Clan Mother Awareness

After a week away in the forest, practicing nature and cultural awareness as expressed through the archetype of an Eight-Direction Medicine Wheel (at "The Mind Of Mentoring" workshop taught at Wilderness Awareness School) - known as the Eight Shields Mentoring Model, I returned home, looking to keep that awareness alive. I knew my senses had opened to a resonant, vibrant state, because in that forest sparkling with rain and sun, I had come to hear the very edges of the landscape singing - an experience I'd only had once before. Now, reunited with my family, I tried to keep that gateway to awareness open.

To me, this meant reentering the landscape of my children as if they were creatures within the forest herself. I listened intently - and realized how much I don't normally hear of what they say (I realize that my four-year-old daughter, Gwynne, habitually tells me something at least twice when we play together - evidence that I'm often thinking of other things while we play. Ouch!). When they began to squabble, I watched and listened, trusting that some opening - either by way of the things they said, or some other happening - would reveal a graceful or mischievous way I might shift the dance, just a little. If I was patient and kept my center and the perspective of a mother's deep love and trust of her children, I was (at least that afternoon!) able to intervene less often, more gently, and to greater effect. Often I didn't need to do anything at all. Just witnessing with love was enough, and the nasty words flung back and forth unexpectedly boomeranged to a new unexpected direction, and a game suddenly emerged, with my daughters running off to play it together.

I told my daughters stories of what I'd seen at my secret spot in that forest: a nest of baby grosbeaks guarded by their frantic parents. Instead of just telling the story, I found myself seeing that landscape again, and I moved through it with my whole body. The room became my section of the forest, where I'd huddled in the muddy leaf and tried desperately not to move, because those parent birds were upset enough that I'd walked near. When Gwynne started telling a story of her own - of something she'd seen (just made up) at her 'secret spot' - I saw her landscape as clearly as mine, and I let the two merge. So now I was walking through two stories, and it was all one place, Gwynne as much a part of my grosbeak memory now, as I was in her imaginary (but real to her) story of her secret spot experience.

In the garden the blue summer sky expanded past the trees surrounding our home, past the edges of our island, across Colvos Passage and beyond the waters to the Kitsap Peninsula. I listened as far as I could in all directions, and when I plucked kale and lettuces for our meal. I picked each leaf mindfully and with thanksgiving, and felt that I truly was preparing *presada* - holy food.

I reflected on my older daughter, that her first two years of life had been like a giant secret spot experience. She hadn't crawled, and only began walking at 18 months. But she had sat and listened and taken everything in, speaking at 12 months and phrasing her words eloquently and poetically throughout her toddlerhood and beyond. According to that Eight Direction Mentoring Model I could see that she'd been very much centered in Northeast experiences. A hereditary eye condition that allows her to focus her vision to one side rather than straight on, further explained to me that she had indeed experienced much of her world with the sensitivity of a poet (N/E stuff again), or 'through the eyes of magic'. Small wonder that she had such a protective sense of her personal space, and that noise and lots of people around her had often been an assault on her senses during those early years.

I reflected on another child - a boy who'd been born not long after my older daughter. This child had been the total opposite (so it seemed) of her. Where she was still for long stretches of time, he was always on the move. At nine months he was scooting around, contorting like an inchworm (but on his back!), climbing over baby gates. Southwest, I thought now. The energy of wandering, of being in your body, your physical self. According to the Eight Shields Mentoring Model focusing on either Southwest or Northeast experiences, opens you in unexpected ways (at least in terms of our modern culture). Small wonder that both of these children are 'outside the box'.

Although the Eight Shields Mentoring Model is just that - a model, or a tool, I can see how I can open its medicine bundle, or quietly ask my friends to use some of the ideas, to help my daughter explore - say, more of her Southwest nature. And I can see how I might pull out some ideas to play with my friend's son's more Northeast nature. And considering these two children, suddenly my mind opened. If I had this sort of awareness of just two children, what would it be like if I had it of all the children in my community? And not just me. What would it be like if all the women in my community had this sort of awareness of *all* the children? And not just of the children, but of each other, of our partners and spouses, of our aunts and uncles and elders? Of our entire 'tribe'?

This must be Clan Mother Awareness, I thought. To have the kind of nature awareness that Wilderness Awareness School attempts to cultivate among its students, but in the context of community and relationships. Surely the glimpses into other ways of being I'd had that day with my family and my home landscape, and the daily tasks of being alive, are all a part of a deep level of being that mothers have carried within their being in other places and other times. It lies encoded in us now, a blueprint waiting to be awakened.

I'd like to say my Clan Mother Awareness stayed with me, but after a few days it became too difficult to maintain, too exhausting. I let it go, but kept the memory burning, waiting for the time when it might be a little easier to slip back into it.