Chapter 6 The Ho-Key-O Portal

Chapter Six

 The Ho-Key-O Portal

      Dreams provide a bridge between dimensions.  Having images from the night world of the owl fly into the day world of the hawk fortifies the spirit.  When I decided to rent a room closer to my work, I dreamed of my mother who was wearing glasses supported from the bottom.  She opened the door of the dream space letting me into a restaurant where nourishment of the soul took place.  I recorded the dream in my sketchbook journal and went into work. When I went to inspect the room for rent later that day, I felt like I was entering into a new dimension.  The woman who opened the door of her home was, yes you guessed it, wearing those same glasses!  Since that style was popular over twenty years before, I knew that magic was a foot.

      Sweet Lorraine, as I came to call her, was the first white skinned full-blooded Blackfoot Indian I have ever met.  She looked just like my mother did at her age.  Her hair was bleached into a strawberry blonde and as we walked into the living room, I noticed it was filled with Native American art and artifacts.  It looked like a museum.  We were surrounded by memories of times past, when our people lived free and roamed the mountains and plains of America.  Then she introduced me to her half-breed dog, Dancer.  Perhaps that was her first test of the potential renter. Dancer was a huge, silver wolf/malamute, whom I later discovered had excellent intuitive abilities.  She had raised him from a pup and his love for her was like a child for its mother.  He could smell a person’s essence and knew whether or not to trust you.  If he didn’t like you, she wouldn’t have you in her space.   I guess he could tell I was a coyote, because he greeted me with kisses.  Lorraine was surprised with his behavior, “he’s not usually that affectionate with strangers,” she said, “come, let me show you the room.”

      I rented the room and moved in a few days later.  I put my stereo on a table at the foot of my bed where the door opened.   My grandpa peyote cactus sat on the table near my head. Everything seemed normal at first.  Then weird things began happening.  Doors opened mysteriously and the toilet down the hall would flush at night when no one was up.  A Yaqui Indian about my age was renting the bedroom next to mine.  He was completely disconnected from his tribal roots and appreciated the long talks about my experiences.  He was a recovering alcoholic like Lorraine’s ex-husband.  Lorraine and the Yaqui would sit up watching old movies on television every night.  In my bedroom I listened to peyote music or a Portuguese group called Madre Deus (Mother of God) to cover up John Wayne’s voice coming from the living room. After everyone was in bed and asleep, the mysterious sounds would recur.

      I asked Lorraine about those sounds and she said, “oh, that’s Jimmy, my son.  He used to get up late at night to use the toilet and get a snack from the kitchen.  Your bedroom used to be his room.  That bed you’re sleeping in was his.  He died ten years ago in an accident.”  I was curious about him and wondered if she had a photo of him I could put in the room.  She took down one from the hall, which was taken just before the accident, and offered it to me.  He was about eighteen and looked like a cowboy in the photo.  Now I knew who had been sharing my bed at night.  I had felt someone snuggling up to me, who reminded me of my boys when they were sick, always wanting contact with their dad.  So Jimmy was the boy whose arm was around my waist at night.  I liked his affectionate touch and felt recognized as a loving father.  But I didn’t want him to hang out in between our world and the Spirit World, so I began to talk with him about things.

      When I asked Lorraine about Jimmy’s accident, she became silent and her eyes filled with tears.  She told me how Jimmy was the youngest of her three children.  She had left her first husband in Southern California and moved into life as a single mother with enough money to buy the house we were sitting in.  Jimmy was three years old at that time.   Lorraine supported her family and had chosen the house, located across the street from an elementary school, because of her eldest son’s disabilities.  He was partially blind from birth.  His younger sister and brother helped him get to school every day.  There was also the boy she adopted.  He was thirteen when his father, who had been one of Lorraine’s lovers, died of a heart attack.  The boy had only met Lorraine a couple of times, but when asked where he wanted to live, had told the authorities “with my new mom, Lorraine”.  I was surprised at Lorraine’s generosity.  “You took a perfect stranger into your home as your son?” I asked.

      Sweet Lorraine was so filled with love and compassion that she adopted the boy, who had no one to trust but her.  She told me how the boy had been mistreated by his father’s lovers, who had sexually abused and beaten him.  He distrusted most women because of those experiences and Lorraine was determined to change things for the boy by giving him complete, unconditional love with safe boundaries.   Used to sleeping on the floor, the boy was given a bed, a dresser for his clothes, and a loving family.  He took the younger kids swimming in the river, hiking, and fishing as he grew older.  Grateful and loyal to his new family, the strong one graduated from high school and became a truck driver.  Jimmy idolized this older brother, whose wild spirit was tamed by love.

