Evan's Earth Walk

An Author's Journal--Evan Pritchard's open letter to his friends and fans concerning his writings, poetry, music, ideas, conversations, and adventures on the edge of the Native American experience.

Name:
Location: Hudson Valley, New York, United States

I am interested in everyone and everything, and how it all fits together...which used to be normal, now they call me a Renaissance Man. I am the author of Native New Yorkers, and No Word For Time, (both coming into revised paperback in September nationwide) also Native American Stories of the Sacred, Wholehearted Thinking, and many others. To learn more about my non-baseball research log onto www.algonquinculture.org. One of my other blogs is http:/resonancemagazine.blogspot.com; another is http:/peopleofmanitou.blogspot.com

Monday, February 13, 2006

Feb 13th, looking back to Feb 11

February 13th, Updated this blog offline. I need to really clean up my writers studio, so I can find things. I once made a tape diary of my experiences at William Commanda’s 2005 Spiritual Elders Gathering, a memorable exprience, which now is a sort of hole in my blog (I can probably find it online at help!theresaholeinmyblog.com) until I find it. Since last Friday, I keep hearing that string quartet (usually played by a huge string orchestra) in my head, and it is very calming and peaceful. I started hearing that in my dreams when I was 16, which was before I first heard Albinoni's great Adagio in A. (That's alot of A's) When I first heard that I went into a trance for an hour or two and felt transported in a kind of ecstatic religious state. Every few years the strings would come back, and lift my soul again.
This afternoon after working a while on this blog, the music got yet more intense, so I grabbed a book of blank music paper and started to write it down in pen. As I wrote I could hear all four voices clearly, and in about three hours had completed the 40 measure quartet section, in ink, without access to a piano. I had just started to learn Finale, but its not easy, and I was not proficient yet to attempt to use it as a composing tool. It was a lifetime dream fulfilled, as when I was studying composition at Catholic U and later Juilliard, I was always striving for this type of fluidity and clarity, to write four independent contrapuntal voices without using a piano, and have them come out perfect, and also beautful. When I was younger, I'd find that when I played the piece on the piano I had to change a few rhythms and notes to make it work better. I then wrote out a 160 measure version (writing out the four voices in various combinations) as a pipe organ Meditation in A minor, (but with lots of modulations) which came to 8 pages of piano staves. (I will edit it down in a few days) Then I got to a piano and played it. I found that it didn't realy need any changes after all. I played it for a fellow musician,over the phone who said it was amazing. I thought, "This is how Handel must have felt," but of course his Messiah was longer by far, but it sounded more like Bach, or more exactly like Albinoni. I felt I was in that dream the whole time, and felt like it was a gift from God, and I was very grateful and happy. That song still sings inside me. I went outside to walk and the moon was even more amazing than the night before. It was sitting on the end of my road, due east again, a bright red hazy ball sitting on the horizon. I watched it as it rose up into the sky again, going through many beautiful colors. What a truly mystical experience, looking at that vibrant color with all those strings playing in my head. I mentioned it to a friend who said that a famed french horn quartet was going to be playing, and there was a connection with a mutual friend, Ted. I thought, now that would be a miracle. To write a quartet and then hear it played three weeks later with french horn ensemble. It would sound great!

February 12th, Snow hits overnight, not much here, but 26 inches in Central Park and 21 in PA. I had plans of meeting a friend at the UU in Rock Tavern, but they were cancelled. I set up a portable recording studio at home and cleaned up the room a little more. My friends are sooo psychic. I don't have to call them, they call me the minute I walk in the door. I may be away for weeks, and no messages, but I walk in the door, and there's one call after another. Today was like that. We talked about the coming earth changes and global warming. Ellis and I talked of green architecture, and described to me off the internet all the ecological features of the new Bank of America building at Bryant Park. There are many! It sucks pollution, catches rainwater, collects solar energy, and probably takes a bow at the end of the day.
Meanwhile I worked on polishing the section of Evansearthwalk written in summer of 2005. Its important stuff too. If you look to the lower left of the screen you should see an entry for January and before. Eventually that will go from June 05 to the present, probably completed by the time my kid is living on Mars. I went outside and saw the full moon and it was astounding, rising on the eastern horizon. I called Ellis and said “put your coat on and go outside and look for the full moon on the eastern horizon. I’ll be back in an hour.” I went out and took an hour walk towards the moon, ending up at my favorite tree, and wrote this poem in my head.

Moon, full on the eastern shore of my horizon
Clouds like mother of pearl floating in a sea of mist
Rising powerful and lovely, the moon filled me with the desire to live
I threw sunflower seeds in the snow
Threw them downward, eastward, forward
Hoping for a sign, there in my special place.
The moon kept rising, straight up like a phoenix,
Raising the spirit of endurance within me,
As if expecting an eclipse to mark the day with fire.
The wind felt cold and good on my face,
Waking me to the moment,
Telling me to face the facts of this dying world without fear
A wind solo
Stating the haunting theme
of winter’s final movement in A minor.

I called Oannes Pritzger, my Penobscot friend down in Florida, host of Wolf Mountain Radio to thank him for sending me cassette copies of the interview we did earlier in January. It is four cassettes long, and will be divided into several broadcasts of 58 minutes.

