Here’s a quote from the book that I love:

The Great Spirit is our father, but the Earth is our mother. She nourishes us; that which we put into the ground she returns to us, and healing plants she gives us likewise. If we are wounded, we go to our mother and seek to lay the wounded part against her, to be healed. - Big Thunder (Wabanaki Algonquin), late 19th century

One of things that tickles me about this book are the multiple perspectives. To its credit, there’s a forward by Louise Erdrich and an introduction by Anne Makepeace who help us readers understand with more depth, subtlety and humor the perceptions, misperceptions, and fictions created by Curtis’ photos. They talk about how Curtis had to gain the women’s trust – at a time just before American Indian women were having their babies taken from them and sent to boarding schools. They give voice to the descendents of the women who were photographed, and allow them to laugh at the way some of the photos (beautiful though they are) are contrived. Christopher Cardozo, who culled 100 of Curtis’ photos, to create this book, writes an essay that helps us to see Curtis’ work as a photographer and his contributions as an American ethnographer.

As for me, it’s really the soul of the book that draws me to it. The woman who stands alone beside her hulking canoe, looking out across the water. The shaman women, healers among their people. The mothers and their babies in swings and hand-made carriers. The textures of the clothing. Women, their eyes shining, their faces holding something back. Anger, the ability to laugh at what’s in front of them, the mundane tasks of gathering wood and grinding flour — the everyday stuff that keeps humanity alive.

See what you think for yourselves…

- MGB

(Incidentally, I feel the same way about prayer. Fixed words usually don’t do it for me. Intuition and opening myself up to the larger Creative force feels more honest, more in-the-moment.)

There have been periods when I’ve written for 13 hours and not noticed that time has passed. It’s a kind of joyous absorption in something larger than myself.

What I know as F L O W,  Robert Olen Butler, in his creative writing book FROM WHERE YOU DREAM, calls a “trancelike state”. And there are things we all do to slip into the trance. Me personally? I light a candle. I say whatever prayer comes to mind, mostly in the form of “Thank You, thank You, thank You for this precious time.” Or “Let me hear what needs to be heard.”

But these last two days, with my son home and sick and the trick of learning how to balance historical research with creative writing, email to respond to, deadlines, and catching a virus — well, it’s been less F L O W than Stop’n'Go. *lol*

You know those kind of days? When life seems to conspire against your showing up on the Page? Yes, time to cultivate a little patience and nudge my sense of humor.

Does F L O W  work the same way for musicians? Painters? Sculptors? Other writers? I wonder.

We can chop time into precise numerical abstractions – seconds, minutes, hours. Or map it onto the phases of the moon. We can mark it by the body’s life cycle – birth, walking upright, a girl’s first menses, the fruitful swelling of her womb. We can mark time by ritual rite of passage — circumcision to signal a covenant with God or a bar mitzvah when a boy reads his Torah portion and becomes a man. Eras, epochs, ages, decades, centenials. However we do it, we human beings gage our own time.

Imagine: gold bangles rest on your wrists. The slow rise of your hand as you point to the sun. The faint tinkle of gold as ten bracelets slide cool, smooth, down to your elbows. Makalululu, the Hour of Sliding Bracelets.

I reserve this thread, this space on my blog for pondering time, savoring the wild romp and process of writing stories that transport us to past ages and the distant shores of memory.

Time. History. Writing. Reading. Ahhhhh. *contented sigh*

Welcome to the passages of skin and gold.