      Flowing through Lorraine’s story from her childhood onward was alcohol and physical abuse.  Her parents were dangerous when they drank alcohol.  The only time they were safe was during the short period of time when they were attending peyote ceremonies.  She trusted me because of my sobriety and my connection to peyote.  All of her husbands were just like her dad, alcoholics who were spiritually lost; they were emotionally unavailable.   She told me that it was Jimmy’s accident that ended her last marriage.  Her husband fell into the bottle when the boy died and she couldn’t pull him out.  Evidently Jimmy had fallen in there too before the accident, because he was living with a Pastor’s family during his teen-age recovery from the family disease.  He had learned the pattern of alcohol use and addiction from his step-father. Lorraine’s judgment was clouded by her need to get love and acceptance from her father’s energy, so she picked guys just like him.   I knew how that felt from my own quest for my father’s love.  And what about Jimmy?

      During Jimmy’s counseling sessions, the therapist, whom I knew to be a man of integrity, would sometimes use hypnosis.  Evidently one time, in order to give Jimmy hope for the future, the therapist asked his client to enter the near future.  The boy’s nose began to bleed profusely and would not stop when brought out of trance.  He had to be rushed to the hospital and his nose cauterized.  This worried Lorraine at the time, and with good reason, because it foreshadowed the accident a few months later.  Jimmy was leaving a parking garage with his friend and their girl friends.  Having left his coat on top of the cab of the truck, Jimmy climbed through the window and reached for his coat while the truck was moving.  A low hanging steel beam collided with Jimmy’s head, severing his nose and neck.  He was kept alive for two days before he died. Lorraine needed strength to grieve his passing and her husband was too devastated to comfort her.  That’s why he fell into the bottle and she divorced him.  But she had never really let go of her son Jimmy.  He was still living in the house and she loved the noises and flickering of lights, which his ghost had been making for ten years.

      After our auto accident in 1966, which killed my best friend Kent and put me into months of depression, guilt, and alienation from my fraternity brothers, I refused to let go. I held onto Kent for thirty years.  That wasn’t good for me or for his spirit.  I decided to talk to Jimmy about these things.  Since he was Native American through his mom’s Blackfoot lineage, I invited him to travel with me to a Peyote Ceremony run by the Hitchhiker’s Dad.  It was a memorial service my brother Black Horse was putting up for his wife who had died in an automobile accident on the reservation.  When I picked up my Apache friend Two Bears, he was wearing his red headband on his leg.  He seemed depressed, but wasn’t talking about it.  I had loved the movies of Geronimo and the Apache people, who were fierce warriors.  They were capable of suffering in silence.  Apache tears flow internally and are displaced into black obsidian stones carried in the pocket.  It was in the middle of the prayer service when Two Bears (he was a twin) finally told me that his older brother had died that day.  Unexpected death seems to be a theme in my life.

      On my birthday, five months after picking up the Hitchhiker, I was enjoying time with my son the Puma.  He was in the college dance ensemble at the time and was sharing a video on Spanish flamenco dancing with me.  I was so happy to be with the son who worked hard to keep communication open between me and the rest of the family.  Then the phone rang and I answered it, and to my surprise, it was my niece, who hadn’t contacted me in eighteen years. My brother had severed relationship with me six years earlier, telling me I could communicate through his daughter, my niece.  She had my phone number and address because her mom had not severed relationship.  Her mom did have a serious alcohol and cocaine addiction, which led to my brother’s divorcing her over ten years earlier.   Although my sister-in-law was in recovery, the cocaine had damaged her circulatory system and that New Year’s Eve an artery burst in her brain.  They had kept her alive, but her children had decided to turn off the machines that night. The memorial service would be the next day at 1pm, on January 4^th, my birthday.  My niece didn’t know it was my birthday; she just wanted me to come to the memorial service.  I told her that I would be there.   I made arrangements to leave the next morning.

      I awoke from a dream of holding my nephews close to me.  They were the age I had last seen them eighteen years before, when we visited the Midwest.  My mom was dying of liver failure due to a life of alcohol abuse.  She wanted to see her children and grandchildren one last time before she died.  My brother, who had power of attorney, was in denial about her impending death and refused to grant her request.  She went into a coma a few months later. He then decided that he would spend her money to fly my family to visit.  This pattern was already familiar to my wife and me. 

