SEDONA RENDEZVOUS

Last week we went to Sedona, Arizona to meet up with old friends from England, David Eastoe and his partner lovely Helen. So many years have passed since we last saw Dave. Much has changed for all of us and yet it seemed so easy and natural as if it had been only a few days. He wasn't yet with Helen when we had last seen Dave but she seems such a natural fit for him that it was as if we already knew her.

Yukine, PQ, Me, David, and Helen

Pba-Quen-nee-e and I have been wanting to go to England again to re-charge the energy connection with Glastonbury. Since Standing Deer has difficulty traveling long distances with his oxygen in tow and our finances don't permit us a trip at this time it was an answer to an intuitive hunch that Dave and Helen should suddenly appear to do a workshop in Sedona which has become our second home.

It was a lovely visit but it has pushed me into another crisis about where I should be. We had to let our house in the Sedona area go last year because we couldn't afford to keep it but the energetic connection remains, and there is no doubt that Standing Deer's health would benefit if we could be there.

On our visit this time we were led to a special place of power by the lady who sponsored Dave and Helen's workshop. One of those confirming magic events occurred on this visit that reminded me that something like this happens virtually every time we go walking in the Sedona area. I won't speak of the event itself because it prefers to be kept as a private event at this time, but it was a confirmation of the connection with these sacred places.

When we returned to Taos I fell into a gray, distant remoteness that was very uncomfortable. It was as if I was disconnected from everything, floating on a dingy charcoal cloud. The next night I had a very bad dream of being held captive by a situation of mistaken identity in a very ugly, broken down, gloomy house in an unknown city by people I could not connect with nor did I want to. These people were trying to draft me into their profession. In fact they thought I was there intentionally. I desperately searched for but could not find my car keys to leave and then discovered that I didn't remember where my car was either. I awoke in a state of despair.

It occurred to me that I should smudge the house and myself with sage. Perhaps I picked up something negative on the trip. But the trip was fine in most ways. However, I felt a bit of a dejavu  just before leaving for Sedona.  I picked up a severe cold. The last time I'd had a cold like that had been in Glastonbury 13 years earlier. The circumstances were strangely similar. For some reason I was reliving certain events but failed to understand the connection. The cold had been associated with some very difficult events in my life those many years ago, events that felt very distant and no longer a problem. However, during that episode David Eastoe had given me some help with his plant essences that was very effective and now he was giving a workshop in Sedona about the use of plant essences.

The disturbing dream indicated that there was danger of becoming accidentally lost in a decaying situation. It is  necessary to move to another level but old fears arise of falling victim to another compromised trap. Of course I journalized this dream which removed some of the power from the spell it cast. Now I recognize that this is my way of preparing for the next major life hurdle. Housecleaning is the beginning of this process and whenever this comes up in my life I notice that there is a lot of dirt and broken stuff in the dark corners.

A right next step will require something beyond my current psychic tool box, which means it isn't clear on my psychic GPS. I sense that my energy has shifted ahead of my consciousness but I do recognize that I'm definitely responding to a shift in energy.  I sense that Taos is becoming my past. It is still home but I don't think my soul work is here at the present.  I'm following an energy wave to Arizona right now, but I can't justify it practically. Standing Deer would feel much better at a lower elevation but living in Cottonwood last year was a financial stretch that we can't manage this year. I keep hoping that some resolution will present itself, but I also sense that something I haven't imagined or fantasized may emerge at the end of this drabness.

Perhaps its my Moon rising in Cancer that requires that I have big emotional swings that herald changes in direction and growth. It seems that instead of  seeing the future I have to feel my way through each process.
Usually I find myself following a new interest with no idea why it suddenly presented itself.  Knowledge always comes much later.

PASSION BEING BORN

I’ve been thinking about the power of emotion and its most intense expression, passion. Without passion there is no vitality and creativity, only circles caught in circles that never move out of two dimensions into the three dimensional world of life or beyond. Creative life moves in spirals rather than in circles.  Passion is emotion focused on something we find central to our very being.

Creative Burst

I feel that my own passion is returning.  After a long winter, the ice is breaking and droplets are trickling into promising streams. I didn’t realize how much of the water of life I’d lost over the decades.  Such a long time spent just getting by while waiting for a chance to live the life placed piece by piece on a shelf for a better time.  It was a lesson in how one can lose one’s soul bit by bit.

