Third Bone - Sara, My Great Grandmother

Sara My Great Grandmother

My earliest memory of Sara feels like a dream – and when I recalled this memory I, at first, thought I was remembering a dream. In time I came to understand that it was a memory – although since it came from my infant self – the memory is cellular rather than cognitive.

In this first recollection I am lying in a cradle in my family’s living room – Sara is leaning over me – holding my head between her ancient hands – and places her forehead against mine – and in that instant wills into my being all of the memories of the linage of her family.

As a very young child – from my toddler years until I was 6 - Sara was my constant companion – and best friend. My family’s home and Sara’s sat on either side of a gravel driveway. The land our homes sat on had been Sara’s father’s farmland – and my parents had bought a track of this land to build a house on – my first home in this lifetime. Sara’s little house was just north of our property.

I made daily trips to her house – several times a day. My mother recalled that if she lost track of me she would listen to hear the sound of Sara’s front or back screen door slam as I wandered to and through her house.

Sara was a healer – she worked with plants and herbs – and the green growing things of the earth were her teachers and friends. Many people came to her for her “medicine” and her advice. Even the country doctor who served the medical needs of this tiny community sought out her advice and wisdom regarding plants and herbs’ healing properties. She was a strong woman – strong in body – strong in mind – and strong willed. A fixture in the community we lived in – she was highly respected and admired.

As a young child I only saw her as a friend – who entertained me with wonderful stories of her life – and who took me an outings and adventures to collect the herbs and plants she used as her medicine.

An outing to collect plants would go like this. Sara always wore a bib apron with full pockets. She covered her arms and her face when outdoors – trying to keep her naturally dark skin as light as possible (having Native American roots in her time in history was a handicap – and so her lineage was not discussed). When we went “wild crafting”, as she called it, she wore a dress with long sleeves – sturdy shoes and a bonnet that kept the sun from her face. In the pockets of her apron she would place small digging and cutting tools and tobacco for offering. We carried long gunnysacks to collect the plants in – and larger digging implements if deeper digging and cutting were needed. When she found a plant or herb that she wanted she would sit quietly with it – she told me she was asking permission to take a cutting – and if she got that permission she would cut or dig what was needed and then we would leave an offering of tobacco to Mother Earth for her bounty. Sara taught me that there must always be a “give away” for the gifts from Mother Earth – and tobacco or cornmeal were always left.

I remember one morning going with her. Before leaving her house one of her sons – my great uncle – stopped by – and he handed me a shiny new penny. I put the penny in my pocket – fully intending to drop it in my piggy bank at home. After he left Sara and I sat out to wild craft. She found plants she needed – ask and received their permission to take her cuttings – and we began our work. She would dig and cut – and I would put what she cut into the gunnysacks. We had collected quite a bit of the plant she wanted – and she reached into her apron pocket for the tobacco that was always there – but on this day she had not put any into her pockets. She felt around trying to find tobacco or cornmeal – but none was there. She then looked at me – and told me to check my pockets to see if I had anything we could leave. I know she saw my face cloud over as I remembered the shinny penny my great uncle had given me back at the house. I reluctantly stuck my hand into my pocket – grasped the penny – and pulled it out and held my hand out to her. She laughed, “no, child – you offer it to the earth – it’s your offering – and your lesson – we have to give away to receive.” So I offered my penny to the ground where we had dug and cut – laying it on the soft earth – and then picking up a gunnysack to follow Sara back home.

It was her way – and I understood that I had to follow her way, her teachings. She was my first teacher – and her teachings have never left me in this lifetime. She was not an easy teacher – she was demanding – but in her strength there was great warmth and caring – and I as her great-grandchild was recipient of both her demands and her care.

Because her teachings were so deep and so subtle I had to reach adulthood before I could begin to come to terms with the wisdom – and to recall the very first memory of this woman. Had I remembered before this I may have thought myself crazy – it took time, years, and maturity to be able to absorb and then share what she gave to me in the early years of my life.

Sara put down the foundation for what would become my life, and she was my first teacher, and her memory is the first bone collected as I began to assemble the skeleton of my authentic self.
As you reach back into your history and being to uncover the foundation of your original self remember that first teacher – the person who ignited the fire at the core of your being. That person is your first teacher and is the keystone to the completion of the structure of your instinctual being.

