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THE AWAKENING

It is midnight, heading ever deeper into darkness—and into enlightenment.

Fireflies are dancing on the outside of the screen encapsulating the porch where we sleep nearly half of the year. These annual visitors normally come all too briefly. This year they have come very early and have stayed an unusually long time.

Tonight they have awakened me, taunting me with a mystery that has been presenting itself almost nightly for the last few months—the last months of my mother’s life—which have been both an ordeal and an awakening. This journey ended, in part, for my mother yesterday, but I now recognize that it has actually only begun for both of us. She pointed out a pathway. Now lit with fireflies, it is ever so slowly becoming clearer.

The dancing fireflies are dots I have been struggling to connect, not just since my mother’s death yesterday, but for some months quite intensively, and intermittently and unconsciously for many years. Tonight I began to recognize some semblance of a pattern in the chaos of the little points of dancing light. But the pattern does not consist of clear and simple lines connecting dots to form a two-dimensional image, like in a children’s coloring book where you draw a line from one numbered dot to another, in their numerical order, and then an image is revealed.

Instead I see a wondrous matrix of many scattered dots, which could be connected simultaneously in multiple ways, and through dimensions in the air and in time so complex that I am only beginning to grasp the possibilities. This matrix, or web, is like a three- or four-dimensional dream catcher changing through time. You may be acquainted with Native American dream catchers, which consist of a circle with a web inside and small feathers hanging below. These sacred objects have become commercialized trinkets, sold as key chains, earrings, and rearview mirror bangles in gift shops. But tonight the dream catcher’s web of firefly trails has caught me up and swept me away, just as my mother’s illnesses caught her up and swept her away yesterday.

This newly intense twist in my journey began a little over a year ago, in Montréal.^*2 It started innocently enough. Carolyn Schmidt, my wife, and I had developed a fondness for visiting Montréal, staying at a bed-and-breakfast west of the city center, and bicycling into the old port along the historic Lachine Canal. We would walk the city’s cobbled streets and peer in the windows of souvenir shops and art galleries, visit museums, or attend a concert.

On one trip we came upon a collection of art kiosks in an open square in the old section of the city, a tourist section called Vieux Montréal. Standing out amid a collection of small displays of tourist kitsch, jewelry, and cheap caricatures, we came upon a dazzling display of paintings done in brilliant colors, executed with great care and feeling. Quietly sitting in the small shelter that housed the cheerful paintings was a smiling Sikh with a long gray beard and a colorful turban. We expressed our joy at the quality of his work, embarked upon an unexpectedly lengthy and intense conversation about art, and learned how the artist’s roots in India shaped his view of art, both technically and philosophically. The artist presented his card, and we learned his name: Manjit Singh Chatrik. We also learned that Manjit was a poet and that lines of his poetry were embedded in many of the paintings. More significantly, the spirit of his poems was embedded in the artwork.

Fig. 2.1. Native American portrait, mixed media

Painting by Manjit Singh Chatrik

As we chatted, I noticed several paintings of American Indians. All were images of bold individuals made unusually vibrant by a palette that I recognized as distinctly South Asian Indian. I explained that my interest in the Native American images was aesthetic, but also personal, as I have Native American Indian heritage. We exchanged chuckles at the irony of a North American Indian discussing portraits of Indians with an Indian Indian.

Over the course of a summer we returned many times to Manjit’s kiosk. On hot summer days, it was an oasis of beauty and inspiration. Eventually we began to collect his art. But since we biked into the old town and the paintings we purchased were much larger than our backpacks, we nearly always left our purchases with Manjit. He encouraged us to come to his house to pick them up, to continue our conversations, and to see other paintings he kept there. Manjit and Manjeet, his wife, became friends, and our visits a kind of spiritual renewal.

One of my first thoughts upon seeing Manjit’s art was that my mother would love his paintings. The increasing collection of Manjit’s Native American paintings in the house Carolyn and I have in Vermont did indeed capture my mother’s attention. When she visited for holidays, she sat and admired his portraits.

