Time Travels the River

I believe one of my legs lives fully in the Mohawk Valley, with all its intended desire and capability to lead my body forward in a sprint. Part of me still moves in this past. My leg's slightly twisted weakness is apparent to my body, but it refuses to listen fully. Does Spirit hold it there by force? It is as if it has been numbed in the cold water of the ancestral Great River. But I want to learn if this theory could be Truth: What holds me?

Is this rigid way in which I move and think in the Modern world any different than my refusing spiritual grounding in a past I'm regreting? No warrior now. I am slow; instead, planning and thinking like a council mother. I admit I am impatient living in this new way. Slow to rise up and defend, and thus, blasphemous to all Spirits.

In this new time, I am not among the people and no one teaches the old ways of honoring Nature's gifts. It is no wonder I am a walking bird here. Flight is given by the Wind Spirit, and I am like old and silent bedrock, drowned beneath the river's current. My mouth fills with water even if I try to shout the name of the Wind.

I once learned French readily among the traders. As many more of the men-from-outside-the-Nations came, I saw how little favor speaking the outsider language gave. I laugh at the irony of it now. I placed myself in a dark room to learn the words of overseas men, and places I would never walk. I was to send myself to the classroom yet again, in another time, only to experience the same betrayal. The lands which I travel now, or the time traveled on the river are life-bound. Some days, the knowledge that my spirit has traversed such great distances is uplifting. Other times, in this world, I can think only on what has been lost. I relive my death; worse than the overturned tortoise's end. Why now, drawn to it again? Finally, I am removed from the blood-steeped ground of the battlefields made on my native land, and having blood pulp for eyes, the last living memories in that life are filled with the stench of death and the feasting births of maggots on my own flesh.

Why can't my empathy act to free me from this parallel path? The threads of Mother Spider's web criss-cross my past and present connections to knowledge. But it is that felt connection that makes me the communicator I am today, and once was. I feel for the message in my many moments. So often, I continue to allow other people to inhabit my open plain, or my hidden forest hunting grounds, and I realize in this moment, I miss my own story.