      Before mom moved back to the Midwest, she had come to visit us in Southern California. After a week with us, she became sick and had to be hospitalized.  The pneumonia was not responding to the antibiotics.  I took action, because my wife was not about to have her mother-in-law die in her house.  That was unthinkable to my Greek American Bear; she would never live down a thing like that in her culture.  So we had to communicate to mom while she was unconscious, in the coma of Sleeping Beauty, who was waiting for my dad, her handsome Prince to rescue her and take her to the Kingdom of Eternal Bliss.  My job was to get her to remember how beautiful is the garden of the Great Mother Earth and choose it over the Spirit World.  This was no small task even for a young magician. I got a poster of mom’s favorite birds, the bright red cardinals, and put it up in her hospital room.  We got her a soft, fluffy stuffed kitten and put it within her reach.  We pinned fresh fragrant gardenias to her pillow.  The smell filled the room with memories of dance parties and romantic times with her lover.  I talked with her and massaged her back, telling her that I knew it wasn’t easy, that she missed my dad, but we wanted her to choose life and relationship with her family.  The nurses were very supportive; evidently they knew that she could hear us in a coma.  Within days mom was conscious again and had decided to go home to Wisconsin to be with her sisters and my younger brother. Although I had told my brother about mom’s unconscious decision to die in my home, he had always been the practical one who was skeptical about my spiritual “trip” as he called it.

      When I awoke from the dream of holding my nephews, I got up, showered, shaved and then I noticed the time.  It was 2 am!  Since I was up and ready to go, I decided to drive across the state in the dark, foggy night.  Driving highway 20 from Willits to Auburn was a soulful journey and a very slow one too.  In the morning I stopped for breakfast, consulted the I Ching and still arrived four hours early at my sister-in-law’s apartment.  I followed my niece’s directions exactly, and as I parked my car, another pulled up beside me.  It was my niece and her Jewish husband. We went up to the apartment and talked about our lives during the eighteen year separation. She told me that they had turned off her mom’s life support machines at midnight.  I told her the dream and my belief that her mom had visited me in the dreamworld by producing what she wanted to see, her children being comforted by their long, lost uncle.  The boys had adopted their mom’s alcoholic patterns and my brother’s reaction was to reject them, so I was the only representative of my brother’s family at the memorial service.  My birthday gift from my sister-in-law was to get back my niece and nephews after eighteen years.  And the story of that birthday gift was the one I told in the Tipi over morning water the day I met my spirit brother Black Horse, whose wife had died in the accident back in South Dakota.

      Sitting in the memorial Peyote Ceremony next to my friend Two Bears, the grieving Apache, was a beautiful woman.  Her employee was the Fireman, who had invited her to the meeting. She liked Two Bears a little too much.  He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, although he was married and had a two-year-old child.   At midnight when we got out our instruments, the Fireman handed his employer a raven’s tail to hold.  He neglected to tell her about how to use the feathers or how not to use them.   My spirit sister had told me that only those with pure hearts should hold Raven’s feathers because of their power.  “Whatever you pray for will come to you,” she had told me, “so you need to be clear in your intentions if you are going to carry Raven.”  I looked at those feathers and the longing in the eyes of the beautiful woman and knew it was going to be an interesting meeting.

      The sponsor’s friends were sitting up for their first time.  Beside Black Horse sat a woman holding her baby and next to her a young couple.  The mother was one of his students.  The couple had been friends of his wife, and as I later discovered, the woman had been a professional ballerina who had danced with the sponsor in Europe.   I was sitting directly opposite the ballerina and her husband.  He who looked like Coyote to me.  He seemed so wild eyed and curious, like an animal who had wandered up to the Tipi, shapeshifted into human form, and walked in to enjoy the show.  After the Medicine had gone around a couple of times, the Coyote sitting across from me started to laugh uncontrollably.  He looked directly at me, smiling in recognition, and I projected this thought: “yes, you are right, the humans are ridiculously pretentious.  They are thinking and feeling all sorts of silly things, but you must behave yourself and try to be quiet.”  He sat up straight then, like a dog trying to behave, but the smile grew bigger, the giggles erupted, and he burst into laughter, covering his mouth with his hand.  He played with their friend's baby and continued to annoy the Hitchhiker who was drumming for his father, the Road Chief.