In a sense, birth is a lifelong process carrying us by stages to each new dimension of life.  At any point along the way we can be still born or thrown onto an ice patch. I once saw a cartoon about a hatchling proud of itself for making it alive out of its eggshell, but it hadn’t yet noticed that this shell was enclosed within a shell that was enclosed within another shell ad infinitum.

When I was younger I was passionate about everything. However my family was a bit intimidated by my intensity.  With the help of Church and School they put up a high dense wall. After colliding with this wall again and again I gradually I lost hope and almost lost memory of the passion for life.  More accurately I hid it.  I loved to dance I love to draw and paint and I loved horses and wilderness but these passions were frowned on in our fundamentalist family.  I could only watch longingly while admiring others dancing beautifully or taking art lessons.  Later I took ballet lessons and learned everything I could about dance.  But I was too old by then to fulfill my dream. Now I see that the enemy was fear of passion and thus fear of life. The most dangerous enemies always masquerade as friends.

The frustration of my early years was that my people had lost their passion for life. Although they loved me they no longer had enough life force left beyond everyday tasks to involve themselves in my interests or take my dreams and talents seriously.  Their world was two-dimensional. They wanted me to fit in, be responsible but not dangerously responsive.   They were OK with just getting by.  Even my low grades in school were virtually ignored.  I know now that they expected that I would become honest, humble, and expect very little from life.  I would graduate from High School marry a good Christian man and work as a housekeeper or receptionist. I was passionately, intensely interested in many things and my school was in a low-income neighborhood.  I realized much later that the teachers in my school were culled from better schools and had lost their passion or never found it. Most of them merely went through the motions while waiting for retirement or a husband to rescue them.

People are motivated by emotion not reason.  Even reasonable arguments are designed to promote emotional attachments although sometimes the emotion is hatred or fear.  Without passion nothing happens.  Without passion everything that seems to happen is just a smoke screen to keep us from discovering or connecting with a passion that might make us wake from our zombie state and join in creation. Passion is necessary for a genuine connection with our Source. Passion is life force directed like a laser.

Emotion drives all human and animal actions.  Of course not all emotions are for good, but no emotion is certainly not good. It is a sign of death.  We don’t necessarily die all at once.  Sometimes it’s a piece by piece process until we lose the last sparks of heat and light and become gray and cold like ash.

LILITH TELLS HER STORY

This is a story never mentioned in the Holy Bible as it was compiled by the all male priestly class. It goes far back in underground history before surfacing again in the Middle Ages. The feminine face of God was acknowledged long ago in the stories of human creation and strangely emerged in a traditional but non-biblical story of Adam’s first wife Lilith who refused to be dominated by Adam and flew away in a rage. She was known as a she-demon, but no one asked why she was angry. She both fascinates and repels. Forces of nature when rejected tend to become monsters.
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I am Lilith. I am both maid and wife. I am the maid of desolation and the wife of Chaos.

I have long ruled the dark side of Yahweh, my secret lover. He is the God who tells you that he is only one God.

Once before his reign I was the Great Mother of life. I am also the Lily, the Rose the virgin, and the fertile one. Do my connections sound familiar?

I have ruled the fears of mankind since before the time of Sumer. I have many guises. The people dreaded me, and made amulets to ward me off into the modern ages. How do they think they can, since I am their secret power of life and death?

Once I was honored as the source of all life, now they call me murderous she demon.

I am the maid of desolation. The desert is my old home and the wild cat, jackal and screech owl are my companions, the wild Ass, my friend.

Men call me screech owl, afraid to utter my true name, lest I answer.

But once I was Adam’s mate, created with him in equality by the first cause. Adam wished to be superior and subject me to his will. He wished to take his father’s throne. And thus was envy born.

This is an abomination that could not be tolerated, and I called on the name of the true God and flew from Adam’s presence.

But Adam is still my rightful mate and secretly with him I have spawned the insatiable demons that prowl the world of men.

I cannot tolerate imbalance and he that made himself above me and said the female is not rightfully
equal with the male. He split heaven and earth and set them against each other. Creation must rule in tandem.

Although men forget the way it was meant to be, I do not forget. Though they banished me to the desert I will never allow them peace in their state of disorder.

