Here Be Dragons

Remembering how to listen through the blood. An introduction to "Piko: A Return to the Dreaming."

The piko symbol

Dear Readers,

Many of you have written to express congratulations on Whale Road Press. I so appreciate your enthusiasm and am hard at work revising the manuscript, getting a website up, and working full time as a massage therapist, so if you feel like translating your enthusiasm into a paid subscription I would be even more grateful!

This week I am going to share the current version of the full introduction to Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, which will be the first book published by Whale Road Press. A few have asked if I plan to publish other writers’ work. The answer to that is yes, but I am going to start small and get this first book out before I start looking at other manuscripts. I am happy to announce my brother Steven Lighty has joined me as a member of the Advisory Board at Whale Road. Lightnin’ has been called “a human jukebox.” Many of those songs are his own, including a rock opera titled “I'm Gone: Finding Transcendence in the High Mountains Through the Mystical Intervention of a Yeti”. Click on links here to listen to the opera and many other unique original compositions by Lightnin’. He also has a Master’s Degree in creative writing and is a dedicated reader. I’m thrilled to have him on board.

I hope you enjoy reading this introduction to Piko. I’d love to hear what excites you about it, if that’s the case, or if you have questions. My Substack readers are my first readers of the work aside from editor-extraordinaire Leigh Medeiros who has been helping me fine tune the book. She is a fountain of enthusiasm and insight and one of my creative muses!

Piko: A Return to the Dreaming

Introduction

Part One

In earlier times people believed a culture was maintained and a life could be saved by stories and ceremony. Some still do. I am one of those people, a living testament to how story can heal a sick body and a damaged soul.

In the old days I would have begun this ceremony by reciting my lineage in order to place myself in time and space. Yes, you heard that right. This book is a ceremony, and by reading it you are a participant. If you choose, you can call in your own ancestors now for guidance as we  prepare to cross oceans together on a spiraling hive of words that will carry us simultaneously forward, backward and deep down. All aspects of the present moment will be invoked. Will we fly as well? That will be up to you. I can affirm the stars are listening, have been all along, and that even if you’ve lost the stories of where you came from, the stars themselves are waiting for you to claim them as your ancestors.

I am the descendant of Europeans who crossed the Atlantic Ocean, migrants who left their villages for reasons not passed down, a daughter of lost forests. Orphaned blood travels through my arteries and veins.

I don’t know what motivated my ancestors to leave Europe for Turtle Island. Maybe some were just adventurous spirits, but more likely most left because they had to. Perhaps there was a famine, or they were persecuted for their political and religious beliefs. Maybe, like so many migrants, they wanted more opportunities for their children. They could also have just been greedy and wanted more. Whatever the case, they claimed what didn’t belong to them, nearly erasing the stories and cultures of the inhabitants of Turtle Island, and it is that loss which has motivated my work for the past twenty years as I’ve prepared for this ceremony.

I feel the loss of what my ancestors took without permission, and I feel the loss of what they left behind-the fern-spun song of the spring where they gathered water, the stream just outside the village lined with curly dock and cow parsnips where spiderwebs sparkled at dawn in the vegetation, the rivers they followed to the ports where they boarded ships with all their worldly goods to be carried over the edge of a map to the place marked “Here be dragons.”

I invoke my ancestors now through a bloodstream, rich and pulsing. I honor the severed umbilical cord of my lineage by providing it now with fertile ground so my ancestors’ lineage can complete its potential through me. I am the ground. I am their legacy, and if I am the result of a forgotten lineage, it’s to me to remember where we came from. As I remember through the land around me my connection to the piko, the navel of the world, I banish forgetting, with your permission-for us all.

Inspired by storyteller Martin Shaw’s book, Wolferland, beginning April 1, 2021, Fool’s Day, I sat at the edge of two small anchialine ponds in the Pu’uhonua o Hōnaunau, the Place of Refuge, on Moku o Keawe, known in modern times as Hawai’i Island, and told stories to the water from many cultures: Hawaiian, Haitian, Irish, Inuit, Greek, Sumerian, and Shinto. Day after day, I wove myself into the place with words. I opened my senses. I watched. I listened. I smelled, touched and tasted. I felt...and I wrote.

my inspiration

As the ceremony evolved I found myself weaving my own lived experience of trauma into the narrative along with observations on the climate crisis, ecocide, and the legacy of colonialism in Hawai’i.