      By morning the Coyote was crying uncontrollably.  The Road Chief, a Medicine Man from Oklahoma, had told us that sometimes the Medicine makes you laugh and sometimes it makes you cry.  He was used to the Medicine’s unpredictable ways.  His adopted spirit son, the Hitchhiker, was raised by Protestant Christians and, over Midnight Water, the Drummer decided to chastise the Sponsor’s guests for his perception of their disrespect.   Those of you who are familiar with native ways know that upbraiding the Sponsor’s friends is very bad manners, but the Drummer was young and impetuous.  His dad had a reputation for letting his sons make fools of themselves, thinking that was a better way to learn than correcting them.  The old man also seemed to thrive on chaos; that way he could pull everything together at the last moment and be regarded as a savior.  The Sponsor, who was also a Medicine Man of considerable power, corrected the Drummer, saying that his wife’s spirit was very present and honored.  She had the ability to generate spontaneous laughter and it was a credit to her spirit that people were laughing.

      I told Sweat Lorraine’s son Jimmy to talk to my brother’s wife, that she could help him cross over toward the light.  I reassured him that his mom would be OK without him; I promised to talk to her and help her let go of him.  He seemed agreeable, he had been waiting ten years for this opportunity and he liked the fiery Eagle spirit wife of Black Horse.  They would be good friends. Perhaps she would adopt him as a son and care for him in the spirit world.  That’s what came to mind in that time when Black Horse went outside to communicate with her.  In the morning after the prayer service, I met the Coyote and his wife.  He took both of my hands and said to me through tear filled eyes, “thank you brother for your words last night.  I was reading everyone’s minds and laughing at them.  You were right, but I couldn’t stop laughing and now I can’t stop crying because I can feel their pain.”  I went to find my spirit sister, who had the blood clots in her lungs dissolve during the Eclipse of the Sun meeting.  I told her about the Spanish Coyote’s tears and she took us back to the fire.  There, she put down cedar and blessed the Coyote off with her eagle feathers.  She told him that the tears were shed for our relatives’ lives and suffering and the continued suffering of the people, but what the people really needed was strength, people like him who could walk their talk.  That’s when he stopped crying.  The Coyote’s companion told me how she met him in the Black Forest in Germany.

      A Lakota Medicine Woman was practicing her healing ways in Germany.  The Coyote was living there, studying Victor Sanchez’ adaptations of Casteneda’s techniques attributed to don Juan.  He was a professional tennis player and a flamenco dancer, who had been born in Spanish Morocco and identified with the indigenous inhabitants of his birthplace, the Berbers. He had heard of the Native American woman living in the Black Forest and attended her Inipi Sweat Lodge out of curiosity.  When they smoked the Sacred Pipe, the Chenoopa, during the third round, he saw his future life fly by with the woman who was smoking the pipe.   After the Ceremony, the Medicine Woman introduced the woman to him saying,  "I want to introduce you to your wife. Yes, I saw it too, your life together.”  She described  exactly what he had seen.  He was shocked! He had just been accepted into a PhD program in Psychotherapy in the United States.  He was moving to the San Francisco Bay area where his wife-to-be was returning.  “Very magical story,” I said, “and thank you for recognizing me as your brother.”  The ballerina, I later discovered, was a Sun Dancer and Pipe Carrier, who now pours her own Inipi Ceremonies in the USA.

      Jimmy, my invisible companion, was evidently having a good time with me.  After the Meeting, The Apache, Two Bears, was flirting with the beautiful woman who had been holding the Raven tail feathers.  I noticed the two of them sitting and talking on her blanket.  We ate and socialized.  I was getting ready to leave, when I saw the beautiful, red-faced woman running toward her car.  “What happened?” I asked.  Through her embarrassment and anger she said, “I told him how sexy he was and that I wanted to make love to him.  He said that he’d like that too, but he didn’t know how his wife would feel about it.  Can you imagine that?  All that time he never once discouraged me!”  “Wow, that must be tough!” I said, wondering about my sister’s comment regarding the Raven feathers.  That’s when I asked her if her friend had mentioned anything about the Raven and its power to her.  He hadn’t.  So I told her about the Pacific Northwest stories of Raven and his extraordinary creative powers and trickster energy.  He is their equivalent of the plains people’s Coyote.  I heard Jimmy’s snickering softly in my ear and told her it was time for us to go.  She jumped in her car and disappeared in a cloud of dust, which covered Two Bears as he tried to wave good-bye.

