Deriving

Awoke this morning considering the Lakota word wasichu which they used in reference to white people and it's literal interpretation refers to magical, as in a "magical people," or "people with powers" ~ I knew this from a Lakota dictionary where I once looked it up. It sounded so much like word 'white' to me I wondered about it's derivitive. I haven't been able to find any root words for the Lakota language... it must all go back to the tower of Babel. I love how when the most complicated answer will not process in our minds, we will choose the simplest one. "Yes children, the differences in language all got started at the tower of Babel, and ofcourse, as you will find out like all human changes this was a PUNISHMENT from God ..."

And so this got me to thinking on creation myths and specifically how all cultures have a myth to explain why we are here. My favorite creation story happens to be a Lakota tale (one of many) of Unktehi the big water monster who sent a terrible flood, allowed by Wankin Tanka, The Great Spirit.. there's a lot more to the story but eventually it settles on a woman, the only one to have survived who was taken up by an eagle to the highest point in the Black Hills. He kept her safe and married her and they had twins, a son and a daughter, and when the waters subsided they went out and replenished the earth. There is also the tale of Wohpe, the Star ..daughter of the Sun and Moon who falls to the earth to emerge as a woman. She eventually comes to assuage a period of starvation for the people... It's a wonderful story.

I like how women are honored in so many myths and are given credit for their part of the consciousness of humanity. So different from how the creation myth of Adam and Eve that has devolved to disempower .... everyone. It is divisive and abandoning and non-inclusive, but there are parts that speak to me, I think live in me as a I see it. My body resembles the myth... the Adam departs from the woman, her body in which he lived in her, in paradise, and nourished from her placenta, the tree of life, to be born fractured, to want only to find her to crawl back inside her and find himself whole again...

I have had an interest in trees in the past year or so, wandering around in woods, in reference to them in metaphor, thinking about them, climbing them, sitting over rivers on them, identifying, wondering, collecting their fruit...writing about them,... writing, resting, thinking, reading under them....

To Sustain Him
Offer Milk and Honey
A Pungent Ambrosia
That drips onto his Tongue
Drowsy Heady
As he laps
With satisfied hunger
And forgetting...
Never having been lost
Never having been left
Always found and found again
Safe and sound between the branches
Bypassing God and the Knowledge of Good and Evil
And Feasting straight from
The Tree of Life...