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Drums & Rattles

Sylvan Thorncraft ~ 25 October, 2005

          There’s something about edges that’s so interesting, so alive, full of magic and potential.  As the place where meadow fades into woods contains the full range of life comfortable in each ecosystem, these edges are seldom places of this or that, they are both and more.

          Two winters ago I found myself dancing an edge between dreams of sleep and waking.  At the time I lived in the woods of rural Maine.  In hopes of making peace with the long, deep winters, I made a ritual of walking every day, to meet the crystalline cold, the howling wind, the thick snow that enveloped the ridge that held my home.  My wanderings that winter called me off the road and into the open Beech woods that blanket the hillsides.  With snowshoes strapped to thickly shod feet I worked my way along a familiar trail, happily meeting the tracks of other wanderers, the dots and dashes of lone snowshoe hare, the deer’s heart shaped toes picking the way through crunchy snow, the hieroglyphics left by a flock of wild turkey, and then there were the coyotes.  They were the ones that captured my heart.  I loved to follow the meandering trails that recorded their silent nocturnal search through the woods.

          Early one morning I bundled up and ventured out to greet the snapping, gold colored dawn.  Heading west my feet found a familiar path allowing my sleepy mind to wander where it would.  It was only at the field’s margin that I noticed something different.  I had come down to the field to watch the full moon rise the night before, all was as I’d left it, the hollow in the snow where my candle had sat, the ring of my own foot prints under the Ash tree where I sang to the trees and moon and sky.  This morning there was also something new, the snow revealed that several coyote had come to see what was up, circling though my own tracks, pausing to examine this or that before looping back into the woods.

          This was the beginning of our overlapping worlds.  I started dreaming of coyotes visiting the house, I’d catch glimpses of faces, legs, or tawny fur flickering through the thicket of raspberry and meadowsweet, pine and alder that grew robustly up to the mowed edge of the lawn.  In dream after dream they were coming for me, watching, waiting, haunting the wild places that nestled up against the bubble of my domestic realm.  From dream I would wake in the night to see Sirius, the Dog Star, blazing through the skylight above my nest of blankets, or catch the electric sound of their howling off in the North West, or the south, ranging over the hills and blueberry barrens.  On my frosty walks I could see that they were following my tracks at night as much as I was following theirs by day.  The overlapping layers of snowshoe and paw print, the sequence of night turning to day turning to night, it became more and more difficult to distinguish the difference between waking dream and sleeping dream.

          I felt compelled to create something to honor the relationship that was growing between us.  So as a January blizzard howled outside I worked feverishly on a necklace made from a set of coyote claws I had saved from a hunter’s kill several seasons before, wrapping red leather and sewing beads to one claw after the next.  By dusk, wind still stirring up spiraling funnels of snow, I ran out into the storm wearing the claws close around my neck.  I was overwhelmed by the joy and wildness of the snow and wind, coyote filled me and I ran and pounced in the deep powder, sniffed at the air and sharpened my eyes into the growing shadows.  I was overcome by wonder realizing something that’s so easy to take for granted, these claws, sharp against my throat, had walked on the earth under sun and moon and rain, had first formed in the warm body of a mother, had scratched itches, run across field and through woods in search of food, and even now they were alive as I was alive.

          Late in the winter I dreamt one of the last coyote dreams.  As I walked alone on an enormous frozen lake in an unknown land, I rounded a huge boulder that rose from the lake and found myself facing a coyote.  We both stood still, each watching the other, until he suddenly sprang and ran towards me.  As coyote approached I saw that he was wearing a collar and bleeding from his side, having received a wound from the people he was living with.  I picked him up and stroked his fur lovingly, tucking him into a ball.  He grew smaller and smaller until he fit into the palm of my hand and I was able to tuck him into my heart so he could heal.

          This winter cycle with coyote was part of an initiation process that broke my life wide open.  The seed for this had started growing in earnest in late autumn when I found myself in the studio of a woman whose work is sacred tattoo.  As she labored over a spiraling web of ink between my shoulder blades, the searing drone led me deep into trance, undeniable echoes and truths about who I am and what my life needs to be grew louder and louder, impossible to ignore.  The ring of moons on my back are the fey marks that remind me of my essential self, the coyotes came to guide me though this next phase, to remind me what I had started as I shed the skin that had defined who I was.

          This past September, almost two years from the coyote dream winter, I sat on the back of my car in a dear friend’s dooryard.  Dusk was settling in, the car was full to the brim, and I was exhausted but full of anticipation.  The next morning would find me headed south, leaving the world I had known, the world that had been a womb for what I was birthing now, a new dream.  As the first stars began to appear through the lavender veil of twilight I heard a familiar, yet unexpected sound.  The coyotes were singing, from the swampy land along winding creek their voices rose into the night’s embrace.  They howled and yapped, the voices of this year’s pups joining the rest of the pack.  My heart sang with them, a celebration of life, a job well done, and a loving goodbye.  I’m full of gratitude for the lessons coyote brought, softening the edges between waking and sleeping dream time, how to hear the innate, healing wisdom that dwells in our hearts, how to hold open the place of possibility to make room for what needs to unfold, and the beauty of tracks in the snow.

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