“So, tell me child. What is your intention?” Abigail smirked at being called a child. She was almost sixty years old and had racked up a lot of miles during her second set of twenty years. The only reason she had hired this shaman was so that when she led her own ceremonies at her home in Monterrey, she could bring some authenticity to the role.
“I’m searching for clarity and direction,” she repeated the lines she had concocted on the drive down. “So many of my friends are in transition – retiring, taking on new roles. I want to make sure that I’m on the right path.” The old woman nodded with her lips pursed, as a parent might do with a small child who has told a fib. Abigail planned to practice the expression in the rear-view mirror on the drive back to California.
“The right path, you say? Where might that path lead to?” Her dark brown eyes burrowed deep into Abigail’s own, “or away from?”
“Yeah, I’m not so good at following. As a writer, I’m more of a creator.”
“And what do you think of the story you have written?” The words flowed from the shaman’s mouth like sap from a rent tree.
“Well, after I made all of the revisions that my publisher requested, they’re happy with it.” The old woman smiled sweetly, the braided gray cord of her hair coming in and out of Abigail’s vision as she shook her head.
“No, child. Your story.” Abigail’s lips formed an “o” as the shaman’s meaning dawned on her.
“I mean, it’s not what I would have written. My first marriage… God, Clay. He was talented, and I guess I thought that living in the same space with him would allow me to be in the same space with him, but it didn’t work out that way. And then Gavin… That man thought the world of me, but he wanted children…”
“What has been written can be revised. Even the great creators, sky and sea, took three times to write the writers.” She responded to Abigail’s confused look with a gesture that included them both. “You and me.”
“First creator made people out of mud. But mud people cracked and they fell apart in water and they could not speak. Creator washed the mud away with a great rain and made people out of sticks. They had sturdy bodies and they could speak, but their skin was dry and crusty and they had no memory and no emotion. Like the book you just submitted to your publisher, the creator was not reflected in this work. So then the creator made people – father-mothers who spread throughout the land turning all they experienced into knowledge that soon rivaled that of the creator. So he clouded their minds. Are you ready to have the clouds lifted?”
Abigail nodded and drank deeply of the shaman’s elixir.
Literature in Small Doses 