Flying Lessons
“Teach me to fly.”
Chapter 9 is a flying lesson; wherein Asmeret and Charlotte (and Frieda) are ‘leveling up’ their own ‘powers’ (been hanging out with my nine-year-old nephew who uses this language daily), and learning to hear and use their gifts with the help of their teachers coaxing them into experimenting, taking risks, and trusting their instincts.
Rather than a big explanation of the chapter this time, I thought I might replay a few pieces, point out a thing or two and let you see write, dream, fly with the text. There is also a practice in the study of literature called close reading. You choose one small passage, a paragraph, or even a line and focus on all of its aspects. Sound. Rhythm. Word choice. Layers of metaphor. Resonance or patterns mapped to the bigger work . . . That could be fun too! Lots of juicy bits in Chap 9 for flying lessons.
Perhaps you might journal on it or share what comes up for you in the Comments.
If you play, I will join you!!!
(I’ve numbered the pieces for ease of reference if you share in Comments.)
ONE
And if the tree was real, then maybe the story of how it came to float over the sea was true. Had the girl in the story been her grandmother? Had animals put on shows? That was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Asmeret set all of her nine-year-old brain to the task of thinking it through. The raven swooped down from its roost and landed in front of her.
Stood eye to eye.
It spoke to her; heart to heart.
A question: Which way is up?
The girl was completely thrown out of her previous thoughts. The matter of real or dream no longer concerned her.
The question was too simple. Was the bird that stupid or did he think that she was? Was it some kind of riddle? Surely a bird of all creatures must know which way is up. Then again maybe it wasn’t a question at all.
“What do you mean?” Asmeret asked, eye to eye, heart to heart.
A black fingered wing unfolded as the raven grew bigger and bigger. A staircase. An invitation.
She climbed onto his back.
. . .
Bird and girl tip and wheel in a great backward arc, looping under the tree through the dangling roots then over the branches, again and again, swooping and soaring until “which way is up” is of no matter to a bird and a girl.
Nine-years-old in human development (at least in ‘westernized’ cultures) is when concrete thinking (sometimes very suddenly) takes over holistic ways of knowing and being (or MUCH EARLIER now that we ‘teach’ academics to four-year-olds and strip them of their magical powers). At this critical moment, when Asmeret has set all of her nine-year-old brain to thinking it through, Raven (her higher voice) swoops in and show her how to be both Earth and Air — or use her body and her mind to be in the moment and trust the EXPERIENCE of life.
TWO
By day, the girl and the bird fly further, crossing fences, the borders between countries. Across the Red Sea. Fly over the birthplace of half of her ancestors to the East and the other half to the South, where the African continent tapers off into an ocean.
Once, Raven took her with him at night.
Harvest the carcass.
Drink the last breath.
Feed her from his beak.
She feeling more than fed.
Understands she is body and soil and death and breath.
And she is more, but cannot name it.
Flashes of memories cross her synapses, not hers, perhaps of the man.
Sips blood of the carcass—tang.
Watches Raven eat flesh.
Watches him call the other scavengers to finish. Hyenas come. They eat the bones too.
I simply can’t bring myself to unpack this for you but I can offer this: read it slowly.
Read each line with the period and let those points of black cause a pause and a breath.
And I would love to know what comes up for you. Tell me that story. I’m in!
THREE
“Even those who have a gift must learn to use it, Asmeret. I can teach you some ways to see, and get the answers you need, and in the end it will be all up to you. There is one way available to each seer, and until all of the pieces are in place, including your head and your heart, the bones will remain silent.”
When I read Tarot professionally, I tend to attract ‘seers’ (used vaguely here to encompass those with all sorts of metaphysical gifts) who haven’t quite gotten all of the pieces in place. Sometimes they are experimenting with the ‘tools’ they might use (cards, bones, crystals, a violin, their voices, their hands) but mostly they need to tell themselves the story this way: I have a gift that is needed and needed now—no matter who told me that it is nothing, or too dark to unleash, or not welcome in our community or our family, or it scares me to death . . . I love this gift, I trust this gift, I love myself, I trust myself.
Leap.