      Shortly after that Ceremony while I was living at Sweet Lorraine’s home, I dreamed that both Josh, my spirit son, and I had prostate cancer and peyote was handed to me by the dream doctor as my medicine. That was the night before a Peyote Ceremony, which I attended the next day.  During the meeting, right after Main Smoke, I asked to pray with tobacco.  The container of corn shucks was the same cobalt blue of the package of peyote in the dream.  I shared the dream with all the people there while rolling my Smoke, and then prayed, asking Creator to heal both Josh and me.  Josh had been born with a genetic tendency to form blood clots (a protein deficiency) and had a couple clots in his body.  Although he was taking daily doses of anticoagulant medication, the clots were not dissolving, and at the age of twenty, he was afraid one of the clots would find its way to his heart, lungs, or brain, which could cause permanent disability or death.

      Shortly after my prayer for healing of both Josh and myself, while I was meditating and gazing at the Grandfather Fire, it suddenly dawned on me that rage toward the feminine was the source of the problem.  Both Josh and the twenty-six-year-old Sponsor were filled with rage directed toward their mothers; I understood that because I knew their stories of neglect, abandonment, and physical abuse.  But the puzzle for me was why prostate cancer?  The prostate produces the lubricating, nourishing male liquid to propel the sperm on their journey into the female. Symbolically this gland is necessary for creativity of an intimate sexual kind.  At that moment gazing into the Eye of God, I experienced my rage.  I was angry and aware of the reasons: my parents molested me sexually as an infant and my mother allowed it to continue emotionally throughout my childhood and adult years.  I realized how I was like the Sponsor and Josh; we were all angry, filled with rage toward the feminine, and it was manifesting in the form of difficulties with sexual intimacy.

      Richard Gartner (1999) in his book Betrayed as Boys: Psychodynamic Treatment of Sexually Abused Men talks about a "therapeutic window" which can develop during counseling abused men.  He says this window is a space in which, “anxiety-arousing feelings are experienced, but the individual does not feel he is drowning in them and so does not resort to processes like dissociation that help him escape from them” (p.177).  Gartner's words make it sound as if this process of dissociation were a conscious one, but it is not.  Dissociation is an automatic psychic exit from the drowning sensations to a safer or more familiar way of being.  It is as though a different part of the personality takes over in that moment. We experience it in others as a sudden shift, maybe a tone of voice or affect, a slight modification in the way they are presenting themselves.  They are no longer the person they were a moment before; there is a splitting of the personality, a dissociation.  The aggregate of memories and ways of being (which we call the ego) suddenly becomes unglued and a part of the person's adaptation to stressful situations takes over.  In order to heal this splitting, this dissociation, we need to "stay present", to be in the moment experiencing our feelings, but we have to feel safe enough with the other person being there with us to try a new way of dealing with those old "anxiety-arousing feelings".  The counselor must have established a bond of trust and respect before we can "sit with" our fears.  We have to feel safe enough to re-experience and deal with our feelings in a healthier way, one that does not result in an automatic flight called dissociation.  When we trust our mentor enough, that "therapeutic window" opens.  Therapeutic means "healing" so we could call this a window when healing can occur.  It doesn't mean that healing will occur at such a time, just that it could.  Gartner's words alert us to this possibility.  The window can show up at any time in a conversation.  If the counselor is adept, she/he will notice the subtle changes and encourage us to stay present, to feel the scary feelings in their presence and ride that roller-coaster all the way to the leveling out time, to survive instead of the automatic and unconscious "fight, flight, or faint" response of the frightened inner child.

My dream and experiences leading up to the Prayer Smoke during the Peyote Ceremony had provided a correlate to the therapeutic window.  I had been experiencing tremendous anxiety throughout the day.  I was shaking so much while making my morning coffee that I knocked the grounds over and covered Lorraine’s kitchen with them.  I was literally late for work because I was cleaning up my mess.  Fortunately I was working at the Tribal office and when I told my dream to the Tribal Administrator’s secretary, she could tell I was distraught and encouraged me to take the day off and go to the Peyote Ceremony.  Her support was instrumental in dealing with my anxiety.  She played the role of the therapist who heard and encouraged her client to process the feelings which were flooding me. She was confident I could deal with them.  She reflected the attitude of my psychotherapist and that was comforting.  I knew that if I could follow the images in the dream they would bring healing.