This book is the resolution of my own trauma through reconnection with nature and the words here are the result of the sacred exchange that occurred between me and the elements.

My wish is for this book to activate your own internal compass. Everyone’s path will be different as we collectively navigate the massive transformations occurring now on Earth. We all have important parts to play, but the directives must come from within. We can no longer rely on outside forces to tell us what to do. As each one of us invokes what we want to see in the world, we must banish that within ourselves that is inhibiting it from realization in the material, and we must be faithful to the instructions received by following through with the required actions. That is the way of heka, magic, as practiced by the Hawaiian kahunas. Invoke, banish, administer. It’s a simple formula with revolutionary results, but does require discipline and devotion. Too many spells these days have been abandoned. There’s quite a backlog of unfulfilled wishes, so many that most people are paralyzed or without hope. Apathy or denial have become the guiding stars for too many. With this book, through my dedication and commitment to sitting by the ponds’ edge for twenty-one days, I carve a path of liberation from disconnection for us all.

I may not know the stories or the ways of my ancestors when they were still immersed in an indigenous consciousness-knowing themselves and their place in the cosmos through relationship to plants, rivers, streams, deer, bear and boar, but I am here now. I am proof of my lineage, and while I may long for what was lost, I will no longer define my life by it. I will use the body my ancestors gave me to learn the stories directly from nature. I claim connection with the stars and proclaim my lineage through the living entity of a language sourced from within my bones and blood, held within the greater matrices of forest, ocean, lava field and waterfall. Words are spells. My hope is this book will help humans reconnect to our primal origins and realign with our divine potential through surrendering to the greater powers of nature and the dreamtime.

Part Two

Where do stories come from? Many aboriginal and indigenous people today say they are the voice of Earth herself, and believe that telling the stories is an essential role in keeping the balance between human culture, our home planet and the cosmos. A well known example of this today would be the Shipibo people of the Amazon, who say their icaros, ceremonial songs, are direct transmission from the plant medicine ayahuasca. Although many modern cultures have lost their stories, if it’s true they come from beyond human sources, they could still exist and are waiting to be resurrected and broadcast through a human voice box. In the meantime, thousands are still with us, passed on through the oral tradition and preserved in books. As a white North American descended from European settler colonists who had most likely lost their connection to the land centuries before they boarded the ships that carried them to Turtle Island, I see these stories as long lost cousins waiting to be invited back to the fireside. I believe the processes they ignite in the psyche have the potential to awaken humanity to make the necessary corrections in order to bring us back into right relationship with each other and the rest of life on planet Earth and beyond.

Through my years of teaching, traveling and working with clients as a bodyworker on the table and in the water, I have witnessed the craving for deeper connection in hundreds of people and held space for the individual griefs of this collective loss.

“Piko: A Return to the Dreaming,” moves beyond the intellect and its explanations and rationalizations. Reading it requires some work. This is not a linear narrative moving like a line down the highway at top speed, it’s a meandering dirt road. At times, it may not even be a road. I write this way in order to invoke embodied participation on your part. Because it is a spell, be forewarned that it will require vigilance. If you choose to allow the words to penetrate you, you may be moved to make you own invocations. Remember, any invocation must be balanced equally by a sacrifice. I can tell you I had to sacrifice my own sense of inadequacy over and over again during the ceremony and in the process of writing this book. Every time doubts come up again, I administer to them. In this way I show my commitment to my kiahahi, my purpose. As the founder of a contemporary lineage, I want to be proud of the legacy as I leave. I will not abandon my creations.

It’s important to me to give proper credit and outright gratitude to Martin Shaw, whose book, Wolferland, as I mentioned, was the inspiration for my ceremony and book. Reading the story of Martin’s 101 day vigil on Dartmoor in Devon, England, is my idea of a thriller. Martin is a pioneer who uses images to invoke his readers to explore new territory. Without Wolferland and Martin’s body of work, written and oral, mine might not exist. I hope this book honors what he has so generously passed down.