I will not live by rules set by Adam and his God Yahweh. I must by my very nature avenge the lost wholeness of creation. But Adam is bound by time and the limits of his lifetime and does not recognize what is.

I am the Lady of the Beasts, and I have many faces. As the Lion Goddess Sekhmet, I scorch with the purifying fire of the desert. She avenges the wrongdoing of men.

I must avenge the lost wholeness of creation. Now that I am the spirit of the desert, she-demon, they call me, I trouble men in their dreams and women in their bondage.

To those in bondage I have become the great anti-mother, enemy of human life. The people say that I drink the blood of newborns, cause stillbirth, and women to be barren, that I suck the life force from the male’s semen at night while he is sleeping.

Among the Jews, it was forbidden for a man to sleep alone at night lest I come to him and seduce him, causing him to leave his body and fly away with me to the wild places where no human can live.

My power is set in the wildness of being more ancient than the oldest memories of humankind, and yet I hold the future of your dreams.
Your cities cannot hold me, nor can walls contain me. I travel softly with power like the leopard prowling in the pre-dawn shadows.

Once goddess Innana brought my home, the wild willow tree, to her garden to cultivate it. She wished to grow it large and wide to make for herself a couch and bed.

When it had grown very large, the hero Gilgamesh cut it down and drove me and my wild companions from our home.

First he slew with an axe the great serpent at its base, and then drove from her home in the high branches the Imdugud bird. Thus I tore down my house at the tree crotch and fled to sanctuary in the wild and desolate places where the howl of the wind matched my cries of grief.

My tree is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and it is the bridge upon which the queen of Sheba crossed over to Solomon the wise.

Recognize it also as the tree upon which the Christ is hung for the willful forgetfulness of mankind.

When Gilgamesh had cut down the wild willow, and presented it to Innana, he then celebrated his triumph with his friends.

From the pieces of my home Gilgamesh and his friends made a hockey puck and sticks. In their arrogance they didn’t notice as I watched forlorn from the sidelines in the body of a young girl.

Again I called the name of the first great God, and the ground cracked open to swallow their toys.

Dear friend of Gilgamesh, the wild man, Enkidu volunteered to descend to the netherworld to retrieve them. But he could not remain detached from the many seductions of that realm and was trapped there forever.

Gilgamesh would never again play with his wild friend. Only the shadowy ghost of Enkidu could rise through a crack in the earth to speak of the underworld to Gilgamesh. Thus, men still wander in loneliness, searching for their lost companion.

I Lilith am the first virgin; my way is my own through the wilderness. I am queen of the demons from the depths of the human soul.

Men and children I kill with my kisses, and they die with a smile and the laughter of pleasure. For that brief moment they awake to the luminescence at the heart of darkness.

My name means nocturnal. I am she who rules the night, and she who rules the darkness of forgotten things. My familiar the Owl is the sight of the deadened Sun.

My consort is Samael the dark god, and great tester of mankind. But when the moon tide turns and the people of the angry God are expelled from their land, I become the secret wife of Yahweh, and his light bride the Sekinah becomes the bride of Samael.

I remember the freedom of all created beings. I came to the slave mothers with fearsome fantasies because the free virgin in every woman has been betrayed.

I have a secret lover. We meet again and again through the ages when the time is right. Solomon, the wise magician calls me forth from the desert land. My Avatar, the Queen of Sheba, black and beautiful he once called, and conceived with her a son of two realms. The wise one knows the evil that dwells in good and good that dwells in evil.

Out of the desert also comes Hagar the mother of Ishmael, the first born son of father Abraham.
My body is beautiful and my eyes are wise, but my feet are the feet of wild things, sometimes the bird of prey, sometimes of goat or wild ass, my lower parts frightful and hairy.

Who can span heaven and hell to redeem the barren parched soul but a dark and rejected one. Truth hides in an invisible cloak. As witch and whore I bear the scapegoat’s burden into the deserted and desolate places of the heart.

The sacred flower of the great Goddess named Astarte, Eostre, Easter, bears my name. The lily is the yoni of spring, is it not more than irony that the lily also represents the pure mother of the Christ?

Consider Mary, was she not the sacred prostitute of God, who conceived as a free virgin outside the laws of men, for men cannot be saved within their laws. When the laws of men over took her son, my daughters the beautiful night hags flew across the Moon howling their lament.