      The surprise for me was when I called Josh the next day.  Josh reported waking up about 2 am (the time of my Smoke) with a burning sensation in his right shoulder, where a potentially deadly deep-vein thrombosis (blood clot) had been located.  He had also dreamed he was sitting in a curtained temple structure, something like a theater with thick, red curtains, where the Book of Life was being read by the Tribal Chairperson.  Josh was sitting at a long, oval wooden table with those taking turns reading from the book. Sometimes the person reading would be picked up from behind and carried away.  When it was his turn, Josh read and was not taken. He awoke with the hot, burning pain in his chest.  He was surprised when I called him, but by then he was getting used to synchronicity as it continually manifests in our relationship.

      Five months later, I sponsored my first Peyote Meeting with the intent of being doctored to heal the rage toward my mother and the feminine in general.  I hoped to exorcise the energy of the psychic vampire bite (Hort,1996), which I had received from my parents.  Josh sat beside me and I foolishly asked Creator to be able to understand his pain.  When I reached down and touched him on the leg I felt shooting pains in both my legs as my muscles cramped.  It was so painful I jumped to my feet and had to be helped outside with a person on each side of me. This was very strange as I was in excellent physical shape, having been initiated into the Brazilian martial art of Capoeira just the month before.  In all the meetings I attended before that time I had never experienced such painful leg cramps.  It might have been the specially prepared Medicine Balls of Peyote, which I had been fed before the experience. 

      The seventh Medicine Ball brought something prehistoric out of me.  I was foaming at the mouth, spitting out what seemed to be the physical and emotional trauma caused by the incestuous molestation, when I let out a scream that sounded like a dinosaur.  I am not sure whether anyone heard that scream but me.  It doesn’t really matter whether it was external or internal.  What mattered was the feeling of relief.  Josh had been quietly sitting beside me, supporting me, when I asked Creator to experience his pain.  I was wide open and grateful for my healing and also to have an appreciation for the courage to endure pain, which Josh told me was a daily experience for him.  After that night, I knew why Josh resisted sitting up with us.  I also recognized the incredible love he had demonstrated toward me by sacrificing himself that one time.  He has never since sat up with the community.  Three years later Josh was delighted to discover there was no evidence (using a Doppler-ultrasound study) of any clots or scarring of the veins anywhere in his body.  He was incredulous at first; having seen the images of the clots three years before, he demanded to see what the new pictures looked like.  He told me that "studies have found the power of prayer to have a positive impact on peoples’ well-being and that there is much to learn about the power of prayer"   (J. Joshua Brown, personal communication, January 26, 2004). 

      After ten years of silence hearing nothing from my brother, I attempted to contact him by phone.  He had refused all my offers to reconcile and make friends.  I was delighted and shocked when he agreed to talk with me.  He told me that at the time of my dream, when we weren’t communicating, he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.  I told him of my dream. There was a picture of me and Josh at the Mendocino County Fair on the doctor’s table.  This seemed unlikely since I had never attended that Fair, but I had attended the Twin Falls County Fair in Idaho every year with my younger brother. I told my brother how re-parenting Josh reminded me of the way I parented him when we were children and young adults.  I thought about the telepathic abilities which both Josh and I share and how the peyote and the dream world provide information to us.  It took three more meetings, one each year for a total of four years to complete the work begun in the dream of the doctor giving me peyote as my medicine.  The prescription read, “Peyote: Sprinkle as a garnish on salads”. (Author’s personal journal, February 20, 2000)    I did all the blood work after the Peyote Ceremony in 2000 and there was no evidence of prostate cancer in my blood.  Maybe there never was anything more than the possibility.  I believe now that my intention to live a long life, like my Native American Grandmother, Theodocia Chipman Shelley Melville, did, coupled with the help Peyote provided in focusing my Prayer Smokes and the support of those in Ceremony enabled me to live differently.  I have changed my diet to avoid diabetes.  I rarely drink alcohol anymore, nor do I smoke marijuana.  Trying to eat organic foods like our ancestors did seems to align me with the needs of that ancient self in my genes.   But now I’m getting ahead of my story again.

