Singing the Bones

A bone's-eye-view of La Huesera/La Loba.

My take on Verdell Primeaux, Johnny Mike and Robert Attson’s “Healing Song 4,” a peyote track in Lakota Sioux about the desire to live. I sang this in ceremony the other night when I was about on the verge of death. (Dramatic, but, I was struggling.) It was the only way I could come back, to feel/fill my spirit. I sang as if I was singing to the very center of the fire, to the center of creation. And then I changed positions and sang from the center of sky, over all of life, over every morning bird soon to rise, every sweet child. The Clarissa Pinkola Estes story about “La Loba” having reentered my field the day before, in that new dawn, I sang my own bones back awake. I would suggest sitting down somewhere peaceful and letting this wash over you. (PS the sound is kinda fuzzy. Just pretend that’s deep space.)

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“And still La Loba sings so deeply that the floor of the desert shakes, and as she sings, the wolf opens its eyes, leaps up, and runs away down the canyon.” -Estes

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“‘Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.’” -Ezekiel 37:9

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I died in the bone valley. That long ripple of light-gray towers like side-by-side femurs and fibulas touching sky. Plaza Blanca — the White Place — with its tall spines of sandy-solid beings gathered in constant council, assessing the changing nature of everything. They observe as the cottonwood curanderas go from green to gold. They sit in stoic praise when it rains. Wopila tanka, they thank in the old tongue, loose pebbles falling to the desert floor as they speak.

Not even sure who I was when I died. The body of something. Mammal. Could I have been rabbit? Bobcat? Cougar? Woman. All I know is that I fell from sandstone cliff. A disorientation from drought. Falling, the trees appeared as swords instead of staffs. On the ground, the trembling in my heart slowed and slowed and slowed until the last shush of my breath gave itself to the wind.

No one found me for a few days. Not vulture, nor tourist roaming the far-off hills. Then: flies and their squirmy children and coyotes and, once, a golden eagle. Mostly time and the persistent bore of the New Mexico Sun beckoned until bone. Turned me again and again in their hands until I was the same as the 18-million-year-old, volcanic-debris skeletons rising above me. From winter through summer, the Sun continued his long song, brittling me splintered and pinkish. So very dry.

Soon enough, I scattered all across Mother Earth’s boneyard. A coyote shuffled a couple of my ribs down canyon to clean his teeth. One of those strong, gusty days tumbled my left leg next to a salt cedar. Some dude’s dogs made play of my vertebrae. My skull — a miraculous find — was almost carried off to a human’s altar until she thought better of it and propped me on a high rock for a good view. A little bit of me everywhere, fragmented in landscape.

Me as rib @ Plaza Blanca near Abiquiu, NM

Down to only sacrum in place, I shivered the night, all those winking jewels overhead. Planets aligned and the Big Dipper swirled around her North Star axis. Sometime around midnight, I heard a crunch closening. Heavier than a mouse but lighter than an elk. Whoever it was had the same lunar eyes as that big-hearted creature. The eyes focused intently on the frilling curves of my holy triangle.