The desert hermits in their vanity withdrew far from the city for their salvation, but I and my daughters the Lilim tortured them with lascivious apparitions.

I can’t be removed from the memory of men. Romans called their female demons striges (screech owls) and witches of the Italian wilderness are still known by the name of Strega. I am tortured and burned in the name of the wise ones of the countryside. My howls of rage have fallen on deaf ears and hardened hearts.

Until the time that holiness (wholeness) is restored and my sister Shekina is restored to her rightful place on Earth as God’s earthly home maker I will continue to prowl through the dreams of men taking from them the power that is rightfully mine.

Men call me; the first wife of Adam, a she demon but their souls have no substance and drift like pale ghosts without me.

UPDATE ON THE GREAT TAOS GAS OUTAGE

This morning was the start of the 6th day without natural gas. I've been cooking on an electric fryer and the Microwave. The coffee maker is electric so that's been our source of hot water. We are lucky that the electricity held up. For a few days that was also dicey. The weather this week has been the coldest for many years and that made the loss of heat desperate. The unexpected cold was, of course, the cause of the outage in the first place. But the weakness of our big systems has been exposed this past week.

Along with the weakness of the natural gas system, the local and state government and the suppliers of gas and electricity have been exposed for being asleep and then for waking in a confused fog. The information given to the public was inconsistent. First they told everyone to wait for the teams of professionals made up of their technicians and recruited volunteers from New Mexico and even as far away as New Orleans and Colorado. Then the word came out that considering the enormity of the situation it was OK to light your own gas if you knew how. But mass confusion soon set in as this word went back and forth. Coyote the Trickster was leaving his footprints.

Tired of waiting for one of the gas lighting teams to show up, we piled in the truck this morning and went looking for them. Radio announcer Paddy Mac has been on all day each day since this began. He has opened up KTAO's airways to the public and it became apparent that the public knew a lot more than the officials about how to get things done. At the Shell station down the road we saw some National Guard troops gassing up their Humvee. We asked them if our block was on their to-do list but they didn't know and said to go to their info center at the Storyteller Movie theater parking lot. We couldn't quite understand what the National Guard was doing to help and it seemed that they didn't know either. They were just following the orders of our new governor. Their colleagues at the theater took our name and address and said they'd get back to us when they knew something.

The place where Standing Deer picks up his oxygen was closed until today due to the outage. After picking up his oxygen this morning he saw one of the relight trucks and flagged it down. A young man followed him to our house turned on the meter and lit the gas. Wow! Life may go back to normal after six days without natural gas.

However, I don't really think this story is over. The Taos trickster has been stirred out of his den and I have no doubt that there will be more twists, turns and switchbacks on the way out of this debacle. Taos itself is laid out more like a field of fractals than a modern town. It grew organically; tiny lanes going off in this and that direction often hidden by volunteer foliage. Family complexes go back many generations and are known by family rather than street name. Neither the Town of Taos, or the gas company seems to have accurate maps to go by and the volunteer gas lighters seem to be wandering in confusion. That's why we decided to find them rather than wait for them to find us. We would probably be stiff by the time they found us.

Taos, and for that matter, most of Northern New Mexico is still a third world country almost secretly embedded in the United States. The fact that we are one of the poorest counties in the US is not above examination either. But there is something tricky about the under dog status that is very powerful in its ability to expose the weak side of the top dog. Since the outage people have missed work, pipes in public buildings broke causing hundreds of thousands of dollars damage, children were out of school, restaurants were closed as were many other businesses. Life in Taos is a hand-to-mouth situation and the loss of work will mean rent, mortgages and many bills won't be paid. At this point it appears that FEMA may also get involved, but that isn't validated. When this whole town shuts down the ripples will go on for a long time.

Red Rock Blessing - PQ's Birthday

We (Pba-Quen-ee-e,i.e. Standing Deer and I) recently returned from Sedona and Cottonwood Arizona. We truly miss being there even though we love Taos, and still have hopes of someday having a home in both places. Sedona/Cottonwood is our place of regeneration and inspiration. Taos is intense, and we have personal karma and purpose here but I sense that our stay in Arizona last year opened new doors of love and spiritual growth. On Standing Deer's birthday this year we went hiking on one of his favorite trails between Courthouse Butte and Bell Rock. He sat on a marker to catch a breath just as a man approached from the other direction. The man stopped, pointed to PQ's drum and pulled out a Native American flute. The two of them began improvising together. Two songs and then the man nodded and walked on down the trail. Not a word was exchanged. It was a beautiful synchronistic moment. I took a short video of the encounter. Everything seemed light and magical that day.