One of Sara’s many gifts to me was the lesson “that to receive we must first give”. Life returns to us what we send forth, and so it was with my first teacher, Sara.

Sara realized that in my lifetime the world would reach a crisis of extinction. She saw even back then – late 1940’s and early 1950’s – the traces of pollution and toxic materials. She lived in a tiny village – less than 600 people populated this little community – we had no television then – radios and telephones were in use – but certainly nothing like computers and the Internet. But Sara needed none of this – she watched the land, the animals, and humans, and she saw the signs – saw them long before I took birth in this lifetime.

She saw the great river, the Mississippi; begin to fill with silt from the runoff of the farmer’s fields. She watched while humans began to encroach on the river’s space; draining the flood plains to cultivate, and to graze cattle on. She lived through two great floods in her lifetime – the first years before I was born – the second when I was less than a year old.

She watched the farmers from the “bottom lands” drive their cattle through the streets of her tiny village – also built in the flood plain – to higher ground to save them from the floodwaters. And she watched but refused to be moved out of home, saying “the good Lord put me here, and he will move me if I need to go”. Her village didn’t flood that year, 1947, and she stayed there in her house until her death in 1952. She was not there in 1993 when her town was flooded beneath 25 feet of water. The silting out of the rivers, the taking of floodplain for farmland, the re-channeling, damming and levees of the river, forcing it into an unnatural course – had grown to monstrous proportions – and her predictions came true.

Sara taught all who listened. She asked nothing in return for her gifts – but gave them freely to those who would take them and use them. She told me that although I would be a healer – I would not work with plants and green growing – she did not use the word – but what she was telling me was that my medicine would be energy. And in essence what she believed was that the herbalists (like her) could teach the medical people a great deal – but in the end it would be the energy (she would say “like electricity that runs through the wires) that would transform the world – and that would happen in my lifetime.

And Sara taught me to remember my dreams. She felt that in the dreamtime real wisdom was imparted. She passed away when I was six. For the next six years she visited my dream space – and carried on the teachings that she began in my childhood. She remained my constant dreamtime teacher until I reached adolescence and hormones kicked in. For the next twenty years I lost touch with her teachings but never with her essence and so when she reappeared in my thirties dreamtime we picked up where she had left off.

In my early thirties I attended a seminar at a University. It was a two-week program, and was open to therapists and counselors. It was 1980. I signed up for two classes – one a traditional approach to therapy – the other a class on working with altered states of reality. The second class was taught by an instructor about my age: longhaired and wearing sandals, a hippie that I was very comfortable with. We laid on the floor of a ballroom in the student union of this university – where he led us into states of relaxation and meditation while he began opening us to higher states of awareness. His teachings, these exercises were familiar to me – reminiscent of Sara’s teachings in my childhood – and I was like a moth to the flame – drawn close but realizing that the flame would burn and destroy the image I had of myself. But I stayed and danced closer and closer to this flame.

When the two weeks came to an end I decided I would return home – leaving this new knowledge behind – and pick up with my life as it had been. Little did I realize that the slumbering shaman inside of me had come fully awake – sat up, stretched her limbs, and decided to stand in the middle of my life.

That Thanksgiving we traveled home to visit my parents in my hometown. My grandmother was still alive then and on our arrival she called me into her bedroom. She told me that she had a dream with her mom, my great grandmother, Sara. She said that Sara had visited her in the dream and told her that her work here was about done and she would be coming home soon.

It was usual from my grandmother to report on a dream – or call me aside to talk about it. Later I asked her more about it and she denied having the conversation with me and told me I was mistaken. I let it go and really didn’t think much more about it.

In January my mother called. My grandmother had taken ill and she passed within three days of getting sick. It would be a few more years until I put together her dream of Sara, her telling me of her dream and her death. In June of that year I had taken the seminar on altered states of awareness – and the inner slumbering shaman had been awaken in me. This part of me had been implanted in me in infancy by Sara in the very first memory I have of her. When this happened Sara visited my grandmother’s dreamtime to tell her that her “work was done” – and she would soon be coming home. My grandmother had always looked out for me – in that she kept my parents from too much interference in my life with allotropic medicine and organized religion. She had protected me in a way that allowed me to grow up uninhibited by the interference of these two institutions.
After my grandmother’s passing I began in earnest to seek out my spiritual path. Dreams of Sara reappeared in my dreamtime – and eventually led to my next teacher and a deepening of the lessons that I was to learn.