| Last winter, I wrote about the Seven Fires. An Anishinaabe prophecy that the Natives of this land had long ago foreshadowed. I left the 6th and 7th Fire for another entry because I felt at the time that I did not cross that bridge yet. Of the eighteen months that I attended this Community Worker program, the only memories that remain with me are the wonderful peers that I journeyed with throughout each semester and the story of the Seven Fires. I remember reading this last year and it piercing right into me with such profound familiarity... my heart breached the threshold of overwhelming longing. Longing to recover the last of it. Something was missing... something that would in time be brought back to me.... I did not know what at the time. I could not even understand this feeling, much less explain it to anyone. But I knew that my heart would recognize it in due course. ~~~ "In the time of the Sixth Fire it will be evident that the promise of the Fifth Fire came in a false way. Those deceived by this promise will take their children away from the teachings of the Elders. Grandsons and granddaughters will turn against the Elders. In this way the Elders will lose their reason for living ... they will lose their purpose in life. At this time a new sickness will come among the people. The balance of many people will be disturbed. The cup of life will almost become the cup of grief." -- (wiki) A year has passed and still, even now I cannot help the tears that well in my eyes as I read this above. I know this, I have lived this. And in recent events, it has come to pass... that my soul has awakened to the cries of this again. What is this story that keeps repeating over and over again? Like an obscure memory replaying in my head. I long to break the cycle, I know this is the only reason now to live. I think perhaps that was why I let myself get swept away this Fall. I met someone who carried in his blood the lineage of the Great People. Like my kin, I opened up to him effortlessly. I made love to him as if he were a part of me. Closer than kin, thicker than blood, than the density of karma that swallowed us into one another repeatedly. I wonder now that it's over, what exactly I was searching for? I cried with him more often than I laughed. There was no humor found, no light between the space of our embrace. Black and red, heavy.. a volcanic exchange that was both the push and the pull. Did it remind me of the crimson waters that seeped the dark soil of this land? I buried my face into the hair of my lovers and I breathed in one last time his scent. He lay before me, pierced and dead, the earth and my body stained in red. Violent images would fall over me when I lay next to him at night. My stomach writhed in discomfort, my nights often restless despite the familiarity of our embrace. A past of tragedy, where the only room for comedy was one of the most bitter kind. Void of loving temperament, a mask where beneath bore the face of genocide. I don't believe the passion in our lovemaking was all entirely mine. I may have brought out a lot in him, as I clung sobbing wet and naked before. I may have been searching for the 7th Fire, and felt the songs of his ancestry that night when we made love on the floor. In all likelihood, I may never see him again as I feel in my heart our journey for this lifetime has come to an end. I had taken the roads of unloving, I will love you farther than I wanted to. To lay with a heartbroken man who buried love beneath the ground two years before. Still I know he weeps for the last part of him that had remained pure. That it could not be, that trust and commitment had already been violated in his youth, was again savagely taken and turned to ruin. All this I felt in him, the weeping cries of lost love and beauty... His apology found only when his eyes lingered a little longer on me. He never said anything, it was in the silences that I felt the heart break, I tasted the grieving in his tears. I know he buried himself long ago, but the waiting to die was what broke my heart the most. Like reliving a painful memory that is sewn into the webs of this land. I sought the 7th Fire and felt instead the burns of sorrow in the end. |
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