New Mexico Natural Gas Failure -- Why Now?

On the coldest night in Taos this winter and for many winters (-20) the natural gas flow failed. There was something about a rolling electrical blackout in Texas effecting pipeline delivery, the rest was a chain reaction. They now tell us we may have gas by Monday, Feb. 7th. As usual this is bringing out the best and worst in people. Workers from all over New Mexico and Southern Colorado have been called in and many volunteers in the plumbing and heating business. And then there are some who are pretending to be technicians coming to people's homes to turn on the gas for a price. Of course they are scamers.

My partners house is heated by propane so we have been staying there, but this morning his electricity went down and he brought a space heater to my house which is dependent on the failed natural gas. Both houses are limping. The first thing that came to both of us was to find a way to install solar panels as soon as possible. He has a traditional adobe fireplace which is our ultimate backup if I happen to lose electricity also.

Most of us are dependent on huge network systems that are beyond our individual or even community control. Often we don't know the source of our necessary resources until something like this happens. I think of our ancestors who gathered their own wood, and had no electrical or gas systems. They had wood fires, gas lamps or candles and a well for water. There were no universal systems to cripple millions when they failed.

All of these wonderful systems that sustain us are a mixed blessing. I remember when my parents put an electric can opener in our mountain cabin. unfortunately they didn't keep the old fashioned hand operated can opener. When the electricity went down for a week we had to open cans with a knife, an even more primitive tool. I regarded it as a lesson in the necessity of keeping a backup. Here I am living in a town that was pretty independent a few years ago but is becoming less so all the time. The advantages of progress aren't always what they seem.

When I worked at the Tattered Cover bookstore I remember coming across a book on old tools. I was amazed at the ingenuity involved in some of them. They were amazing and required no electrical hookup or gas. Why did we discontinue them. Sure its cool to have electrical equipment but there are times when it doesn't work.

Manufacturers, developers, and suppliers of necessary resources probably wish us to be totally dependent on them for our lives but it doesn't seem like a good idea in the long run, or even those times when the drawback side to large exclusive systems reveals their weakness. Maybe we need a crisis in delivery once in awhile to show us the downside of too much dependence on big systems.

But then there is the human side to big system failures. People pretty much ignore each other as long as these big systems are functioning, but when they fail everyone has to step in and show their true colors. People help each other, communicate with their neighbors and accept the loss of a few days of routine along with a cut in income. And on the other side the bad eggs show their true nature as well. It seems like these system failures reveal a lot of hidden potential both good and bad. Once in awhile we need to see the other side of the picture painted on the wall.

THE WHITE DEERSKIN DRESS

From my Journal Retold on the Day of the First Snow:

This Vision came to me on the day that my partner’s brother Nathaniel was taken to the hospital never to return. We’d recently arrived home from a month in England. My friend Grandmother Jean placed a large crystal in my hands and asked if I saw anything. This is what happened.

This is the vision: On a clear, bright, snow covered day I find myself riding horseback down Spider Rock Road. A middle aged Indian Man dressed in kiva attire meets me about half way to my friend’s house. He is slender, about 5’ 6” and I never clearly see his face. We ride together toward the Pueblo and then beyond toward the mountain. I feel wonderful, lighthearted and moved by the beauty and clarity of the day. As we are riding I see but make nothing of the fact that the season now seems different. We are no longer in snow. As we begin to ascend, suddenly I am aware that as a non-tribal member I should not be here. At this time the guide is no longer with me. I don’t know where he went nor does it seem important.

I don’t want to violate the Pueblo laws and turn around to start back down the trail. But the season now seems to be late summer or early autumn. There is a grove of aspens to my left about a hundred yards. I am riding in the open. Suddenly I am either in two places at the same time or else I switch vision and identity with someone in the grove of aspen. I can see her face at the same time that I am looking out of the grove with her eyes.

She is young but beyond adolescence. She has intense black eyes, and full lips. She is dressed in a white deerskin dress decorated with fringe but no beading or other decoration. Her thick black hair is long and loose but tied in many small clusters with strings of white deerskin. It is a way of doing the hair that I have never seen in any picture nor has anyone ever said anything about this way of doing a woman’s hair.

