Owinda’s Way
(An Excerpt: The Big God Network)

“The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” Owinda smiled in that way she had, like the sly sneer Elvis had been famous for. She closed the book, took a long puff on a thick Cuban cigar, and blew a smoke ring towards a cluster of tiger lilies in a vase.

               “It’s beautiful,” said Dolores. “Chief Seattle?” They were inside Owinda’s house.

               “Yes, and there’s another part of his speech that I love very much.” Owinda scrunched up her wrinkled face and closed her crystal-blue eyes. “Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is it to say goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.”

               She opened her eyes, and stared sadly at Dolores.

               “You read that last part from memory,” sighed Dolores. “How do you do it? I can’t even remember my shopping list.”

               Owinda stared at her without blinking for a long while, then said, “It is nothing. An art that is nearly gone now, anyway. The machines remember for us, think for us, act for us, live for us. Civilization is no longer carried in the mind, generation to generation. Now it exists only in data bases and legal systems and bank records, and humans themselves have nothing to carry forth to posterity. They go through the motions, mechanically, like zombies, without life or wisdom. There aren’t many real homo sapiens left on earth. I am one of the last.” She took another long puff on the cigar.

               “It’s a big world out there,” said Dolores. “What about those who live in the upper Amazon or the Outback?”

               “My dear, there are vestiges,” said Owinda. “Yet villages in the remotest stretches of rain forest have embraced Christianity and capitalism. Their shamans have died and they’ve forgotten the old ways. They wear soccer shorts and follow the World Cup and get drunk and have their teeth fixed and get hooked on video games. They trade in old diseases for new diseases, and lose their souls in the process.

               “Most of what used to be the tribal world, which was the last living world as far as I’m concerned, has been deforested, denuded, canned, packaged, eroded, overpopulated, turned into chemical dumps, or culturally polluted by Western ways. There’s not much left. A few pockets of real civilization scattered here and there, including the last remnants of indigenous peoples -- and there certainly aren’t many of them left.”

               She sighed again, and looked much older than the sixty years that Dolores guessed was her age. “This is unfortunate for your future.” She hugged Dolores. “You know I consider you my daughter. And I think of that husband of yours as my child, despite his barbaric gender.”

               “We know, Owinda,” smiled Dolores, kissing her on the cheek.

               “Well, you two are as close as I’ll ever get, all things being what they are.” She smiled. “If I had been able to stay married, and if I could stand men, then you would be the children I’d have wanted. But the straight life wasn’t in my nature, thank the Goddess.”

               She walked over to a mahogany table and pulled open one of the drawers. She took out a candle, set it in a silver holder and lit it. “This is beeswax, which is sacred to the goddess. Bee societies are strict matriarchies after all.”

               “Heaven help the drones,” said Dolores.

               “Males have their uses,” said Owinda, passing her hand above the flame, seemingly transfixed by it. “You know, I am staying on our lovely blue planet as long as there is air and water and fire and stone. I love the here and now. No transcendence of birth and death as sought by Hindus and Buddhists. That after all would be a rejection of women’s power and of the cycle of life itself. Of the Goddess, in other words. No, give me my earthly existence.”

               Dolores wondered what Owinda was leading up to. She and Franz had known Owinda since graduate school, when she was a visiting professor at Duke, teaching a graduate-level course in Matriarchal Cosmogonies. It was before she founded her network of goddess covens on the West Coast. In her lectures, she blamed men for every conceivable crime against humanity. They were even responsible for women’s transgressions, including those of female leaders who of course had been the victims of the patriarchy and brainwashed into acting like men. Only men were inherently violent, greedy and antisocial. It was in their chromosomes.

               Owinda put Franz on the gender-defensive. He argued with her for hours during their first meeting in her office, though he agreed with many of her points. She interrupted him frequently by getting up to put on her owl headdress, wave a broom, and chant witchy spells. He worried he was getting hexed. But when he asked her what she had been saying, she smiled and translated her Celtic (her preferred ritual language). They were prayers to the Goddess for his health and for good communication. “Just because you’ve got a penis and excessive testosterone doesn’t mean you can’t learn to control your evil, selfish nature and become a responsible servant of womankind,” she had said, in her peculiar way that meant she liked someone.

               Franz and Dolores appreciated her sly humor and unusual perspective. The three of them became close friends, with common interests in comparative religion, ethnobotany, and all-night poker games. Once Dolores married Franz, Owinda told her, “He’s a good consort. But control him, don’t let him control you. If you’re one of those women that has to have a male, then remember that the man-goat serves the priestess. Do keep that in mind.” Dolores had laughed, but she didn’t need Owinda’s assistance in getting her way with Franz.

               “Dolores, please, sit,” said Owinda. She had changed into a royal blue sari, with a hemp-fiber necklace of shells.