Anyone who has been lucky enough to work with Martin (especially for an extended amount of time) will know how the experience of listening to him tell a story is both bespoke and collective. For over ten years I experienced this by the shore of Lake Damariscotta at the Great Mother Conference in Maine. Not only did his words shine light on my wounds and triumphs, they did the same for everyone else in the hall. Every year, as the week unfurled, the events of the stories he told bled through into our everyday interactions. The “conference” was really an alchemical crucible of the highest order and I was forever changed by it.

Ironically, it’s hard not to reduce the impact of our shared experiences at The Great Mother Conference with words. The direct statements of prose just don’t convey the subtle power of the process. In Piko, I hope to incite this same process in the reader by bypassing the flat highway and driving us on a curving mountain road of narrative streams and literary techniques. Here you will find a tapestry of memory, poetry, folk tales, reflections and song lyrics that I hope will keep the reader from the comfortable dissociation of a good read. Although I love a good page turner myself, I don’t think we need any more books to lull us to sleep. I suspect waking up will, in the long run, provide much more satisfying, even if we don’t get the happy Hollywood ending we think we crave or deserve. At the Great Mother Conference we speak of the “handmade life,” a life lived on purpose according to one’s destiny. I’m hoping that by disrupting the linear narrative readers will awaken to the power of stories to cast spells by becoming aware of the field of transformation that activates when we engage with stories. Perhaps you will also discover your purpose.

Piko

Part Three

Finally, despite the illusion of density and permanence we’ve created through following a path away from nature, even today, with the night sky smeared by artificial illumination and smog, there are some cultures where people can recite their lineage back to the stars, speaking the names as the poems they are, cell memories that bind the speaker to the truth of where we came from and possibly where we are going. I am fortunate to have encountered one of those people and to be in close relationship with him as my mentor.

Ke’oni Hanalei is a descendant of the Mū Hawaiians, a mysterious people often associated with legends of Lemuria, who lived in the Hawaiian Islands before the Tahitians sailed across the Pacific around 500CE to occupy the islands and establish what we know as Hawaiian culture. Most of what I’ve learned from Ke’oni has been transmitted orally, so at times in the book you’ll hear me say, “Ke’oni says…”

While associated with Lemuria, the Mū however, are still here. According to oral records, Mū, which pre-dates the Sumeria and Egypt, is one of the seed civilizations on Earth. Traces of it are still found in symbols around the globe, and contact with these cultures as simple as viewing the symbols can awaken indigenous memories and the desire to live in societies more closely attuned to nature. Basically, Ke’oni says, if you’re alive now you are descended from the Mū.

Remnants from Mū in the Mayan book known as The Madrid Codex.

In this time of dismantling the structures of colonialism, it’s important to remember that at one point, we were all indigenous. However, I do feel it’s important to be aware of one’s place in the colonial hierarchy and whatever unearned privileges one might have that enable the exploitation of the indigenous cultures left on the planet. These unbroken lineages hold immeasurable wealth far greater than dollars in a bank account and should be acknowledged and honored for continuing to remember humanity’s true purpose on Earth, to praise and revere Creation. That so many have done this in the face of genocide is a miracle and we must all be aware of our tendencies to appropriate these cultures in our enthusiasm for what they have to offer.

Yes, we are all indigenous, but that doesn’t mean some of us don’t have more work to do than others to correct the distortions of colonialism. This book is a call to re-indigenize by planting yourself in the soil where you live, to grow down and root before you claim the glory of the flower.

Through the medium of pua’aehuehu, fern medicine, Ke’oni shares Mū teachings on emotional intelligence that has been preserved in the DNA of ferns. As he tells it, when it became clear humans were about to experience what Western civilization calls “The Fall,” 103 species of ferns volunteered to preserve these teachings as codes in their DNA so the wisdom (Ke’oni has named them “the principles of aloha) wouldn’t be lost in the upcoming catastrophic earth changes. These codes can be remembered and their intelligence activated by those who make contact with the fern avatars. I am honored to call him my mentor. His teachings permeate this book.