So it was that Manjit’s paintings became colorful dots suggesting a pathway forward for my spiritual wanderings. They were also points of awakening, hanging on and beckoning from our walls.

As I look back, it now seems ludicrous that I was so slow to recognize the significance of the fact that the timber frame cathedral ceiling room where Manjit’s paintings hang is full of religious art. I have collected these objects from around the world during decades of travel. I always thought, and rather emphatically claimed, that I was collecting the objects because of their transcendent beauty. I now believe that, no mere inanimate objets d’art, they have been collecting around me.

To the right of and below an Indian portrait is a large stone Buddha statue. It found me in a Chinese antiques flea market and shows signs of prolonged submersion in water and muck at the bottom of a pond or well. It was probably tossed there for safekeeping during Mao’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, when owning such items was forbidden and dangerous.

A few feet away from the Buddha is a one-meter-tall wooden Lithuanian statue of St. Rokas (St. Roch) that found me in Vilnius. To judge by his weathered gray patina, he stood outside, only partly sheltered in a roadside shrine, in Lithuania’s countryside for decades. A few feet away from Rokas is a Chinese Sung Dynasty ceramic “Buddha House,” in which sits a three-inch-tall, glistening, green-glazed gem of a Buddha. And next to it sits a Chinese wooden Buddha, countless centuries old and so dried out that it is almost weightless. Its deeply weathered and eroded surfaces, echoing Rokas’s life as a weather-exposed object of adoration, now present only a vague suggestion of a human form. At first glance, this Buddha looks more like a piece of driftwood than a statue. Except for the face, which has been restored and preserved in great detail with applied and carefully modeled clay. The statue stares out at all present before it. Visitors from eastern Europe have always found this Buddha frightening, its aura simply too overwhelming.

Such objects have been finding me for decades and assembling in our cathedral-ceilinged living room, which one visitor likened to a chapel.

Did I mention that in the space below Manjit’s painting of Native Americans a giant, two-meter-long, wooden Advent calendar appears at Christmas? I spent many months making it. It resembles a medieval altar piece. My mother enjoyed seeing it and opening its doors during her annual Christmas visits. At that time of year our living room really does resemble a chapel. Additional Christian images populate our walls—crucifixes from Lithuania and Spain, Russian icons, paintings and batiks of saints.

You get the idea, probably more quickly than my rational secular mind did.

Back to the dots, those dancing fireflies, points of enlightenment that have been appearing faithfully year in and year out, which I had been ignoring as little more than beautiful light shows put on for us by an obliging Mother Nature.

Tonight the dots spoke to me. For the first time I listened. I suddenly sat up, bolt upright, in the middle of the night in my bed on the porch and realized that in all my musings and reflecting on my mother’s illness and approaching death these last months, I had forgotten the other dot, the one marking the starting point in the most recent sequence of events that has taken me on my journey of reconnecting with Mother Earth and ancestors.

I am referring to the peaceful night that was upended by a phone call telling me that my mother was not answering her phone, the lights of her townhouse were out, and the police had broken her door down and found her on the floor. She had had a stroke, and this was the beginning of the end of her life.

What I saw then as an approaching ending, I now understand as a beginning. The dots of enlightenment were beginning to emerge even then and to connect slowly. Only later would they appear more frequently and more clearly, and be connected by me.

Sunday, June 4, emerged as a pivotal moment, the next emerging dot that alerted me to the fact that discrete events were pointing somewhere. This early June dot was actually more like a great lighthouse emerging out of the fog in a storm at sea, or from the clouded consciousness of someone lost in a sea of uncertainties.

It began as an evening of entertainment and ancestral reconnection. Robin Wall Kimmerer gave a presentation at the Middlebury Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. The event was up in the beautiful Green Mountains near Ripton, Vermont. My wife, my mother, and I attended. Kimmerer was scheduled to read from one of her award-winning publications combining a scientific perspective on nature with a Potawatomi view of the world of nature as profoundly spiritual and animate.