She is standing by a small fire that has almost burned out. Somehow I know the fire was for a ceremonial purpose, just as I know that her dress and hairdo are not usual but for some special ceremony. I don’t know about the time of this scene but I know it is not the present although when I met the guide he and I were in the present which at that time was the day after Christmas, 1997. The only thing I know for sure is that this scene is at the latest in the middle or late 19th century and quite possibly much earlier. There is nothing external that would give me a clue as to the actual time period.

Then I am no longer on a horse riding back to the pueblo and noticing her in the forest but completely inside of this woman and now I can’t see her anymore because I am she looking out from the aspen grove. As her I am in a state of shock and disbelief. It takes my breath away and I feel that someone hit me in the belly with a large stone. My body is almost limp and my head is reeling. My world has been turned upside down and inside out and I barely recognize anything anymore. The unbelievable has happened. Something went terribly wrong. It is so extreme that I can’t take it in. I know that my life is over and even worse that everything I had dedicated my life to is over and can’t be fixed.

At this point in the vision I feel her shock and grief and begin to cry. But her feelings cannot be truly expressed in my body and nothing can be resolved, they haunt me for months. Every time I think of her or mention this vision to someone I trust the intensity and desperation surge over me like a tsunami. The big emotions have faded over the past 11 years but I can still see her and feel her with great clarity.

Gradually a story begins to unfold. She is waiting for a medicine power to be passed onto she and her partner after so many years of training beginning in childhood from perhaps the age of seven. An old medicine man from another pueblo or another tribe had come to this place to pass on his knowledge to two children, a boy and a girl. This was an unusual situation since normally he would not have left his own tribe. However, he was the last carrier of a certain type of medicine that was considered very important and there was no one in his own tribe to pass it on to. It had once been practiced in this place also but that was a long time ago. He came here and worked with the two children until they were ready to be initiated and the power would be turned over to them. He was too old to begin again.

On this day of initiation everything was ready. But the young man suddenly disappeared. She didn’t know what happened whether he left with a trader who came to their village, it seems like that may have happened, or if he simply ran away to another village to escape. It almost seemed as if something had sucked him up and taken him away without a trace. When she is standing in the grove, she is alone. The old man is not present either. Perhaps he left knowing there was no use going on. She was alone with her shock, grief, and total disorientation. The medicine they were trained in required the powerful interaction of male/female balanced energy. They each had a critical position in the use of ceremonial power. One alone would not do.

She must face the fact that her life training is now without an outlet and everything she believes she exists for no longer exists. It is far beyond her personal death in its importance and impact. This medicine will now be buried with her, in reality was buried at the moment the young man left. The old man is too old to begin with another boy and girl and he considers this event as the sign that a more powerful enemy has killed this medicine path. It is a bad omen for the future of these people as well as his own.

Next I feel my way as this young woman into her future. She never recovers her soul. It’s as if her heart was jerked out of her chest and she lives on in her village in a somnambulant state, a mere shell. She never mentions to anyone what happened nor does she bring it up consciously. She tries to live on in some way that will be good by helping other women and children in the village. I somehow know that she never married. Now I see her in late middle age a person with a kind of distant beauty but with enormous sadness behind her mask I never feel her as an old woman and believe she must have left her body in her late 40’s or early 50’s.

No one in the village ever found out what became of the young man. He disappeared into a different life and never returned. Surely he must have left that life feeling unfinished. He left something that he had been uniquely chosen for. Perhaps the responsibility seemed suffocating and overpowering to him and he panicked at the point of final initiation and commitment. He must have spent the rest of his life trying to justify and either deny or compensate for what he did. It was the type of panic driven decision that could not be undone. Did he feel shame combined with a giddy freedom? Did he feel that he was living his own truth at any cost? Maybe he went into a state of denial, suppressed the memory and never opened the door again. In this vision and in my everyday life I can only speculate.

This is the only complete story that I have received about what I left behind unfinished. Was it truly another life? Was it a composite of previous lifetimes and their unfinished business? Was it a story that just appeared out of some unknown connection? It came to me like a waking dream, quite suddenly without warning. The white deerskin dress connects me with the many white deer that ask me to paint them. This was and is a story that will reveal its magic, I sense, over the rest of my days on earth.