               She motioned for Dolores to take a seat in an antique oak chair and offered her tea from a silver tray.

               “I don’t know what Offworld’s story is,” said Owinda. “But your troubles couldn’t come at an odder time. I sense connection here.” She flicked away bad energy from her fingertips, like she was getting rid of cobwebs.

               “With what?” asked Dolores.

               “The coven sisters are describing odd occurrences in the Net when they manifest. Not the usual peepers, but inexplicable distortions, strange emotions, feelings of an invisible presence.”

               “It is immersion, Owinda,” said Dolores. “A powerful illusion.”

               “This is something else.”

               “What do the E-Police say?”

               “That it’s power surges. But it’s not.”

               “How do you know?”

               Owinda faced the far wall of the living room. A hand-woven tapestry of a moon, a star, and an ibis hung there, above a pine table full of tribal medicine bundles and figurines of female deities from different cultures.

               “Dolores.” Owinda spoke while facing the wall, “It is my profession, my life, to know these things.”

               She turned around. “You and Franz were on this path once, too, but you turned away from it.

You no longer believe in anything.”
               “I believe in love.”

               “That is nothing!” She relit her cigar and savored its taste for a moment, then filled the immediate area with pungent smoke. “Well, I mean to say that love is everything, of course, on one level, a singularity where physical and mental laws can break down. I know this well.”

               She chuckled and took another puff. “For example, there was my husband Dark Hawk, an Oglala shaman. What power he had. A shame it couldn’t last.”

               “A fascinating man,” said Dolores. “I remember your stories.”

               “Our love eventually faded away, maybe because I was developing my own powers and that unsettled him. Then I became infatuated with a cowgirl from Wyoming and that was the last I had to do with men.” Owinda paused. “As consorts, that is. Anyway, I digress. I am speaking of something deeper, something which encompasses love and gives birth to it, a vastness that we can not explain. And that is exactly what you and Franz must rediscover. There is much on earth that we have not dreamt of and can scarcely imagine.”

               “That’s Shakespeare, more or less.”

               “One of the dead Euro-penis people, as we used to say back in the day,” she cackled. “He was a genius. And aware that forces are at play that defy comprehension.”

               “I agree with that,” said Dolores.

               “But you have turned away from that which attracted you in the first place to the noumenon, as Kant would put it. You have forgotten why you were studying what you were studying. You found the paths, and the paths drew you in. The invisible connections between things. Uncanny coincidences, apparent telepathy, a sense of awe and wonder. You used to be curious about what they might ultimately portend, about what you couldn’t see, about what might be out there.”

               She waved delicately in the air with two fingers of her right hand. “What happened to the glimmer fields?”

               “How do you remember that?” Dolores smiled. The glimmer fields was a phrase she and Franz had come up with. She thought back to when they’d gone for a walk in the Duke Forest after midnight and lain down on a plank bridge over a rushing stream. Lying on their backs, studying the stars and listening to the sounds in the water, they had used the expression as they imagined unified fields of consciousness in the universe. A fabric of life energy. Gaia and something greater. Such a radiant web seemed almost palpable on such nights.

               “Yes, what happened, indeed,” sighed Dolores.

               “You were both cosmosapient, but somewhere along the way you lost your spirit.” Owinda waved her bejeweled fingers. “You both seem to be in it only for the Euros or the Woz now. You are wasting your considerable energies. Your axé and that of the Goddess.”

               “We have an interesting show. People like it,” said Dolores.

               “You do good work. But you’re off the path.” Owinda threw up her hands, closed her eyes, and intoned, “We part of the Goddess, and to her we nightly return.” She ran her fingers over her necklace of shells. “I’ve watched you both embark on this career with Takeshi, and now it’s time for you to go back, retrace your steps, think about why you are where you are today.”

               “We know what we’re doing. We chose it.”

               “I wonder.” Owinda frowned. “Somehow, this is a touchy subject,” she added, her accent growing curiously thick. “We’ve never gotten to the bottom of this.”

               “There’s no bottom to get to,” insisted Dolores.

               “Maybe not. But you have to change, regardless.” Owinda lifted her arms, and her head twitched. “I am saying that you two had better get with it, and soon. Because you’re in over your heads. I can feel it. And if you’d been in harmony none of this would have happened.”

               “None of what would have happened?”

               “I feel that major forces are in play.”

               “Now you’ve got me worried,” said Dolores. “Why do you say that?”

               “It doesn’t take any of my usual powers to inform you of that. Merely an accumulation of facts, which is nothing.” Owinda laughed and stubbed out her cigar. “You told me in the garden you had a strange encounter in the Church of the Good Citizen. Franz gets an unexpected invitation to Galactus. Then people are shooting at each other and he has to go incommunicado. It’s not business as usual, is it?”
 

excerpt from The Big God Network
© J.C. McGowan 2007