What the Covid Lockdown Taught a Loner

by Winter Ross

published in Medium.com

I have read article after article on how devastating pandemic isolation is. The agony of being alone! All the “undiscovered” ways people have found to cope with this problem. Never has extroversion been so debilitating! And personally, I am puzzled; sympathetic, but puzzled. I know there are untold numbers of us introverts, agoraphobics, hemits, HSPs (Highly Sensitive People) and misanthropes whose lives haven’t changed much in these so-called unprecedented times — or even whose lives have become more comfortable in the silence and peace of their places.

It’s a subject for another essay, but I use the term “places” because plenty of people don’t have homes. Every reporter seems to assume that staying “home” is a basic inconvenience rather than a privilege. As a retired woman “Traveller” (British spelling), I get by as a house sitter/pet sitter/artist-in-residence, camping in between gigs. I became a Traveller briefly in my twenties before jobs and kids slowed me down. I picked up the lifestyle again when rent became more than my social security check. Although I live alone, the name fits a lifestyle I refuse to apologize for. The road keeps me sane. There’s something about the neither-here-nor-there escape from stress that keeps me going. But I lack community. I’m often in places where I don’t know anyone. Once, I spent five winter months caring for a house and two cats, binge-watching Netflix because I couldn’t let the wood stove go out in one of the coldest towns in the country. I was glad when spring arrived but it was no big deal. I hadn’t had a television in years so I caught up on this strange culture while I worked on a sci-fi novel. It was a lonely but ok winter, when I look back on it

I must have inherited my loner temperament (please don’t call it a condition) from the grandfather I barely knew. Within 10 minutes of my family’s yearly visit, he’d have escaped upstairs to his study where high-pitched childish voices were muted. He was always kind: teaching me to play checkers on a rainy afternoon, quietly putting together a few pieces of a puzzle with me in the evening. But I saw little of him. Like Grampa, I seem to wear my nervous system on the outside of my skin. Overwhelm has always defined my life. A book he sent me for my thirteenth birthday on alien abduction seemed to explain it. Most of my teenage summer nights were spent writing anguished poetry, looking up at the stars and trying to call in the Mother Ship to please come take me home.

I personally locked down on March 6, in a friend’s second home, two weeks before the state mandated it. The plan had been to assist my friend when she came through, to take care of her dogs when she traveled. But I found myself there alone actually glorying in the opportunity to simply Be somewhere.

At the beginning, the next door neighbor would stop in with two of his toddlers to chat, escaping briefly the new baby, the constant cartoon network noise and the boredom of no work. His kids drove me crazy. I spent the short time of their visits snatching small antique objects from their hands and locking doors before they could reach the handles. I finally came up with an excuse to end the visits by announcing that there were pins and needles all over the floor from my sewing projects and the place was a child hazard. It was a relief when the neighbor got the hint.

The town never did close down completely, I think. I’m not sure: I only left the house for the early elder-hour grocery shopping and stocked up for weeks, when I did. I made a game of eaking out the leftovers and cutting down to one meal a day if possible. Anything to keep from opening that front door. I realized my introversion was blooming into full-fledged agoraphobia. I made myself go on daily walks on back roads bordering cattle pastures; sewed masks and modeling one myself, forced myself to drive to the Post Office and mail them to far-flung friends on the Navajo Nation. I dragged a ladder out of the garage and painted the trim on my camper red and gold. I’ve spent much of the time fascinated by the news and learning to freelance. Indeed, the neighbor has hired me to write copy for the disinfecting business he’s starting.

Now, eight weeks later, it’s obvious that the sweet confinement in a house to myself, is coming to an end. The dogs have been dropped off here now, so I have company — annoying company that wants me to play with it all the time, smears its wet noses on my freshly showered skin, literally dogs me from room to room and sheds all over the area where I used to do morning yoga. That I can be irritated by a couple obedient, sweet labradors surprises even me. I have become keenly aware of how much humans bother me, too. When walking the dogs, I speed away from lonely people out for a bit of sun, who ask to pet them. I feel guilty, but the call of sanctuary is stronger

I’ve been as influenced as everyone else to indulge in the opportunity for self study and inner awareness that the covid lockdown has provided. But the motivational videos promising to help me change me or help me be me, have finally become tedious. That crap was for my youth when I really cared about why I wasn’t the Pollyanna-Barbie my parents and partners always wanted and a career demanded.

I don’t know what will happen next. Who does? But soon, I’m going to have to pack up, open the front door and drive off in my gypsy camper into the scary world again. I tell myself it will be interesting. Because I’ve made it all the way to old age and I’ve learned to cope with who I truly am. That Mother Ship is probably never going to show up. And I’m ok with that, too.

Winter Ross is probably not the only writer with a listing on Housecarers.com. She gets mail in Colorado, taught writing in New Mexico and after working at a retreat center in Hawai’i, is spending lockdown in Nevada. She is a National Association of Press Women award-winning short story writer and Darkhouse Books author. 

