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Tales from the Other Side of Language 97 my legs, but stops at my knees. I am not alarmed, and feel safe in this large perspective with the planet arrayed below me. Out of the meditation I know I’ll be able to manage whatever danger comes to me in the ceremony. I realize also my psychoanalytic perspective helps sturdy me, because I am not surprised or dismayed anymore by the possibilities of the darker sides of consciousness. In clinical practice I’ve done extensive deep work with patients with old abuses never before discussed, divorces and relationships full of rage or anger. Some things are not so new. I remember, too, that the shaman is the center of the ceremony and holds everything. It’s early evening and I’m lying face down on a massage table. The small second floor office is in an old frame house rearranged for five practitioners. I’m eager for this bodywork tonight; my day has been too full. The therapist begins rubbing my scalp and caressing my hair, instant calming, and I fall into a meditative doze. The welter of words melts away like butter. She moves down my right arm. I feel the sensation of crow feathers, my arm becomes a stretched-out crow wing, coal black and shimmering. She massages my back and my leg, and the right side of my body changes into black feathers and the gray of a crow. She moves over to the other side, and my arm becomes an eagle wing, with long brown wing feathers separated at the end like wing fingers, feeling the bones of flight. My left side becomes an eagle body, with my leg having the feathery trousers of the eagle ending at the ankles just above the yellow talons of feet. I’ve been massage-sculpted as crow/eagle. My head remains as my own my white head; I exist as human, crow, and eagle in one, and maybe the white head is also that of a bald eagle. I’m drawn into their spirits, clothed in them, one with them, like family. I think I want confirmation from the shaman, but I don’t need it. The deep sensations in my body are a reality for me. While my human body lies on the table, my eagle and crow bodies tell me of other actualities of being, of flight, of the experience of their lives, of shifting into oneness with them—body knowledge. I have tree roots extending wide and deep into the earth, and branches that touch into the spaces between galaxies. I am a dogwood, a Douglas fir,
98 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance: sometimes redwood sequoia, my sisters. When I move to my mountain home and step into the yard, the sequoias greet me, and I feel an invitation to settle at their roots. Like with my crow friend and the poodle, I feel the sensory reciprocity of non-verbal, non-cognitive language with many beings other than humans. Apart from talking to Leigh, my painting buddy, my brother, and my psychoanalytic colleague, I hold much private about this journey. I don’t yet have the language to speak these experiences of sensing and being in other realms with non-ordinary, non-material presences. When I try, other people’s ears go deaf like I’m speaking into an empty room. As the months of practice go by, I am more confident but still often riddled with anxiety and doubt, and I settle on a desire to be in the healing room itself, to watch what they’re doing with my daughter. When I express my desire to protect her in my morning meditation, I see an enormous tree with a large space between the roots that encloses the ceremony. I observe my daughter, the shaman, and her assistants are all safe inside, and I’m sitting on the ground outside. My ear is pressed to the thick trunk and I can hear everything inside. Later I find that the West Gate is the porch just outside the shaman’s ceremony room, with open sliding doors to the warm July day, where I will, in fact, hear everything. The shaman calls on the phone to tell me her husband has been in a construction accident, is going into surgery, and will need recovery time. She is apologetic, but has to reset the ceremony for two months later. I’m in a fretful temper a few mornings later. “All this effort for what? Will all this have any effect on my daughter’s health?” I call for the presence of the Great Mother Kali and tell her, “If you will heal my daughter, I am yours.” When my mood is better, I am shocked with what I have done. I think of Faust, who sold his soul to the Devil in Dante’s story. Have I done that? What is the reality of my request? How far does this sensory mind go? I have learned to put protections—a discriminating mind—in place, but have I naively gone too far?
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Weeds, ink dr
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PART ONE: THE PRECIPITOUS ABYSS
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Tales from the Other Side of Langua
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