FOUR
As Helge’s heart slowed, the colors of his boyhood sky threaded through the tunnels and alleys in his body once more. The last breath slipped past the tongue, which had swelled to nearly fill the mouth. It (the aspect of Helge that departed his body) rode the blue-green-blue breath, a shapeshift of ocean into rider and quest. Stars blinked and tumbled as the torrent of color rushed by, rearranging to make way for one of their finest knights.
The shift to untethering Helge from his body is in the pronouns, ‘the tongue’ versus ‘his tongue’ . . . It the pronoun in this whole work that most starkly pronounces our language (or at least my mastery of our language) profoundly inadequate (the parenthetical a yearning to say what I mean, even while I am not sure what I mean). I wonder about auroras and what they really are. And how Helge might have always been one cloaked in knight’s skin.
FIVE
Before she knew it, Frieda had slipped in beside Charlotte. The touch of the soft fingertips, impossibly warm, brought Charlotte around. She took deep breaths as Frieda instructed, “Into your belly, that’s it, now hold it—count seven—good, now out through your mouth—steady—one two three four five six seven eight. Good, again.”
Now those hands pulled Charlotte into a cradle of arms, eased her face into the nest of the older woman’s breast and stroked her hair. “Not like this, Charlotte, you can’t go where he’s going in a plane. In the summer, when the sun returns, we’ll take his ashes back to Norway.”
“He never got to go home,” Charlotte choked—the words felt like daggers piercing her heart—burst the dam of despair she had held there for so long.
“Sweetheart, Charlotte, you were his home.”
Here, finally, is Charlotte’s Ten of Swords. Ruin. A story she holds that shatters heart. The bottom of her Princess of Air descent. She will need to rise to the occasion. To see where she is needed in this life and do what she can. Be her own teacher. Push past her limits. Defy gravity. (if you are on Instagram you can replay the story of Charlotte’s Descent of Swords from my profile page HERE.)
SIX
“I just can’t be here, not like Ben needs. After all that I’ve seen. India, for instance, the place that will be your new home is in serious trouble. I fly over her every so often. The forced fracture of that country in two damaged the spirit of the land as much as the people. It yearns, Frieda. I can feel the two parts of India reaching back toward the other, longing and aching like a broken heart. It’s unbelievable what the lines drawn on paper by humans can cause. People massacred. Did you hear that they murdered the Mahatma? He was the very voice of consilience. We may no longer be in a world war, but the world is still at war, there is no doubt. I need to help, and I’m not sure how.”
They sat, quiet with their thoughts.
“It’s too bad the cards can’t just tell us what to do,” Charlotte said. The last time Frieda had cleared the dining room table and spread out the cards, the wheel had slowed and come to a halt. The key no longer moved at all. It was as if the deck and the key had run out of some essential energy, had lost touch with its source.
“We were never the ones meant to read them,” Frieda said, “I still have work to do.”
“And I will help. The Princess of Air is at your service, although I do wish I understood all that meant.”
“The answer to what’s next is always in the wind for you, Charlotte, and you have learned how to listen. Don’t forget. For me, I still need to get the cards published; the publishing house keeps dragging their feet and Aleister is making things very difficult on the legal side. The cards need to get to Africa, quickly, and America too, I can feel it. I have my deck and one other that the printers finally found. It’s like there are beacons out there and I can feel their pulse, drawing the cards toward them.” Frieda shook her head, exhausted, and sighed.
Charlotte watched the snow swirl through the window and was soon lost inside of the storm. She saw the flutter of red—Frieda’s hair flash against white, a scarf blown over the edge of a mountain into the clouds; the howling wind—arrraaaaaaaaaaaa; an African princess stands on a ledge—a daughter whose name describes the role chosen for her by the gods: She Who Unifies.
Charlotte looked up at Frieda, a strange smile crossing her face, “I think I know what to do next.”
Reading this closely, again, I notice how Charlotte’s view is still limited to deep-set assumptions even as she challenges them . . . while she sees something dangerous and damaging in the artificial boundaries created by humans, she still refers to the country of India—whose boundaries are surely as man-made as those imposed by the current warring factions.
Also in this bit Charlotte learns to fly in a way that I recognize. I hit the wall so often of 'The Princess is at your service . . . I do wish I understood all that meant’! On my better days I remember to sit still, ask, listen and do whatever my guides tell me to do without talking back or trying too hard to make sense of it (discerning of course that this is my highest voice, no self-harm, intentional harm of others or addict/obsessive behaviors come from your highest voice). It’s worked out pretty well for me, so far.