Walking the Edge of Cultural Appropriation

Published in the March 2020 online journal of the Society of  Shamanic Practitioners

The young man was goth-like, pale and pimply, dressed in a long black coat and lecturing to a circle of listeners at an Earth First! gathering in the western wilderness. The subject of his talk was the cultural appropriation of earth-based spiritual traditions. He had embraced his Wiccan ancestral roots, he raged, and anyone white who strayed into indigenous spirituality was simply politically incorrect, if not morally indefensible. 

With the arrogance of youth and the disrespect to elders that the predominate culture is known for, he had no patience for any of us who had walked the Good Red Road for decades without having checked our “23 and Me”. We were the worst example, he informed us, of oppression, colonialism, appropriation, etc. Guilt descended upon us as he rained the lexicon of radical philosophy down on our heads.

Certainly the lecture started me thinking about why and how, after long spiritual seeking, I had found Great Mystery and the Goddess while sitting on dusty blankets in a dark sweat lodge or peyote meeting. I came up with some answers that he had no interest in hearing, so I turned to another elder for some pleasantly surprising confirmation of my thoughts.

Genetically, as far as I know, I'm mostly Scottish. My last name, from the Viking word for horse, is common among both the Sioux and Cherokee. Because I'm female, there's no way of knowing if I'm related to John Ross, the first elected Cherokee chief after the Trail of Tears, although I did grow up in his Appalachian neighborhood. The English side of my family probably killed the Scottish side as well as the Massachusetts tribes they encountered after sailing into Plymouth. Who knows? We've been here awhile. All I know is that I love the desert, my theory being that my ancestors suffered too long in rain-drenched kilts. I cringe at the sound of bagpipes. I crave the smell of sage. Sometimes I think about past lives: Wise Women of The Burning Times; the scorned Gypsy fortune teller; the prophecy of Indian souls returning in bodies of The Rainbow Warriors.

To me, “earth-based spirituality” means the actual earth that's been in my teeth and up my nose for most of my adult life even if my ancestor's bones aren't ground into it. It's the land I live on that speaks its spirit to me. And who better to learn the language of that spirit from than those humans who have lived with it for thousands of years? I am grateful, humbled and blessed that the Lakota have been generous with their teaching and invited so many of us Wasichu into the Inipi.

And I am careful, especially in these days of renewed racial hatred and backlash, to stay near the back of any gathering and keep my mouth shut. Yet when I joined the pipe ceremony, unwrapping my own Sundance pipe one dawn at Standing Rock, nobody glared, lectured or gave any indication that I hadn't earned the sacred instrument in my hands. 

A Native American artist I know is so passionate about non-Indian artists making a profit from depicting cultural items in their work, a pot here, a rattle there, the ubiquitous dream catcher sold in every western gas station convenience store, that he got himself kicked out of a gallery for his confrontational complaints. Artists and their romantic attraction to all things Indian is a horse that left the barn a couple hundred years ago. If he was going to be such a purist, I reminded him, then he should stop wearing jeans (invented by a Jew named Levi during the gold rush), stop wearing cowboy boots invented by a white cobbler to fit stirrups on the saddles of horses brought in by the Spanish, not to mention his (the metalwork also a Spanish import) silver Navajo jewelry. French trader's glass beads replaced quill work in the Plains Indian's clothing, jingle dresses wouldn't be the same without tin can lids to curl into jingles, the Pacific Northwest button capes would look pretty different, the Pendleton blanket, the Morning Star quilt, called Star of Bethlehem and Texas Star by it's original colonizing seamstresses. And how could there be Seminole patchwork without sewing machines and cotton cloth? The forged iron pipe tomahawk prized by warriors who had no knowledge of metalworking...I think I wore him down by proving that the creativity of Indian culture incorporated a wonderful ability to appropriate from the oppressor!

Once I tried hard to suss out, to really connect with my ancestral spirituality. I went to Glastonbury (the Sedona of England, I discovered). Although awesome, Stonehenge, Avebury, the Burrows and Tor felt like archeological sites. I shivered with the ambiance of the White Spring but discovered it to be touted as “a tourist attraction in a Victorian pump house.” I can only describe the energy as an amputated limb, cut off long ago by the Church. Despite the attempt at to resuscitate paganism, that's what it felt like: a non-breathing beautiful corpse. Nothing has transfixed me quite like the breath of wind shimmering the leaves of the Sundance Tree.

In my work as a shamanic counselor trained in the very universalist philosophy of the Foundation of Shamanic Studies, I try to avoid using living Native American rituals I've participated in. I'd never consider “pouring a lodge” for instance, or singing spiritual songs outside the ceremonies for which they were meant. But little things creep in: tobacco ties wreath a client for protection; on my altar lies the eagle feather given when I joined the Native American Church; a rattle from Peru; lava from the throat of Pele; clap sticks from Australia,;a small Maori drum; a copy of an Alaskan Yupik spirit catcher...Ancestral tools appear too: candles, a pendulum with Celtic designs, a rune stone. Sometimes “Aho” and “Blessed Be” slip from my lips one after the other during prayer.