Although she had been having difficulty processing complex cognitive relations, my mother had been reading one of Kimmerer’s books prior to the Sunday event. She had slowly read Gathering Moss as she sat on the couch facing west, where each night she alighted in anticipation of watching the sun set over the Adirondack Mountains. This had become part of her end-of-day routine since taking up residency with us after her first stroke. At her invitation, and sometimes insistence, we all began to slow down at this time of day and would sit with her and watch the sunset colors change, often until the very last traces vanished. I think we all understood the greater message of participating in a sunset.

While other presenters at the conference read from their printed texts to the audience that Sunday night, Kimmerer spoke directly to us and told us stories, in the tradition of many indigenous people steeped in oral history. She was engaging, spellbinding, and gentle. She did not attempt to overwhelm the audience with self-consciously crafted literary technique or words displaying a profound depth of academic vocabulary. Her words were carefully chosen. Hints of a writer’s self-conscious crafting, if evident at all, were delicate and employed as a means to a greater end rather than as a display of literary acumen.

Kimmerer first told us a creation myth of Native American people and let this story reveal the fact of our reciprocal relationship with nature. Within the tale lay a powerful call to action and message about global warming. It was a strong yet gentle message. She then told a simpler, more personal tale of gardening and the plenty and love that natural things give to us, in expectation that we will acknowledge that gift and reciprocate the loving activity.

Mom, the elder member of our clan, was enthralled. It was an awakening to our tribal heritage, which she, like many of us, had probably never experienced so deeply.

I will always remember this night as my mother’s brightest end-of-life moment. I don’t know where her energy, enthusiasm, and clarity of mind came from, but it was astounding. It was like the burst of light that ends a meteor’s ephemeral appearance in a summer sky.

Two days later, my mother had a second stroke. I wrote the following message to our multigenerational family as part of my updates about our mother, aunt, grandmother, and sister.

When we returned home [Sunday after Kimmerer’s talk], as I got out of the car, one of the owls that nightly calls in the distance was this night just a few feet from the car. “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you,” it called with almost deafening intensity. The intensity shocked me, but I also had memories of a movie Carolyn and I saw in the 1970s about a dying priest in a northwest Kwakiutl village. He learns about native culture, its belief that the owl calls one’s name at the time near one’s death. The priest ultimately learns of his own impending death when he hears the owl call his name. I knew who cooked for me during my early life, and worried.

Today as Mom lay on a gurney in the ER, motionless and unresponsive, she raised both arms several times and reached out as if grasping something or being called. Twice she did this and clutched ever so gently at the air with her fingertips, as if she were gathering apple blossoms or butterflies so gentle they must not be squeezed.

A time of sadness and discovery. Our elders teaching us even as they fade, maybe because they are fading and see where we cannot?

Randy

My cousin Barb wrote back to me:

Mno gzhep Cousin Randy,

My mom was very moved by the words in your email, so moved that she forwarded them on. I empathize with you and your siblings, and families. This is a difficult time, full of a storm of emotions, concerns and stress. I will put my semaa^*3 down for all of you and my sweet auntie as well. Please let me know if there is anything I can do from a distance. I carry a prayer pipe for the women of our Nation. It is my responsibility to help.

I wanted to share with you a teaching about Koo-koo-o-koo (owl). Koo-koo-o-koo is a protector for our people and a helper to grandmother moon and the spirits. Our ancestors’ spirits come back to earth in the spring with the Thunders. Their day is our night. Koo-koo-o-koo flies silently and swiftly all night long, protecting our families while we are sleeping . . . keeping the spirits from the dark side away while bringing love. She has acknowledged you and your momma, protecting you both and sharing love. That is all I can share via cyberspace . . . I hope these words are of value and comfort.

With love,

Your cousin Barb

Barb’s support continued through email communications.

Subject: Full moon pipe ceremony

To: Randy Kritkausky

Hello Cousin, Boozhoo Nitaawes,

Last night I sat in the silver light of D’bik Giizis, Nokmis, our Grandmother moon and I lifted and lit the Nokmis Pwaagan (grandmother pipe). Prayers were said for my auntie (your mom) and her impending journey home. The Nokmisag and Mishomisag (Grandmothers and Grandfathers) said they will help her find her way, as she hasn’t had our teachings. They will greet her with love and a great feast.