      Back home, at Sweet Lorraine’s, things were slowly changing.  I was talking to my Rainbow Eagle son one night on the phone, when my chair started moving back and forth.  The Eagle asked me what was wrong and I told him about Jimmy and his impatience,  that there was a Peyote Ceremony that evening and I was staying home.  My son told me to talk to Jimmy about it so that we could continue our conversation uninterrupted.  So I did. I set the phone down and turned to address him. “Jimmy,” I said, “you know where the Meeting is down on the reservation. You don’t need me to take you.  You can get there on your own.  Those are your people and the ancestors are always there.  They can show you the way back to the Spirit World where you belong.”  The chair stopped shaking and I heard the front door slam shut.  After that Jimmy quit snuggling with me and I thought that the period of spirit visitations was finally over.

      One night I felt someone sit down on my bed.  As I rolled over to see who was there, I noticed a golden light in the room and a Yaqui brave was standing by the stereo.  He was naked except for a black loin cloth, his long, black hair fell down his back.  The peyote music I put on to fall asleep was still playing on the stereo.  Then my visitor crouched down in front of the music, trying to adjust the volume.  I tried to speak, to ask him what he was doing in my room, but found no words would come out of me.  I was completely mute.  Something told me to go back to sleep. The next day I complained to Lorraine that the Yaqui, her other roomer, had come into my space the previous night.  I said this even though the man in my room was about thirty and the Yaqui was in his fifties.  He too had been visited that same night.  He said that someone had rolled him over in his sleep.  He thought it might be his son, but found no one there.  Within minutes it happened again and he jumped out of bed, got on his knees, and prayed to Saint Michael to help him.  We later heard that his older brother, who loved Native American music, had died that night.  Evidently the seventy-year-old Yaqui preferred his thirty-year-old image.

      During these times of visitation by the spirits, I had a very exciting dream.  I dreamed I was trying to escape from three white men.  I hit one with a piece of firewood and ran up to the top of the log slide where tree trunks could be slid into the river below.  One man followed me up the hill while I backtracked down the other side.  At the foot of the slide was a huge man dressed in buckskins. He wore a buckskin hat too.  I knew that if he were distracted, I could kick him in the face as I jumped into the air.  I got my chance and knocked him to the ground.  What had distracted him was a large sacred hoop slowly rotating about four feet off the ground.  It was gray-blue titanium metal with large rattlesnake rattles in each of the four directions.  I recognized it instantly, exclaiming, “a Ho-Key-O!” and jumped feet first into it.  I emerged in my brother’s Tipi in Southern California in the twenty-first century.  Then I woke up. 

      Although I told the dream to several people, all they could verify was that the Ho-Key-O was a portal of some kind.  A Pueblo Indian shared his people’s belief that there were space-time passageways throughout the Southwestern United States.  When I was in Albuquerque attending President Clinton’s Research Convention on Native American Education, I had another dream.  It was of a young boy with brown skin and long curly black hair.  He threw his arms around my waist and nuzzled into my abdomen in a loving embrace.  It reminded me of how Zeus felt toward the young shepherd boy Ganymede.  The Eagle of the eastern gate, the familiar of Zeus, was descending on a beam of light. Then I woke up. In this reality the rising sun streamed through the windows.  The hotel staff were Native Americans and for some reason, when I checked in they reassigned me to a large top floor room facing the eastern mountains where the ancient peoples had carved pictograms in the stones centuries ago.  That morning, when I went down to the conference, I was scanning the room for friends and sat with people I had met earlier that year in Oklahoma at the National Education Conference.  Continuing the Eagle scan of the rest of the conference delegates, I noticed the long, curly black locks and beautiful brown skin of the dream boy.  He was a man in his early forties, a professor who was the moderator of the conference.  During a coffee break I approached him and told him the dream.  He thanked me, telling me I was the third person in a week to foretell his being pulled into the Spirit World, and asked me to pray for his life.  His people believed they entered the Spirit World as children with work to do there.  He asked me to pray for him as he had a wife and wanted to have children.  I agreed and then went looking for a coffee latte.