As Casteneda's Yaqui sorcerer, Don Juan, told us “All paths are the same: they lead nowhere...Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good.” I'm not going to apologize for my politically incorrect spirituality. When it comes down to it, it's just the “stuff” of religion and dogma – a structure we've invented to try to figure out what we're doing here on Earth, with Life. Our beliefs and rituals are merely an expression of homo sapien's “god gene”. Celebrating diversity, striving for sovereignty are important, but sharing the beauty of our paradigms with each other is more important. That's Aloha, Namaste, Love. Which we all need a lot more of in these shifting days. 

The Holiness of Dirt

Published on the blog of The Great Climate March: www.climatemarch.org, May 2014 and the e-magazine www.wildwomanrising.com/category/volume-2-issue-8/

“Pilgrimage: a journey or search of moral or spiritual significance. Typically a journey to a shrine or other location of importance to a person's beliefs and faith, although sometimes it can be a metaphorical journey into someone's own beliefs.” 

     I have joined the Great Climate March on its link between Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico. I trudge breathlessly, head down, toward our next camp: the parking lot of El Santuario de Chimayo. A Roman Catholic Church and National Historic Monument in New Mexico, it is famous for miracles of healing. I look forward to baptising my feet in the pure cold stream that gurgles behind the church. Cattle in the pasture that borders the far edge of the water look up as I limp toward them.  Although I've trained to hike the distances expected on this march, I've not trained to the pace of walkers who have been on the road for two months already. I hurt all over; my joints are stiff; the soles of my feet are burning.

     The High Road sees pilgrims and seekers of many kinds. I have been studying the descantos, the roadside shrines of white crosses, plastic flowers and sometimes stuffed toys which mark a soul's passing after a traffic accident. And I've been avoiding discarded syringes, broken bottles and crushed beer cans all day. My eyes on the red pumice gravel, I nearly run into a marcher holding up a sun-faded rosary he's found on the side of the road. He offers it, and I, who have recently misplaced my Buddhist mala (but not my Hindu mantra, the chanting of which keeps me going on the uphill) know it's meant for me. Every tenth bead is a plastic picture of our Lady of Guadalupe, the Christianized Aztec earth goddess, Tonantzin and Mother Goddess of this land. I remove the broken wooden cross attached and wrap the beads around my wrist, grateful for this symbol of protection.

     It won't rain tonight. I lay out my sleeping bag in the new grass at the edge of the parking lot so as to see the stars. Or even a UFO! I have cheerfully explained to curious east and west coast marchers why the cattle warning road signs we see have flying saucers added. They do not seem to share my delight with paranormal trivia and grim humor when I describe the spate of mysterious cattle mutilations and strange lights that occurred in the 70's and sometimes even now. What lover of myth could not love New Mexico?

     After exchanging a foot massage with a fellow marcher also old enough to remember the Peace March for Nuclear Disarmament in 1986, I explore the shrine. While others cut carrots for dinner, attend a council meeting or play in the stream, I find myself alone in the dim chapel. Its shabby filigree and folk art style portraits of bloody martyrs and saints weave a spell of sadness around me. A small room to the left of the altar holds the crutches of those healed at this place – the “Lourdes of New Mexico”. Ironically, this overnight spot is where I will lose the new trekking pole on which I leaned so heavily today as I tried to keep up. Philosophically, I later think that perhaps the displaced patella of my right knee might be miraculously healed now that the expensive pole has been sacrificed. Maybe my walking stick will end up hanging here among the crutches! Magical thinking (and alien encounters) will eventually get to you if you live in the “Land of Enchantment” long enough.

     In the shrine room, a foot and a half diameter hole in the rock floor invites pilgrims to trowel a bit of the ”holy dirt” to carry with them for luck and health. I like the fact that it is called holy DIRT, not “soil” or “clay”, “caliche” or “sand”, just good old honest “dirt”. I take a pinch for my pocket.

     I asked a marcher one day, how she felt about walking through the back country Pueblo lands without seeing the public, when a goal of the March is to raise awareness. She answered that it was important to experience what we were actually marching for; to experience the bones of the land without its overlay of cities, farms, roads; to get a small taste of what it must be like to have some harmony with natural forces; to feel a little of what we have lost.

     Pilgrimage may be thought of as the experience of finding a holy place. But it is not a journey to Eden. Transcendence does not come without the understanding of suffering. On this march there is cold, exhaustion, pain, arguments, tears, frustration, anger and grief along with the laughter, love, wonder and beauty. Three days hence, children we marchers have met, will have fallen to their deaths in a plane over a New Mexico forest fire. On that same day, a peacock at our ashram campsite will have spread iridescent feathers in challenge to a rainbow. And the ubiquitous LYFs (little yellow flowers) of the desert roadside will remind us that life goes on somehow. It will go on without or despite us. Pilgrimage is an embracing of the holiness of it All: the holiness, you could say, of Dirt.

Winter Ross is a street medic, artist and appreciator of paradigm diversity. She joined the Great Climate March in May of 2014 between Santa Fe and the Taos Mesa where she tends an Earthship home. 

welcome

We all have several identities. Most of us are able to blend or separate them at will most of the time. This blog is my Writer identity. It engages - hopefully in a beautiful, interesting and officially "fictional" manner - with the Others. I think you will find yourself here also. Your comments, both constructively critical and wildly encouraging are appreciated.