SEVEN
Charlotte was mystified. “Don’t you want to know the story? What it is, and why I chose her?”
“You didn’t choose her, Charlotte, the Great Mother did.”
Stunned, Charlotte could only murmur, “Of course.”
As a fatherless child, Charlotte needed to ask Anbessa one more question. She waited until she thought she might ask it without her voice breaking. She didn’t wait long enough. “Why don’t you take the gift to her yourself?”
Her question seemed to break something in Anbessa too. He wept silently for a minute then looked her in the eye. “I have equipped her to take care of herself in the bush and she carries the talking animal bones of her grandmother with her. She has known my love and has my whole heart. She is in more danger than my bow or my gun or my wise advice can save her from if I am home. What she needs most is protection from foreigners taking over our country. Here, in our borders, in our traditions, she may be misunderstood, even feared, hated, shunned, but no one will shoot a child or burn them to ash for the sickness she appears to have.”
Charlotte started to protest.
“No, Charlotte. Don’t be naive. I have seen it, and I have come to believe that you have seen it too. They rounded up those they thought mentally diseased first—the autistic, the schizophrenic, the epileptic, the depressed. Not the adults, the children. Cleaned out every special program, school, clinic, and institution. Experimented on them, raped and tortured them, then murdered them in the most barbaric manner. They are only animals, they believed.
. . .
“Sickness she appears to have?” Charlotte repeated.
“She isn’t sick, Charlotte. Asmeret is a shaman, one who will have more power than this world has ever seen.”
I am sorry if this is triggery for you! But I believe we are at a tipping point of the ability to rectify so many ways that our sight has been cultivated and curated in harmful ways. For years the thought had been growing in me that those we label and treat as mentally ill, deficient, challenged, special, atypical (the terms change as we slowly wake up and again grapple with the limits of language) might be harboring incredible gifts of sight and experience that transcends mine (throwing myself in with the ‘neuro-typical’ which may be a stretch). What if the ‘crazy’ person muttering to themselves about aliens as they walk down the street is tapped in and the rest of us are locked in cages whose bars we can’t see?
When I dug deeper in my research and found the (now much more widely known) reports of the atrocities against the ‘atypicals’, even the children, during WWII and dug deeper into the experience of various African shaman (who often report grave illness and mental unease until they accept their destiny, leave their lives, and begin their intensive shamanic training) I could see all of the layers of danger and distress that Asmeret was in, given the place and times she was living in.
Too many teenagers have crossed my path in recent years, struggling with diagnoses (or not) of depression, OCD, anxiety and so much more and I see misunderstood myths in them. When I watch my cousin, nephew, and sister-in-law (all on the autism spectrum) their brilliance flashes and flares through the seams of the every-day clothes we ask them to put on each morning.
I don’t know where we go from here, only that we should move—here is too dangerous a place for us all to stay in.
EIGHT
In those days, weeks, and years since meeting the girl (kissing her on the lips and feeling his heartbeat in hers), Asmara hunted bundles of plants, lured by their smell and fed them one by one to their goat, then gulped the milk. Hunted the savory sweet taste of her. Grew sullen and angry in his failure.
He built things to harness the water and sun and when they worked he cut them down.
“I know what you most desire,” the witch finally told Asmara, which brought him back to the present.
He looked at her, begged, nearly threw himself across the table. “Where is she?”
“Not here. Not now. Go home, Asmara.”
And for some, the path looks like this. Joseph Campbell lamented the lack of initiation rites and a community steeped in myths of wholeness to hold our youth as they transition to adulthood. He pointed out that the lack can be seen so clearly in the violence on the streets and in our own homes, drug abuse, crime, pornography, prisons filled to the brim. He wasn’t pointing a finger at the ones committing the violence, the ones in prison, he was talking about the systemic failure of our dominant cultural myth (progress, individualism, material wealth) to form healthy, whole societies and humans from birth to death.
NINE
I felt for Chapter 9 there should be nine Flying Lessons. And then I remembered. The ninth is for you. Whichever line, paragraph, passage that is still calling to you to look closer. Lean in. Write your way into for yourself. Or to share . . .
My deepest gratitude, as always, for THE GIFT of your attention and precious time.