Watching the night sky and the clouds flow across the moon I caught glimpses of your mom joyfully soaring above the earth. I sang the Koo-koo-o-koo song and three others. Your mom has done good work here on the earth. She embodies love.

Holding you all in my heart and in my prayers,

Barb

Grateful, yet dazed, I wrote back.

Barb,

I can hardly describe the impact of your message and Kimmerer’s talk last Sunday here in Vermont.

You see, about a week ago, after learning once and for all that she could not drive, and finally beginning to accept that she could not ever return to her townhouse, Mom asked us and her doctor, “What do I have to look forward to?” I tried to answer this question by suggesting that she could show us, once again, something we did not know how to do, and that which only an aging mother can teach: how to end our lives. Perhaps she is showing us to how to live, not just end, our lives.

I think that your prayer is being answered and that all of us, sometimes clumsily and belatedly, are beginning to learn the meaning of finding our way home, back to Mother Earth.

Kimmerer’s tale last Sunday at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, which moved Mom and all of us beyond our ability to express, was about her experience with a turtle along the Hudson River, and then with many turtles at the school in the Adirondacks where she teaches. In the Adirondacks, multiple turtles “invaded” the volleyball court to lay their eggs in the sand because the nearby waters had risen as a result of extreme weather and climate change, and the normal nesting ground was unavailable. The turtles needed our help, as an exchange, or reciprocity for what Mother Earth did in our native Turtle Island creation myth.

So well-timed, this lesson. Today, as I left to go into town to see Mom again and say goodnight for the evening, a box turtle was in the middle part of our sandy upper driveway. Then I noticed that she was laying eggs. My first thoughts were “How stupid, another turtle in the road!” But she forced me to stop and to think. I remembered Kimmerer’s stories. And I erected a barrier to protect the nest, planning to move it later.

Carolyn has been asking, “So what do we do?” after hearing Kimmerer’s talk. Her second talk began to give answers. And today your message and the turtle are providing more answers. As Kimmerer said, “All we need to do is listen and learn from nature and our kin.” Sometimes our kin find it necessary to park themselves rudely in the middle of the road and stop traffic. Especially when we are obtuse. It is a kind of civil disobedience. Like native people blocking the road to stop a pipeline.

I think we need to leave our upper drive blocked until the turtles hatch. It will be a small inconvenience and a great new beginning of an altered journey and redirection.

I have been secretly praying for such enlightenment for some time. I admit to the secrecy as I hesitate to fess up to anything resembling the sometimes too mechanical actions of those who demand instantaneous gratification from the saints for little problems not worthy of their attention.

The object, or inspiration, of my seeking has been a giant ancient Chinese ancestor painting hanging over our entryway doorway. It came to me as a kind of gift at a Chinese flea market. I had just bought three ancient wooden Bodhisattva (human incarnations of Buddha) statues and the antiques dealer wrapped one in this giant cloth painting, treating it as no more than a useless rag. It was musty and mildewed. I have restored and preserved it. Every time I walk under it during stressful times, I think/pray, “Ancestors and wiser ones, show me/us the way.” How appropriate that I hung it over the door, where each day we begin our travels.

In recent days, I noticed that the hundreds of figures in this remarkable painting are arranged into seven rows/generations. From half way round the world, echoes of our native “seven generations.”

So Barb, your prayer is being answered, and Mom has been hanging on, even without nourishment or water, which she cannot swallow. She cannot speak. Her spirit cannot let go. But in her silence, she is still teaching us. Now perhaps she can be released from the trap of a worn out body.

And perhaps, thanks to her, and your prayers, we can find our way to restoring Mother Earth, not through the narrow paths we have followed for decades, but through a path of reason guided more strongly by the lessons of Mother Earth all around us.

These days are not, and for me will not be remembered as, an ending. They are a new beginning.

Randy

And we continued.

Mno Waaban, Randy, good morning.

