Portals to the Vision Serpent
Chapter Two
Mama Luna was there. Then she wasn’t. Much like his mother, except he always knew where his mother had gone when she left. Anyway, Sybilla eventually returned. Mama Luna never did, following in his father’s tracks. He vividly remembered the last time he’d seen her. They were having such a good time.
It was about a year earlier that, periodically, they’d started playing the game. He was barely six and Mama Luna had been living with them about three years. She said the conditions of the night had to be just right for the game. Even at his young age, Preston sensed one of those conditions must be the absence of his mother. He didn’t know what the others were. But he did know what they played was very special. So, they didn’t do it all the time because then it wouldn’t have meaning. He also knew it was something shared just between the two of them. When the game was over, she would put a finger to her lips like she did about the spirits liking him. During the game, she called him by a name from her people. Chan K’in. She didn’t use it on any other occasion.
“What does it mean, Mama Luna?” he’d asked her the first time.
“You are Little Sun. You see where you shine!” She had gently held his small face between her brown hands, and gazed deeply into his light eyes with her darker ones.
When she’d withdrawn her hands, something had implanted itself in some infinite place within him, even though he hadn’t understood the meaning of what she’d said. Although he hadn’t known it then, it was the unconscious memory of that strange transmission that would come back to him in later years as the warmth welling up from an untold space, filling the achy loneliness in his heart. His emptiness would be assuaged temporarily. But eventually it would give rise to tears that he would choke off in his throat, rather than have them escape through their natural passageway.
Even as a young boy, Preston was particularly alert to his surroundings and the people within them. Smoky had taught him to be that way.
This is how you learn awareness and what’s so, Smoky breathed into his ear one day when he was playing in his backyard. Watch that bird over there. See how that bush pushes its berries out ever so slightly to attract the bird’s attention. You might think the bush would try to hide, wouldn’t you?
Preston had nodded. When he really focused on the bush and the bird at the same time, he could see a very small movement from the bush, as though it was extending an invitation.
“Why does it do that, Smoky?”
It’s part of the natural circle of nourishing. The bush knows that the bird needs what she has in order to live. She also knows that the bird will digest her fruit and the seeds will leave its body. Because the bird is able to fly and the bush has no choice but to stay put, she knows her seeds will be spread much farther than she could ever do herself. In this way she travels.
“Do all plants do that, Smoky?” He was very curious about this strange fact.
Not all of them. Mostly those with seeds. Some plants have to protect themselves. Those are the plants that spread underground through their roots. Just like people, sometimes the animals get greedy, too. They want to take too much. When they take too much, the plant will send a warning to the others. Then all the plants of that kind in the area will make themselves taste bad, and the animal won’t eat them, or the plants will make him sick.
So, under Smoky’s tutelage, Preston watched and learned what was so. That was why he knew the game Mama Luna played with him was good and nourishing. She took great care in preparation and wasn’t greedy by doing it too much. Preston also knew there were things she did that signaled to him when they would soon be playing again.
Mama Luna had a garden in the backyard, perhaps not the easiest accomplishment under the harsh desert sun. Nearly all her years, she had lived in the blanketing humidity of the jungle with its high canopy of trees, not the open blistering dryness. So she went out very early in the morning, or even under the moonlight, to tend her plants. She’d always said she had to have her fingers in the dirt to remind herself of what she was made.
In the corner of the yard that his mother had given her, she grew all manner of herbs, as well as vegetables she put on their table. Some of the herbs she had grown in her homeland down south and brought the seeds with her. She made things with them. Preston didn’t know what she did exactly, but she’d sometimes mash them up and put them away someplace secret. He saw one time that she had some hanging in the closet in her room, drying.
Another time, when he was sick, his mother was out on assignment across the world somewhere. Mama Luna had brought a jar of dried leaves and sticks into the kitchen. Preston could see her from where he was lying on the couch. She boiled some water in a pan and turned off the fire. Then she had taken some of the dried plant out of the bottle and, whispering to it, she dropped it into the steaming water. After a while, she poured off some of the liquid into a cup, and brought it for him to drink. It had tasted kind of strange: like dirt. He hadn’t liked it much. But he loved Mama Luna and so drank it down.
