THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT - First contact, part 3

If any of my readers care to comment on this book from this point on I will post selected comments to be read here. I reserve the right to choose which to publish in order to keep the discusion on track. I also reserve the right to shorten them if necessay but I will not change any words. If you haven't already read the first two parts of this book please do so now.



THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT - First Contact part 2
The harsh dry wind had turned gentle, carrying the fragrance of lush growth. I was standing in waist high grass, some sort of wild grain. All around me the hills were covered in vegetation, waving in the breeze like a verdant sea. Brooks bubbled in the tiny valleys between the hills, marked by bands of trees along their banks. The parched depresions had become ponds and small lakes, flashing and sparkling in the sun.
Scattered about these ponds in groups of three to half a dozen were rounded huts made of willow hoops and thatched with grass. The nearest group was at the foot of the hill on which I stood. Each hut had its own firepit with a neatly swept stone hearth next to it. Some were in use and wisps of smoke rose from these as women dressed only in leather skirts knelt beside them cooking. Men and women squatted here and there talking and laughing, and around and between them in splendid confusion ran laughing children and barking dogs.
Never had I seen skin the tone of theirs; not the coppery brown of the American Indian, nor the lighter brown of the Oriental and certainly not the color of the deeply tanned Caucasian. These people had skin that could only be called golden. I thought, incongruously, that this was what the rich "beautiful people" tried so hard for but never quite achieved. The hair of these golden people ranged from dark brown to almost blond.
As I stood there in wonder and bewilderment, my eyes were drawn to one man in particular. Medium in height, he wore only a loincloth and leather headband to keep his shoulder length hair under control. All in all, he appeared no different from any of the others.
Storyteller (how did I know his name?) kept the oral history of his tribe in his head and at night entertained any who cared to come to his hearth with stories both traditional and made up on the spot. How did I know that?
As I looked, he turned toward me, palm uplifted in greeting. With a shock I realized that even as I looked at him with my eyes I was somehow seeing myself through his.
The I was again standing, grasping the gouged picnic table top and staring at a salt pan full of alkali. - the bare bones of what had moments before been a lake.
Most of the rest of that day I sat there, my thoughts buzzing like gnats - never quite lighting, ,just going around in aimless circles. I remember thinkig ruefully that whatever the store put in that coffee it could bring a fortune in certain circles.
Eventually I pushed the experience to the back of my mind, as we will with things we can't understand, and in time it became a sort of secret treasure to be taken out and examined from time to time and then packed carefully away again.
When the sun sank low I resumed my journey to Oklahoma to visit my sister. Soon after I arrived I found myself looking at land for sale, something I had not considered before (at least consciously)
Well, I thought, it would be a pleasant place to live once a house was up. My son was grown and happily married with a life of his own, and I had a small income from my Navy retirement. I supposed I had as much right to be a middle aged crazy as the next man. So I became the proud owner of 40 acres on Goats Bluff in the beautiful green hills of Eastern Oklahoma.
My conscious plan was to grow as much as possible of my own food on some cleared land and become one of the growing number of self sufficient homesteaders, but it soon becme apparent that more was going on here than I had bargained for.
The first year was given to clearing brush and stumps and building a small, house that I changed e few years later for a log cabin.
Half way down the North slope of my ridge is a sandstone outcropping, and I found myself drawn there often to sit and daydream. I know now the importance the Nanina place on dreaming, but at the time it just seemed a good place to relax. Often I thought of my experience in New Mexico and wondered what it meant. There is a natural seat on the stone and it seems to have the peculiar property of easing aches and pains with what I presumed was the stored heat from the sun. As I sat there one day, easing a back aching from pulling stumps, my thoughts turned to Storyteller and that peculiar double vision. Almost immediately I felt a jolt where my back rested against the stone as though I had touched a bare electric wire but there is no electricity anywhere near my North slope.
In the same instant a voice spoke loudly. I am certain that the voice was in my ears and not in my mind. The words were strange and had no meaning for me at the time
"Nanina ishtahei". I had heard my first words in the language of the Nanina - a language that had not been heard on Earth in three thousand years, though I did not know it then.
Now I had two experiences to worry over and I chewed at them like a dog with a bone.
Weeks went by with no further happenings. On the one hand I was relieved, but on the other I felt as though I were in quicksand and the only way out was to go farther in, hoping to feel solid ground under my feet.
Then one day as I was working in my new field, I heard the voice again, this time less dramatically for I knew that it came from somewhere in the deep recesses of my own mind. It was Storytellers voice, this time in strangely accented English. "The people are like stone". I knew this was a translation of "Nanina ishtahei" and I also knew, don't ask how, that it signified, "The people are one".
This knowing without knowing how I know was strange to me at the time. It became more frequent, though never commonplace, as time went on.
One more word the voice spoke, "REMEMBER", and now it is my task to remember so that you may remember. REMEMBER the Nanina.
TO BE CONTINUED