      In New Mexico at that time, espresso was a novelty, so I drove everywhere looking for coffee.  When I finally gave up and drove back to the hotel, I noticed a bookstore with an espresso sign.  I went in, ordered my coffee, and went looking at books in the indigenous section.  I picked up People of the Peyote, a book on the Huichol Indians of Mexico, which a friend had recommended.  I was scanning the environment when I recognized a Cherokee man I had met the previous year.  I greeted him; he asked how I knew him and then invited me to sit with him for a moment.  He wanted to tell me a story.  His father had died the week before and after the funeral, this man, whom I shall call Wounded Buffalo, was standing in the park in Oklahoma when an old Cherokee man came up to him.  The old man was wearing a hat which the Buffalo wanted and he reached into his pocket to find something to trade for it.  The old Cherokee opened the conversation with, “Your Dad’s just fine.”  The Buffalo acknowledged this, saying, “Ya, I know he is.  He’s with his family in the Spirit World.”  The old man nodded his head and they continued talking until someone touched the Buffalo on his shoulder.  The intruder said to him, “Cousin, you have to stop doing that!”  As the Buffalo turned toward his cousin, he asked, “What? What do I have to stop doing?”   The reply was, “You’ve got to stop talking to yourself. You’ve been talking in Cherokee for thirty minutes.  Shit, I didn’t even know you knew Cherokee!”  The puzzled Buffalo said, “but I haven’t been talking to myself,” turning back toward the old man, “I have been talking English to this elder here . . . . . . . .,”  but there was no one there.  He was a Spirit.  And then the Buffalo told me why he shared the story with me.

      When I was standing there with my books in hand, I had called him by his first name.  He seemed dazed, and I said, “You’re a long way from Arlington, Virginia!”  That’s when he accepted my outstretched hand.  But he told what he perceived in that meeting was not an Anglo-Saxon elder, but a totem figure standing in front of him.  That’s what was dazzling him, the image of the other world in the middle of the bookstore.  “When your hand emerged from the totem, I knew you weren’t an ordinary man.  You’re a Spirit Messenger, someone who does the Spirit’s work on this plane.  That’s why I felt I had to tell you the story about the Spirit in the park,” he said.  “Thanks for sharing your story with me,” I replied.  We parted after talking about people we knew, and I went back to pray for the forty-year-old professor’s life.  I found a place on the grass outside the hotel. I must have looked interesting as I kneeled down on my new blanket under the sycamores while women I full length gowns emerged from limousines in the parking lot beside me.  They were going to receptions and dances.  I was rolling tobacco while I faced the full Grandmother Moon talking to her about her relative.  I prayed for his life with that Sacred Smoke and got a positive answer from the spirit realm.  The next day, I told him the answer was "yes, but there is one condition.   You have to turn your back on all these academic people who love you and turn toward your wife."  He said, “No problem, I’m starting my Sabbatical leave this fall.”  Fifteen months later he was the proud father of a baby boy.  He now has three children and pulls in his Tribe’s canoe during the summer visits to the tribes in the Puget Sound and Olympic Peninsula of Washington and British Columbia.

      The Wounded Buffalo’s story got shared later that month in California.  An elder Cherokee woman, whose forty-year-old son had just died of cancer, sat with me.  I told her the story in hope it would ease her pain and grief.  She thanked me.  It did.  Then I asked her about this word I was wondering about, perhaps it was a Cherokee word.  She had spoken Cherokee as a child back in Oklahoma and told me how much she loved hearing hymns sung in her native language. “This word I am wondering about is Ho-Key-O, have you ever heard of it?” I asked.  “Oh yes,” she replied, “very powerful, very sacred!  It’s Cherokee all right!”  She stood up, shook my hand, and walked out of my office.  When I asked her later why she had left so abruptly, she said, “I’m not talking about Sacred things around those Pomos.  We Cherokees have our pride.  You uttered a Sacred Name and I had to acknowledge you, but I wasn’t going to talk about it with those people listening.”

      In order to honor the Ho-Key-O, I sing to the Great Mother using that sacred Cherokee name to open the portal for my prayers.  While I was driving to work one morning, I saw a great blue heron standing beside a tree.  I stopped my car and rolled down the window so the bird could hear the peyote music.  It was bobbing its head up and down to the music.  It liked it, so I got out of my car and started singing songs to it.  When I sang the Ho-Key-O song, I heard the cries of hawks overhead.  I looked up and there were three red-tailed hawks circling directly above me. They were circling sunwise, opening a portal apparently, because when I finished the song and looked back up in the sky they had disappeared completely.  The heron is associated with the Peyote Ceremony as are the hawks. Hawk feathers are used throughout the night and heron feathers are used to bless the morning water in our Fireplace.  Once again the Spirit World and our waking world had merged.  I drove across the bridge to work.