There’s a word that’s been dancing around my tongue for quite some time now. It comes to me in the kitchen while I am chopping sweet potatoes, and in the bath as the hot water hugs my skin.
Returning.
It is whispered, both to and through me. Thick as breath, deep in my bones, I feel it. Like something calling for me, only it is also me coming for something.
When I am still enough and think long enough, there are inklings. I can see them—fragments of memory, the shards and splinters of a call beckoning me to come back home.
Home, as in home to myself, home within myself. Home, as in a returning, a remembering, and a rediscovering. All of this reminds me of a poem by Joy Harjo:
For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle of pop. Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control. Open the door, then close it behind you. Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth gathering essences of plants to clean. Give it back with gratitude. If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and back. Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire. Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the guardians who have known you before time, who will be there after time. They sit before the fire that has been there without time. Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters. Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people who accompany you. Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought down upon them. Don’t worry. The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises, interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and those who will despise you because they despise themselves. The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few years, a hundred, a thousand or even more. Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the thieves of time. Do not hold regrets. When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed. You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant. Cut the ties you have to failure and shame. Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction. Ask for forgiveness. Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor. Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse. You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return. Speak to it as you would to a beloved child. Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long. Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes. Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no place else to go. Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short. Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.
These words, they help my soul breathe alive again. I am enchanted by this burning need-to-know of How did I become what and who I am? and How do I remember and return to the things that set my soul on fire?
Return to the land, to letting my toes dip deep into the wild earth. Return to the page, to thoughts spilling out like tired breath. Return to stillness, to being and breathing without doing. Return to the sacred, to finding holy in the humdrum of the day. Return to the sage, the tantalizing burn and smoke that lifts and leads my spirit back.
I want to return to writing words without recognition. Return to running my fingers through my sons’ sun-kissed hair. Return to a life that is not rushed, return to dreams that are not hushed. Return to love, return to simplicity, return to reading, return to running, return to greeting the waning crescent moon in the wake of a new dawn and day.
Joy Harjo, she says, “You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return. Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.”
Perhaps I do not need to do the returning. Perhaps I only need to do the calling. Perhaps I only need to do the relinquishing of all other things as I want and wait for my spirit to return.
This idea of returning, I am seeing it everywhere. I am seeing it in Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God by Kaitlin B. Curtice. She writes, “Identity does not come to us without journey, because to learn who we are means we face difficult truths in our own lives and imagine what life might look like as those truths work themselves out inside of us.” These words call me home, call me to return by way of remembering to always find and face the truth of who I am.
I am seeing it in Stranger Things, when Will Byers returns from The Upside Down, an alternate dimension painfully parallel to our world. After his vanishing, thought for dead, he is finally found to alive in The Upside Down, a place like home only “it’s so dark and empty. And so cold.” A mirror world—one that looks like ours but in nature is not. Eventually rescued, Will returns home. But he is marked, his memory forever remembering the reality of this dimension of death and decay that he left behind.
I am seeing it in the legend of the Rainbow Crow, an indigenous creation story, about a crow with shining, shimmering feathers who makes a journey to see The One Who Creates Us By Thought. Rainbow Crow asks for a way to save his animal friends from the bitter winter. Won over by the sound of his song, Creator gifts Rainbow Crow with a burning stick of fire. On the return, Rainbow Crow carries this stick of fire to melt away winter. But the journey is long and, on the way, Rainbow Crow is stained by the smoke and soot of the burning stick. He saves the animals and the land, but in the process he loses the beauty that he began with. A soul-deep story that tells the truth about living and losing through what was, what could have been, and what is now.
Kaitlin B. Curtice’s words, this story of the Rainbow Crow, and the return of Will Byers from The Upside Down all echo with fragments of Joy Harjo’s poem.
“Welcome your spirit back from its wandering,” writes Joy. “It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.”
Returning isn’t pretty. It is marked with painful reminders of the places and people we’ve unwittingly come to. The return is a ripping, it is a raging fire that burns the body, burns the skin, burns the mind.
Things get lost in the leaving—old habits, old rhythms, old worlds, old homes, old bodies, old beliefs, old thinking, old possessions, old wounds, old deaths.
Returning is a reckoning
in which we
consider the cost
of the loss of
our leaving.
I cannot say that we gain much because we lose much. Sometimes, we do not gain. Sometimes the leaving is a losing of ourselves, a gaping reminder that does not ever get replaced or refilled.
But.
We do come to find another kind of filling. We come to find that all of life is a returning—every waking moment a chance to return, an invitation to rediscover the truth that was meant to be.
We come to find that though we cannot leave this earth unscathed and unscarred, we can walk upon it untethered and untied.
We can release the way things are. We can climb up and out of the dark dimensions and empty existences that trick us into calling them home. We can wake our bodies up to breathe and be in the real world—to live and love deeply, in the here and now. We can release the beauty we began with, the beauty we think belongs to us. We can find that our beauty is bone-deep, is centered on our being and buried within the bravery we embody for the ones we love.
I am returning, I am calling my spirit back. I am choosing to leave the cold world, choosing to acknowledge that there will always be painful reminders of the death and dark that once was.
I am choosing to rediscover the breadth and breath of what can be.
Saying yes to seeing the wild world with wides eyes. Saying yes to listening to the wind and the waves. To breathing deep, belly breaths. To finding my way through the dark. To walking barefoot on the ground. To being present, being found.