A year’s end inventory

There’s a summer thunderstorm size puddle in the driveway. The wet spot behind the house is showing open water that suggests our moderate drought is over and done for now. Somethings with vivid green leaves (vivid vernal?) have emerged in the woods in front of the house. The creek/pond up the road is almost all open water. It is not feeling very much like Christmas time in the North Country. If we try to adjust and adapt, it will most likely trigger several eighteen inch snowstorms in a row.

a full moon in December looks like this

Photo by J. Harrington

Although  there was too much cloud cover to enjoy it, yesterday was the December full moon, know as Little Spirit Moon by the Ojibwe and Shedding Horns Moon by the Lakota. Come Saturday, days will be three minutes longer than they were a week prior. Spring Equinox is 83 days away (March 19, 10:06 pm locally). Around here, that rarely marks the end of winter weather. It’ll be interesting to see what next year brings.

We appear to be augmenting increasingly volatile weather patterns with comparable political instability. These are times when we should focus more and more on the reality that the future isn’t just something out there that happens to US, it’s something we create with every action we take and decision we make every single minute of each and every day.

There’s only a few days before the  start of a new year. What kind of year will we make of it?

A Map to the Next World

By Joy Harjo

for Desiray Kierra Chee

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for

those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged

from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It

must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it

was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the

altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our

children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born

there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to

disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to

them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the

map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-

ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s

small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a

spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking

from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh

deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world

there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song

she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you

will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they

entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the

destruction.

Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our

tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

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Please be kind to each other while you can.