have overridden this kind of information.  Whether it was the Medicine or my newly found receptivity, the experience was unforgettable.

      Something unusual was happening in the meeting.  Everything was being translated into Spanish.  At the time of Main Smoke, the sponsor of the meeting explained her reason for the prayer service.  It was the eclipse of the sun! She felt the star nations would be imprinting our DNA with data for the new millennium.  She had invited several Spanish speaking shamans; some were bundle carriers for their tribes in Central America.  There were university professors from South America, the Naropa Institute in Colorado, people from Arizona and New Mexico.  I was privileged to be in an extraordinary assemblage of spiritual people.  And the Medicine had brought me there by telling me to pick up the Hitchhiker.

      The leading authority on peyote and its use by Native Americans over the past century was Omer C. Stewart.  In his comprehensive book, (1987) Peyote Religion: a History, Stewart notes there are two distinct ways Indians refer to medicine and both can be applied to peyote. The first is a botanical item, which is applied to the body or eaten to cure ailments. These medicines are the basis of many remedies known to modern pharmacology.  The second way of using the term
‘medicine’ is very difficult to define, since according to Stewart, “it leads straight into mysticism. . . it may refer to an immaterial force which manifests itself in Nature’s realm” (p.332).  It is this second use of the term, which I am using when I refer to “the Medicine”.  It is akin to what the Hindus call Atman and what Carl Jung called the Self.  The Self is the Great Mystery.  It both includes the Collective Unconscious (the archetypes, gods, goddesses, myths and symbols) and all individuals as well as the Creator.  It is also included by the Collective Unconscious. Needless to say it is difficult to define but easy to experience.

      Michael Tlanusta Garrett talks about Medicine in his book Walking on the Wind: Cherokee Teachings for Healing through Harmony and Balance.  There he says, “in the Medicine Way, living a life of harmony and balance . . . is making constructive and creative choices through clear intention (wisdom) to fulfill one’s purpose in the Greater Circle of Life by maintaining and contributing to the reciprocal balance of family, clan, tribe, and community in the context of personal, social, and natural environments” (1998, p. 100).  What Jung called the individuation process is another way of talking about the Medicine Way, as it requires consciousness of the Self by the maturing individual.  Basically it is a religious attitude toward life.

      When I emerged from the Tipi in the morning, I had painted my face with red pipestone pigment.  During the night I had the impression of cobalt spiders doing push ups inside my head.  The woman with the swollen ankle had told me about having blood clots in her lungs.  I suggested she could use the imagery of the spider, which wraps up its prey and then dissolves it with its body fluids, as a way of dealing with the blood clots, perhaps by imagining the spider to be dissolving the clots, her lungs would get better.  The woman’s ankle was completely healed by morning; who knows what happened to her lungs.  It felt like Grandmother Spider was taking care of us all night long.  I wanted to honor this indwelling spirit, so I stuck my five fingers in the pipestone dust and drew lines up my temples where the spider legs had been.  The water woman, who had prayed over the morning water and was sitting behind it, noticed me painting my face.  She predicted I would have a headache.  “Too much paint, way too much paint!”  Well, my attitude was one of deep respect for the Medicine and I didn’t get a headache.  But it dawned on me I couldn’t go to work looking like I did.  I decided to call in sick.  The person who answered the phone at the office was my friend Bear Woman, who sat on the Tribal Council and who regarded me as a Healer.  I told her I had been sitting up all night singing and eating peyote.  She said, “I know.  I heard you.  And you were having a really good time!”  She was the daughter of a Healer and had many of her mother’s gifts, but didn’t want to practice them, because it was too hard of a life.  I told her about the face paint and she laughed again.  She knew about that too and told me to take the day off and enjoy the relatives.

The Medicine definitely is powerful.