Tenaga Dalam - Pukulan Cimande Pusaka

one. “You mean, not you becoming a jaguar?”
Exactly. He chuckled. We can arrange for you to
transform yourself into a jaguar, if that’s what you
want. But we’ve been talking about the
shapeshifter’s role in the survival of communities,
cultures, our species. You yourself defined the
threat.
When I admitted that he was right, I must
have once again shown my disappointment. Don’t
worry; he said reassuringly. We can do both. He
paused then and glanced slowly around, his
attention concentrated near our feet. My eyes
followed his along the ledge that formed the top
of the pyramid, a floor for the stone jaguar where
he sat. I tried to imagine myself as a huge cat, but
in my mind I saw a glass skyscraper in the center
of a modern city; from it flowed a great sheet of
ice that spread over the city and highways until it
arrived at a desert, where it stopped. Recognizing
the city, I turned to him. I used to work in those
ancient places, where it all began. He bent down
and picked up a stone. After turning it in his hands
and appearing to examine it with great interest, he
gave it to me.
It was warm from the sun, but there was
nothing else about it that struck me as particularly
remarkable. It was the size of a robin’s egg,
roughly oblong, and had a slightly reddish hue.
Rounded atone end, it was jagged along the
other, as though it had broken off from some
larger rock. “Place it against your stomach,” he
instructed. I lifted my shirt and pressed it to my
flesh. The warmth felt good. Into your belly
button. I rolled it along my abdomen until the
rounded end slid into the cavity where my belly
button was nestled. An image of my mother
immediately came to mind. “Close your eyes.
Feel with your heart.” My mother’s young face
smiled at me. She had died six months before I
left for the Yucatan, at eighty five, after nearly two
months in the hospital, paralyzed by a stroke. I
had tried before, but this was the first time I had
been able to resurrect an image of her in those
days when she had been my vibrant teacher. She
looked extremely happy. My attention was drawn
to her hands. Like me, she held a stone.
I heard the voices of many of the
indigenous people I have worked with over the
years telling me, as they had so often, that every
person and every thing is tied together, that the
spirit of the stone and the spirit of the mountain
are inextricably united with my own spirit. That
stone, he said, will be your key to shapeshifting.
I opened my eyes. A flood of words
poured out of me. I repeated part of a lecture I
had recently given in New York City. In it I had
cited recent scientific evidence that every atom in
our bodies dates back to the Big Bang, the time
some fifteen billion years ago when the earth was
created, and that no atom remains in any single
body for much more than a year.
We truly are all one I said in conclusion.
And we have participated in many lives. He shot
me a piercing look. You mentioned that you used
to work in ancient places, places where it all
began.
Please tell me.
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