“Mama, who were you talking to in the kitchen?” he’d asked.
“Oh Solocito, I ask the plant spirits to send you healing. These spirits are happy to help, and we must give them respect by asking!” She’d smiled down at him and put a finger to her lips.
She must have asked in a way that made them very happy because soon Preston became drowsy and fell asleep. When he woke up, he felt much better. The next day he was out playing again. Before he ran out to play, he had kissed Mama Luna. Then he solemnly put a finger to his lips. Mama returned his gesture with delighted laughter crinkling the corners of her eyes.
So one of the things she did when they were soon to play the game was spend time in her garden. But it was different than other times she would dig or weed. It would be late at night and the moon would be up. It was never a full moon but almost full. Preston’s bedroom was in the back of the house and had a big window. At night, he always liked to leave the curtains open so he could see the stars and the moon’s nightly trip across the sky, if he happened to be awake. Mostly he slept. But when they were getting ready to play the game, something would arouse him very late at night.
It was always when the moon was high in the sky. He’d feel himself pulled sleepily to his window, and that’s when he’d quietly observe Mama Luna in the garden. She’d walk among the plants in her bare feet, as though doing some kind of slow dance under the surreal silver light. Then she’d turn to one of them, a tall one that came up to her chest, and run her hands up and down its length, nearly touching it. Preston always opened his window and could hear her soft whispering song carried through the stillness to his awaiting ears. Periodically, she would pause, turn her face and hands up to the moon, and murmur some words. Preston didn’t understand any of the language but drew comfort from what it generated inside him. Whatever it was must have been transmitted to others who resonated with it, because sometimes the coyotes would answer her offering with acknowledgments of their own, yipping in the night. Once he heard a bird awaken from its roost and return Mama Luna’s song.
That was one way he knew. Another way was her weaving. When she’d come home with them, leaving her own people, the only thing she’d insisted on bringing was her loom. It was made of materials that were big and bulky. Even though he’d been very young, the heated argument that ensued between his mother and Mama Luna made an impression on him. His mother wanted Mama Luna to buy materials to reconstruct the loom in their home. She declined, saying this loom contained the history of her people. He had witnessed the stand-off between the two of them taking place in patched together Spanish. His mother finally backed down when it became clear that Mama Luna was going nowhere unless she had her loom. Sybilla found a way to bring it back. Preston didn’t know why it was important for his mother to have Mama Luna come home with them, but his mother’s compromise did not go unnoticed by him. Mama Luna’s loom graced a nook in their living room just as her garden brightened a corner of their yard during the years she was there. Things grew from her loom just as they did from her little plot of land.
Mama Luna spent as much of her free time at her loom as she did in her garden. She occasionally gave a woven belt to Preston or a colorful shawl to his mother, but usually she wove lengths of cloth and put them away somewhere in her room.
Once when she was busy at her handiwork, Preston asked her, “Why do you weave so much, Mama? You don’t do anything with the things you make.”
“Oh Solocito!” she laughed. Taking a hand from her work, she stroked his head. Holding one end of the threads dangling from her loom yet to be entwined, she fingered them thoughtfully. “These threads are like things we do. I weave the threads and I see how a life is made. I see my own life. Everyone has these threads. Mostly they don’t think about it!”
She motioned him to stand closer. “Look how if I would bring this color in here and wrap it around there, it changes the cloth. It’s not the same anymore. It could be good or bad. The cloth shows me how things will be.”
He had glanced up at her and met her kind, open face. He had a notion she was talking about something beyond her craft but didn’t really get it. His attention span was gone anyway, and he wanted to go out and play.
“Oh! When’s dinner?” he had said before he spun out the back door. Her full-bodied laughter trailed after him. She seemed to recognize when he’d had enough, or there was something he didn’t yet want to understand.
That year, when they began to play the game, Preston noticed that Mama did her weaving in a special way. She sang lightly as she commingled the threads, but it wasn’t the way she usually sang. Her voice had a breathy quality with few distinguishable words, as though she had taken on the sounds of nature: tree trunks rubbing against each other, the flapping of birds’ wings, an animal moving through underbrush. It was a repetitive, entrancing tune. The melodic intonations had a strange quality to them; she swallowed them as much as softly expelled them, as if she had two voices singing the same song.