I hope you’ve been able to get some rest. Your words, read early this morning and just before I went back to sleep for a while, were a catalyst for my dreams and further connecting of the dots of my thoughts and experiences. It is usually early morning, just before sunrise that teachings and understanding come to me. Waabanong, the eastern direction, is the direction of Gikendasswin or Knowledge.

Here is what I came to understand this morning—

The full moon is a time when turtles of all kinds can be observed laying their eggs . . . we are told to plant seeds with the full moon for best results. Nokmis D’bikat Giizis is connected to our women’s twenty-eight-day cycles, connected to the tides, water, and all life. When she is full, she is at her peak of physical presence and strength. When she is not visible for that one of twenty-eight days, she is at her peak of spiritual strength as her body has disappeared from sight. We call that time Manidoo Giizis (Spirit Moon).

When our people are put out to fast, the intent is to diminish physical strength to allow for reconnection and strengthening of our spirit as well as the connection with our own spirit and the spirits in general. Our people routinely fast (without food or water, and in quiet isolation) for four days, and the old ones are said to have fasted for seven days, some for twelve days.

These teachings bring me to the understanding that as our getsijig (elders) pass, those that are given the opportunity to pass slowly are being “put out to fast” to increase their spiritual strength for the journey ahead. That journey home is a spiritual journey only, not a physical one. That journey home is led by Giiwedinang, the North Star (literally the going-home star).

So, yes, protect that turtle nest, keep seeking enlightenment in whatever way is right for you. Our Ancestors guide us continually, in so many unexpected ways, and we have to be quiet and open to “hear” them. Each day is a new beginning, a new opportunity.

Feel free to pass this along to whomever, and my previous words as well. These “teachings” are given to you with compassion, and they are yours to share as you need to.

Love,

Barb

My mother died on June 14. The circumstances surrounding her final days will remain forever vivid in my mind.

She was in a hospice care room at a small local hospital. She had been unable to swallow water or take food for many days. I had previously understood that a human cannot survive more than three days without water. But hospice care staff informed us that dying patients, who are very inactive, can go many days, occasionally even a week or more, without food or water. Weakened, Mom was barely conscious, at least in the traditional medical sense of the word; she was not reactive, and her eyes rarely opened.

During her last days, Matt, a hospital chaplain, visited Mom. Matt played his harp, and it was calming. During one session, I noticed that a clear plastic cup of water on the table by Mom’s bed was behaving strangely. The surface of the water was dancing, jumping upward in a column about one inch high, as if something beneath the surface were erupting. Carolyn suggested that it might be the music causing the pulsing. But the pulsing continued even after the music had long stopped. Carolyn then suggested that it might be Mom’s now interrupted and labored breathing that was causing the pulsing. I put a magazine between her and the glass so as to intercept her breath. It had no effect. The water continued dancing vigorously for some time.

As Mom’s breathing became ever more interrupted, it was apparent that death was near and that her body was in distress. She was given small doses of morphine, which seemed to calm her a bit, but the distress was agonizing. Her ever-determined physical self just would not let go. It was as if her spirit were imprisoned in a broken body.

I took Mom’s hand and put my other hand gently on her forehead. This had previously relaxed her and allowed her to sleep when she was struggling in previous days. But this time I did something different. I tried a tumo yoga technique I had acquired inadvertently in my efforts to raise my body temperature during the winter when I was suffering from adrenal exhaustion and felt constantly cold. With this technique, I attempted to conjure whatever physical energy I could tap into and concentrated intensely on making it go to my hands, which were resting upon my mother. And I thought, though I did not say, “Mom, take this energy, and use it to let go of your tired body.” Within less than one minute, she took her last breath.

I had no regrets at encouraging Mom to take her final breath. It was a relief. I did, however, soon begin to lament one omission, a thought that had been plaguing me ever since it became obvious that she was dying. I realized that she did not have a Potawatomi spirit name. How could I have let this happen to the oldest and wisest member of our clan? Then even before sharing my concern, I received the following email from cousin Barb.

Boozhoo Cousin,

I hope you and Carolyn and your families are resting amidst the sharing of memories and processing of emotions. I send you all love and good thoughts at this time.