Without my own ceremonial lineage to reference, I relied on intuition and things I’d been told or read about to create this ceremony. I am not Hawaiian and was aware the whole time I was in a very sacred place that had been colonized by white settlers, my human lineage. I do not want to be part of the wave of colonization my ancestors rode, turning Turtle Island into North America and Hawai’i into a tourist destination to be consumed for entertainment, but I’m also aware of the waves beyond the waves that carried my ancestors over the Atlantic, and now me over the Pacific. I am a settler here, but I want to do my best not to be a colonizer. One way I can do that is by refusing to bypass the legacy of colonialism, the trauma in contemporary Hawai’i that features in my personal story in this book, and to take accountability for my own role in it, reclaiming myself as a creator even in violent circumstances instead of as a victim.

The deep work of looking to the source of colonialism is perhaps why I came to Hawai’i in the first place. My experiences and the subsequent traumas that marked me were the rite of passage I went through that opened me to new ways of thinking that enabled me to articulate new perspectives on the colonizing impulse that will hopefully enable us to break the cycle of blame that keeps us trapped in distorted patterns of possession, the original act of violence.

I am not advocating spiritual bypassing. Doing the grueling work of emotional recovery and trauma integration is essential. It’s up to each one of us to resolve our individual, genetic and ancestral traumas in order to heal the collective, which will of course be different for everyone. However, I do find it useful to point out, while issuing a warning, especially if you are white or male, not to let yourself off the hook by spiritually bypassing. This is not the time to excuse yourself from the painful work of recovering your indigenous soul by saying, “my soul gave me this experience so I could grow,” and then deciding you’re healed because you now have a logical explanation for whatever happened to you. I hear this all the time in the spiritual community, and I get it. Facing how trauma has shaped your life can be devastating and it makes sense to avoid the pain. But I do promise you, the pain diminishes when you look at it, even more when you actually feel it.

In my own life I spiritually bypassed my pain for years until I was strong enough to release it in a contained manner. In this way, it could not destroy me, and I could understand, in an embodied way, how it had been my friend. I do believe my traumatic experiences were invitations from my soul to go through initiations my culture didn’t offer me, mythic impulses that pulled me down into the Underworld in literal ways. I was lucky to escape, and for many years I stayed committed to spiritually bypassing because it was what enabled me hold my soul in my body. However, I would never have broken out of dissociation and been able to embrace my kiakahi, my purpose, part of which is writing these words to you now, if I had not allowed the pain a dwelling place in my body long enough for my soul to know it could trust me. This was not a permanent home, but a nomad’s tent. When it was time to move on, my pain leaped into the following wind and I haven’t heard it speak directly since, though I do catch echoes of it on the breeze. Those are times I pay attention. What needs to be expressed through me in order for me to be free and sovereign human being? That is the wind I follow.

Humans have been displacing other humans as far back in history as we know. Is our species inherently greedy? I don’t believe so. Instead, I explore in this book how our impulse to conquer and colonize is a result of a primal wound to the feminine principle in the human avatar’s energy field. As Ke’oni says, the feminine-the ‘unihipili in Hawaiian-governs safety. Those who don’t feel safe approach the world from a stance of defend and conquer. This theme will become more clear as I share how this unfolded in my personal story when I first came to Moku o Keawe, although back then I called it The Big Island like every other colonizer.

I’m sure I made mistakes. I may have offended the spirits and the local Hawaiians. If so, I’m sorry. If someone who reads this feels I need to make a correction, please let me know.

One of my great poetry teachers, Fran Quinn, insists that mistakes are how we learn the most, and I’ve read that even today in indigenous cultures, children are not as carefully guarded as they are in modern industrial society. If they put their hand in the fire they get burned. Hopefully next time they won’t do it so they can grow up to have two hands to make all the things only humans can-embroidered shirts, feather cloaks, engraved silver nose rings, finger paintings, and murals of feasting gods on the ceilings of domed temples. And of course there’s Rumi and Leonard Cohen reminding us that cracks and wounds are where the light comes through.

It’s embarrassing to be a clumsy, ignorant human without a lineage who has to make up her own ceremonies, but I did it anyway because I want to become a worthy ancestor, reweaving my broken lineage for us all through relationship with the particular ground I stand upon. The stories we need are beneath our feet. They always have been. Are you listening?

Kō aloha la ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light

Jen