Surreal real

I had the oddest evening-the group I used to study shamanism with is having a session of the medicine wheel class this week. Several of the students were in the Amazon recently with me, and we arranged to go to dinner tonight. The trainings have been all over Park City, but tonight is the first time I realized that they are back in the same lodge that I used to go to for my classes....10-12 years ago!!!

I parked and walked in, and was feeling myself there years ago...walking around commenting that there was no coffee shop, no little place up there at the Lodge to buy things-but there is now! "Food for Thought" which was the name of the cookbook I wrote 10 years ago...how odd is that?

I was looking around at all the bright shiny faces, all excited about their newly opening shamanic world, and feeling the glow of communicating with the world around them-and I saw myself...

just for moments that seem stretched in slow motion, I stepped out of time and saw my class in that room...I saw myself folding up my mesa and talking to someone beside me...I watched myself pick up a tiny hummingbird feather that was under my mesa, and look intently at it and start to laugh with it laying in the palm of my hand...

I had asked for a sign that day, something that would prove that there was REALLY someone with me, answering my requests, helping me along the way-and I didn't ask for just any sign-I wanted specifically a hummingbird feather to appear. I figured that that was rare and random enough to be a less likely feather to appear.

A few hours later when I folded up my mesa- that had been laid out all day in the same place- there UNDER IT, was the feather, bold as anything. I remember holding it in the palm of my hand and laughing. I tried to remember if I had seen it there before? Maybe I had seen it there when I was laying out my mesa, and forgotten?

I glanced around, and lost track of the class that was now, and it swished into the class that was then...watching students milling around, deciding on where to go for dinner ... I smiled. It just goes on, year after year, each year those students beginning, stepping into the footprints of those that went before...the path well worn now...

I walked outside and saw myself again, sitting on a bench. I remember her world was rocking. She wasn't sure why she was there, what she was going to do with it, why she was spending so much money, feeling guilty for leaving her family, then young kids, to run off and play with rocks and feathers! What was she going to do with it, and what was happening to her? She felt like the sand was shifting under her feet, and she both liked and disliked it.

I walked over and I sat on the same bench, and felt myself slip inside her, and her inside me. I took a deep breath and released the past, and released myself as a student. I realized that my entire mesa, thanks to the Amazon, is finally and completely mine.

I never did catch up with the people I was going to meet for dinner...crossed wires, or maybe just not meant to be. All is well. It was an amazing feeling! Like alumni rewalking the halls of their old school, seeing the new students, and remembering their own days there. You can't go back. You go on!