I would like to share something with you. Last night I felt it necessary to light Nokmis Pwaagan, the Grandmother pipe, to assist your mom on her journey home as well to confirm something that was revealed on the full moon. You see, no one has formally requested your mom’s Anishinaabe/Nishnaabe/Spirit name, yet it was revealed during that full moon pipe ceremony! (Just so you know, I have been mentored, for the past several years, in the process of seeking, finding, and naming by my husband, a fluent first-language speaker and spiritual elder. He and I worked together to name my father and my sister, and several other Bodwewaadmii Anishinaabe relatives. He assisted me in interpreting what was revealed, and with the proper use of our language.)

If you would like and if you feel it is appropriate I would be happy to write up the story of your mom’s name and her name. Please know that it is with humility and love that this is offered up. Her name was not asked for, or actively being sought. Rather it was a spontaneous gifting.

Sleep well,

Barb

I responded.

Barb,

Once again, the experience of my mother’s death involves extraordinary developments that defy what I, until recently, would have called secular “reasoning.” Every night since my mother’s death, I have had dreams of her, something unfinished, even though we had a wonderful awakening in recent weeks and closure during her process of passing. As I awoke this morning, I told Carolyn about the dreams. At the very same time, I thought of the missed opportunity to give Mom a spirit name and wondered what has gone amiss.

This gap, this incompleteness, was emphasized moments later by a message from the funeral home asking for our family tribal name for Mom’s death certificate. I had written both Caucasian and Native American for race on the form. New York State wants the tribal name. As I provided this information minutes ago, the failure to give Mom a spirit name became painful. And I wondered if it could be done posthumously. Then I clicked on your message. You cannot imagine the relief and joy it brings.

Please share with us her name, and the story of how it came to you. It will bring great comfort.

As for me, I am still processing the awakening of recent years, and especially recent months. I am in the midst of connecting the dots, which appeared last night as flashing fireflies outside the screens of the porch where we sleep. When my tale is completed, I will share it with you, and perhaps then I can begin to think about the issue of my own spirit name. Until then, thank you for the gift you have given and for conveying the gift of our ancestors to Mom.

Randy

Barbara’s description of Mom’s name

Manidoo Nigiiwehodaasaa

Man/i/doo Ni/gii/weh/o/daa/saa

(Mahn i doe Ni gee way o dah sah)

Spirit Leading Them Home

Inez Joyce Wall Kritkausky

She has taught us much in both her life and her death. Her passing was gentle and peaceful, accompanied by wondrous and spontaneous events, connections, and reconnections. In going home to our Ancestors, she has shown her family the way home.

I wrote to my extended family.

In recent days the fireflies, my awakening points, have diminished and almost disappeared. One or two still appear in this year of their most extended visit ever. Perhaps it is now time for them also to let go. They have labored long and hard and shown the way. I think I can continue to find the dots from this point on, with the help of our ancestors’ spirits, those wise ones amongst us, and by observing and acting on the wisdom embodied in the natural world all around us.

So this is how my awakening unfolded. On the one hand, it was a long, slow process of emerging from a kind of spiritual sleep or dormancy. On the other hand, more recently, it was like being jolted out of a sound sleep by some interruption. In either case, awakening best describes the subjective experience of being caught between levels of consciousness. When we awaken from a wonderful dream, we long to hold on to it, its richness, which we know too well will be quickly extinguished.

Or perhaps my experience of awakening is more like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar awakening as a butterfly. Does it recognize itself? Remember its former self? Does it feel free, being able to flutter quickly and agilely through the air after inching slowly upon the Earth for its entire former life?

Whether emerging from a dream or a chrysalis, we are simultaneously something entirely new and a continuity of everything we were before. Ideally we should seize moments of profound transition, of awakening to changed circumstances. In reality, we often only slowly recognize that we are changing, or have changed already, in anticipation of a new world that our intuition has grasped, even if our rational intellects have not yet done so.

This, I think, may be the greater significance of my awakening: it reflects not just an individual journey, but a manifestation of a greater social awakening and cultural revival.