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I am riding the river of time backwards on my mother’s voice. She is at the bottom of the whirlpool, I am clinging to the top, orbiting wide circles around the still point she holds at the heart of this whirling vortex.
When I let go I free-fall downstream into the mud-brown Ohio, land of our ancestors who pioneered this continent at the very beginning of America, pushing out the Shawnee to build a town named Marietta, where the Ohio joined the Muskingum, the first permanent American settlement in the NW Territory.
The Muskingum ran north-south, the Ohio east-west, their confluence a cross where my ancestors rooted themselves in the linear fantasy of endless expansion America was founded on, the up and down without the circle, unaware they were surrounded, in every quadrant, with mounds built by the Adena, who dwelt on this land before the Shawnee my people pushed out.
The mounds still rise like pregnant bellies toward the clouds that carried the Woman Who Fell from the Sky into this world. They are shaped like turtle shells, and when rain pours down, it’s easy to imagine how we could survive the next flood carried safe on their backs, until Earth was ready again to anchor these floating islands with roots, trees pulled skyward by the light behind the rainclouds.
The most famous mound is a side-winding serpent. Even though it looks like it doesn’t move, it is winding just like this continent’s rivers—eroding sediment, depositing silt, telling their stories in s-curves on the way toward the Mississippi.
Mississippi means “the gathering-in of all the waters” in Ojibwe. It runs through American’s heartland and ends in a gulf—a portion of ocean penetrating land, a wide gap, a deep chasm—how you see it depends on if you’re willing to let snakes wrap around your ankles and pull you down.
Beneath the gulf, the ocean floor. Beneath the ocean floor, more layers of mountain. Beneath the mountains, always fire at the core.
It seems now we are far from that fire, but we aren’t. I know because I am clinging to the side of a whirlpool and can feel the heat down below. The soles of my feet are beginning to blister. Myth time melts geological.
I live on layers of barely cool rock, fresh-spurted from earth’s core by Pele. Some say she is the lava itself, kind of verb and noun combined; but really she obliterates grammar. My home Moku o Keawe is made of five volcanoes—Kilauea, Mauna Loa, Mauna Kea, Hualālai, Kōhala—but that makes them sound like separate entities. In reality, they are all one. To live here is to constantly walk on fire flowing toward the ocean. There is no escaping the moon’s pull.
I am the tide’s daughter, and my mother’s. In the early 1970s we sit together nightly on the orange couch in our raised ranch on Brickyard Road. I lean in as she reads me stories, fascinated by the black marks on the pages I can’t yet decipher. Magic through and through, I am spellbound, unaware of time or self, carried safe down rivers, across oceans, on my mother’s words.
The stories themselves forgotten, what mattered were the sounds and how my mind was shaped by them. Behind my mother’s voice is my grandmother’s, telling us how she and my grandfather, teenage sweethearts in-between world wars, would walk downtown on Saturday nights to see the bright lights of Main Street, and though she was old when she told me this story, I still felt the wonder. Beyond Marietta, the land was dark.
The law of the spiral says we can’t escape the ghosts we created that haven’t moved on. They are whirling in time with us until we free them. Forgive us, for what we’ve done, I say to the Shawnee, to the felled forests, to the rivers polluted by toxic sludge. I can’t expect you to accept my atonement, but I can offer it. If these words could carry us across even one of the gulfs that threaten to engulf us before we enter a new spiral, it will be worth it. We will free each other, or not at all.
And a new spiral will be born when this one collapses. The question is whether we will be within its whirl. I don’t ask that out of existential doom. It’s a wish rising from the depths of my inner waters. I want us to fulfill our purpose, to seed the next world with love.
Even though it defies logic, my grandmother, born at the confluence of two rivers, carried me within her when she carried my mother. Women are born with all the eggs they will carry, and so my mother in utero carried my potential, and chose to deliver me into this world through love. I am blessed.
Marietta, named by French fur traders in honor of Queen Marie Antoinette who lost her head to the guillotine in front of thousands in the Place de Révolution.
Marietta, Italian diminutive for Maria, derived from Hebrew Mīryam or Egyptian mr, meaning beloved or rebellious, meaning sea of bitterness or star of the sea. Which is it? Tell me. Or must I be the one to choose. No question, mark.
Marietta, where the bright lights of Main Street illuminate the dark Ohio as it gathers-in the Muskingum. Ohio, named “good river” by the Iroquois. Muskingum—mshkikwam in Shawnee, “swampy ground,” or mus wəshkinkw, “elk’s eye,” because so many elk lined its banks, watching the river flow past to places they would never go, but still knew as scents on the wind, instinctual as migration that pulled them across this continent for centuries before my people destroyed them.
Marietta, the mother of meaning in my life. The source of my story that began long before me.
Until I wrote this I thought I was missing something because I wasn’t raised in an oral tradition, that most of what I knew was from books which would never be as good as the real world.
Now I see that isn’t true. Within books are worlds as real as this one. I saw them when my mother read to me before I could decipher the black marks on the pages she let me turn when her voice paused.
I am a daughter of two rivers gathered-in by one. I was made by my mother’s stories on an orange couch in the 1970s in a raised ranch on Brickyard Road that ended for us kids with two bends like a river. We were warned not to venture past them, and we didn’t. In time, we learned to swim and the world took us into ever-widening currents.
Brickyard Road, still there, was swallowed by the woods as we got lost in books, became a place in a fairy tale we couldn’t find because the river had changed shape as we did. We could go back, but the maps in our minds will not guarantee safe passage. Only the heart can move a body whole through time.
I am still leaning into the sound of my mother’s voice that always meets me when I’m close to the gulf. Empty yourself.
My mother’s voice is the waters’. I follow it to every shore to which it guides. Whirlpools on either side, I find balance on the edges.
I am not missing out, nor am I missing. I am right here, riding the river of time on the voices that made me, adding my own words at each bend in the river for whoever needs to find them.
Poem To My Lost Ancestors
Without faith, I came again to the forest,
laid my hollow bones down in ferns.
The light, looking up, was tender as a wound.
I wasn’t ready to look at them,
my hollow bones laid down in ferns.
The marrow, a missing song my ancestors lost.
I wasn’t ready to look at them—
who had they killed that I should live?
The marrow, a missing song my ancestors lost
long before I was born.
Who had they killed that I should live?
Why should I feel guilty?
Long before I was born
the future was corrupted by fear and loss.
Why should I feel guilty,
as if I deserve
a future corrupted by fear and loss?
I could continue to live
as if I don’t deserve
the light streaming down like an un-dammed river.
I could continue to live
for all that was lost—
the light streaming down like an un-dammed river
in the ravaged forests.
For all that was lost,
so much more forgotten
in the ravaged forests.
How to speak with trees and water—
so much more forgotten.
A human is here to make beauty with words,
how to speak with trees and water
in the language light taught us.
A human is here to make beauty with words.
Without faith I came again to the forest.
In the language light taught us I found it,
looking up, tender as a wound.
Thanks for reading this and supporting my body of work in the revolution we call life on Earth. Upcoming posts will include an exploratory meditation on how modern poets can potentially repair the wounds inflicted on nature by civilization through writing in received forms, and the continuation of the series “To Live in Growing Orbits,” a dive into the fairy tales and myths I told in my recent book, Piko: a Return to the Dreaming.
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"Jennifer Lighty is the real thing and has done us a great service with Piko. A modern woman working intuitively to contact mythic ground. Her language is fresh and imaginative, her intention five fathoms deep. I'm so glad she exists, and that she has turned some of her life's work into a gift that we can cradle in our hands and feel the benefit."
-Martin Shaw, author of Bardskull
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light