Preston would suddenly awaken late in the night. Something had beckoned him to stand in the darkened doorway of the living room and watch her. In some ways, he felt like a spy because he failed to make his presence known. She never acknowledged him but seemed to know he was there, silently inviting him to witness. He wasn’t sure what he was called to see, and he could never figure out exactly what had pulled him from his bed. It couldn’t have been the loudness of her voice. It rarely carried to his surveillance point. Even so, Preston recognized it as a sister melody to the one Mama sang in the garden.
She never had any lights on, just a few candles, and her fingers moved automatically. She didn’t look at her work so much as gazed at a particular point just above her weaving with a consistent, silent calm. In his budding awareness, Preston had the sense Mama was seeing beyond their living room.
After a while, Preston would return quietly to bed and fall into a deep sleep. In the morning when he came in to get his breakfast, he’d sneak a peek at Mama’s loom. Over time, he saw a beautiful cloth growing. The design was unlike any other he’d seen her make. It had corn and canoes and what looked like jaguars and monkeys, all manner of strange things together.
“Mama, what are these pictures?” he finally asked.
“Solocito, this is how the world was made. I tell you this when the time is best,” Mama relayed softly.
That was all she’d said but Preston was satisfied. It was like being patient for cookies to emerge from the oven, and cooled enough so he could eat them. They tasted ever so much better than when he begged for the mixing spoon to lick off the cookie dough. Even at that age, he knew that things had to go through a process in order to be ready for consumption.
So the special cloth grew magically through the nights. During that time, Mama never touched her loom during the daylight hours. Preston only heard her singing at night. One morning, there was nothing on the loom. Instead, he saw the cloth folded up on a low stool next to it.
“You come, Solocito!” Mama Luna had beckoned him over. She shook the cloth open and placed it around him. Her face took on a tender look.
“Time will be soon.” She took the cloth from around his shoulders, refolded it carefully and spirited it away to her room.
A few days afterward, he had gone into the living room in the morning and noticed another weaving taking form on Mama’s loom. It looked very much like the first one. Its progress was similar to the one that had come before it, growing through the night and resting during the day. Preston thought of the cloth as springing to life, and sensed that something was going on when he wasn’t looking, something mysterious emerging that his eyes just couldn’t yet see.
Like when he was much younger, he thought the stuffed animals in his room came alive at night, and danced around while he was asleep. Often he would try to catch them by pretending to be asleep. Then he’d open one eye. But they were too clever for him. He never caught them in the act. Sometimes their shadows seemed to move, and he knew he’d almost exposed their tricks. He also thought that Smoky might sometimes inhabit them. He’d heard of people having spirits take over their bodies.
But that was when he was four. He was six when they began to play the game, and knew better about his stuffed animals. He had been very scientific in his determination. He’d sacrificed his least favorite one, the bunny, by carefully cutting open its seams, going through all its stuffing, and found nothing.
The cloth was different. Smoky kept appearing to him in his dreams, holding the completed product. He assumed it was Smoky. Preston would see sooty vapor rising into two tendrils supporting the weaving underneath, holding it out to him — an offering.
He kept the recurring dream to himself as he witnessed the second cloth taking shape. Finally, one morning he had gone to inspect the loom and found it empty. The cloth was done. Mama Luna had taken it somewhere. He allowed the sweet tension of anticipation to build. The time was nearly best.
©2013 Carla Woody. All rights reserved worldwide. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be directed to: Kenosis Press, P.O. Box 10441, Prescott, Arizona 86304. Email: info@kenosis.net.
Find links to all chapters as they are published in the Table of Contents below.
Table of Contents
Preston
Sybilla
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Preston
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by Carla Woody:
Standing Stark: The Willingness to Engage. Read in Illumination Book Chapters.
Calling Our Spirits Home: Gateways to Full Consciousness. Read in Illumination Book Chapters.
Navigating Your Lifepath: Reclaiming Your Self, Recapturing Your Vision. A Program to Revolutionize Your Life. Find in Illumination Book Chapters.
