SHAMANIC HEALING IN LAOS
- Invoking my sister’s prayer on the January 9 Full Moon in Lupang Prabang, Laos:
moon growing to full on my birthday,
bathed in my tears as the 8th approaches.
the loss of my physical-as-I-knew-her-to-be-mother,
the one whose body
I separated from on the evening of that day 58 years ago
to begin this journey of my own.
Her absence tangible, the separation tangible.
even though I know the other side is on this side too…
the loss of her on this side lowers me to weeping.
please take my sorrow and shake it out in the land where you are.
spread it out among all the mothers of the land
that they will gather round
and sing to me of the joy and the sorrow,
the suffering and the grace
the life and the death.
The Offering
Calling in the Spirits. I'm sitting between the Shaman and his wife
Healing hands applying the plant medicine
Shaman Gail wrapping with natural fiber, cotton grown, spun and woven by the village women
Laos is the mostly heavily bombed nation on the planet. They call them “bombes” the cluster bombs dropped by the Americans during the war.
I was invited to an isolated village, 20 km. down a dirt road, near the Vietnam border which only recently has cleared the unexploded bombs from their fields.
SHAMAN GAI wanted to do a shamanic healing on my wound. I had an accident with my writing hand while trekking with the Black Hmong in the mountains of North Vietnam, just over the Chinese border. They operated on my wound in the French hospital in Hanoi.
I met SHAMAN GAIL at my friend Vandara’s house in Lupang Prabang where I was recuperating. I knew immediately she was a shaman and heeded her call for a healing. It was a tremendous experience.
I felt the land weeping as I arrived. A weeping land and I never met such powerful and authentic women, all spinners and weavers, filled with such joy.
How can it be that they not only survived such atrocity but demonstrated such an intense passion for life?
Surrounded by the renegade electron I keep writing about in my Heisenberg essays, these women were the literal face of the authentic feminine I have been seeking in art. They make art with their hands, weaving from the fiber that sustains their lives.
The gift that Gail gave me for my sister. This beautiful hand spun, hand woven spread is made from natural dye. Such a magnificent work is not typically sold to tourists. The Hmong make them for their weddings. Gail gifted me with one that had unicorns when we met. The Unicorn is the symbol for my Beloved, who embodies the ancient icon of the hieros games, the ever-present origin of my art theory.
The twin birds on the top of the spread represent the Gemini evoked by my sister on her birthday. In alchemy, twins represent the birth of the New.
Chiron, the wounded healer, rising on the ascendent with Neptune in Pisces, reborn as the fully empowered female shaman that I experienced in the jungle of Laos, is the energy that guided this post, written with my renewed hand!