Oannes was in the Peace Corps in Asia in 1979, and returned to Indian Island, in the Penobscot River in Maine, and someone at the campus radio station at the University of Maine in Orono, asked to interview him. After the interview he asked what was involved in having a radio show on the campus station. The answer was nothing, if you’re a student, you just sign up and do it. He fell in love with radio and never looked back. He has now been recording and broadcasting interviews for 25 years, all in service to native people and mother earth. He started out very simply, announcing births and deaths on the reservation, local news, weather…(snowsnake scores and standings? LOL) He thought of it as Wabanaki Radio. He traveled around a lot and began to wonder how he could find a way to broadcast his environmental message to the whole world. He prayed about it one day in 1992. A few days or weeks later, on March 26th of that year, he found himself at a symposium in Eugene, Oregon called Peace on the Planet: Native Wisdom, Native Rights and Mother Earth. It was there that he met up with the folks at RFPI, Radio For Peace International, and began to broadcast Wolf Mountain Radio on worldwide shortwave. It was around 1997 he was invited to broadcast from the Belonging to Mother Earth symposium in Virginia Beach, VA.
I was there, and saw Richard Schneider, the organizer of the event, walking in the lobby proudly carrying a beautiful medicine pouch. I said, “Wow, Richard, that is the most beautiful Penobscot medicine pouch I ever saw. Where did you get it?”
He said, “How do you know its Penobscot?”
I said, “The style is absolutely unmistakable. That is a very fine traditional style PENOBSCOT pouch! I’d put money on it.”
He answered, “I will introduce you to the maker. He is indeed Penobscot, and he will be extremely happy to hear that you recognized his tribe from his work! His name is Oannes Pritzger and he is broadcasting live on RFPI (Richard was/is deeply involved in the station) from the lobby as we speak. Perhaps we can arrange an interview for you.
That’s how I met Oannes, and did that interview the next day, and several more besides. I ended up being a host and interviewer for RFPI myself, and presented a 24 week series on “The Indigenous Roots of World Religion,” as part of RFPI’s University of the Air. Oannes played an advisory role in that. I was traveling that summer and was able to hear my broadcast from various locations in the US on the shortwave.
As we spoke today he had not heard about Lovelock’s book, but his environmental group at the college he works with is sponsoring a global warming lecture later this week by David Orr, a professor at Oberlin on environmental studies and green technology. I asked him to ask Orr about the methane releases, if he thought they were happening or just a theory, to what degree, etc. and if they would contribute to the warming.
One can now hear Wolf Mountain Radio for free on the internet. One way is to go to www.yatkitischee.org and follow instructions. You can also go to www.radio4all.net , there are about 60 programs, search Honoring Mother Earth Indigenous Voices, click Evan Pritchard and click play and you can hear the show we did if you have Realplayer, which most new computers do. You can also hear Oannes on RFPI, also on line.
Tonight I made my first recording on the ministudio, (Cheyenne) it was complicated. I could not figure out yet how to add tracks. I read most of the instruction book, mindboggling complexity. It had taken me two days to figure out how to turn it on, and another day to figure out how to turn it off!

Saturday, February 11th, 2006; I cleaned my room, a constant battle between priceless information and useless garbage. I pick up one piece of paper after another; “Priceless or useless?” “Priceless or useless?” It’s a hard life being a writer. Some days they’re all priceless and I get nothing done, other days they’re all useless, and I throw out what I later regret not having. Shawna called at 11 to remind me of my workshop later that day. I said of course. The bad news was, with all the threats of snow, there was little preregistration, and I had not heard from the one person on my comp list.
I rushed out to be at Mirabai Books by one, and set up as quickly as I could. Then Shawna came in at one and said, “You’re here rather early. The workshop is at two PM you know!”
Well, that was okay, I needed some time to think. Patty came in first and was telling me how her husband’s Hotchkins disease comes and goes and how she takes care of him all the time and wondered if there was a Native American story about that. I could not think of one. Then AE came in, and her father had just died, the funeral was going to be Monday and she felt that stories were the only thing that could help her. She came in feeling that maybe there was no God, no spirit world, and that all our longings for visions of the spirit world are in vain, and that there was no way to communicate with her father. She herself had seen visions in the past, but now doubted them in the intensity of her loss. I said there was always a closeness with the spirit world at times of someone’s passing, and that winter was the night of the year when the spirits were especially close. She rejected that and said, “Do you know absolutely that this is true?” I smiled and said, “No, I am not absolutely sure about anything. Visions are good as long as they are helpful, and for the most part they are about consciousness. I am speaking of traditions of my people, and it’s a fact that the ancient ones believed this way. I’m not asking you to believe.”
Later on I told several stories about how Native elders communicated through phenomenal means with their loved ones at the moment of their death. I told of Aunt Helen and the Owl and the Blind Woman, and also of Albert Lightning’s messenger, who found me in the woods of Montreal on a trip from Alberta to Nova Scotia, to tell me he had just buried Albert Lightning, (my guru’s guru as they would say in India) and only because my son took his nephew’s blue ball.
Then MG showed up, not the first time in my classes, and her departed husband was on her mind. She said she, a lifetime peace activist, was born the day Hitler came to power. What a balance. She has been dedicated to peace ever since. I had a very sore throat and could hardly talk, but kept trying, and read The Stone Canoe from Native American Stories of the Sacred, which is about death and mourning, and then asked them to tell the saga of their own lives, or at least a thread of it. Patty told a story of a woman, standing at the edge of a great cliff, and weeping. Just then a great eagle comes and flies over the abyss before her. She closes her eyes and turns into a bird and flies above the abyss. AE told a more earthly story about an outcast American girl who finds a pot of money and goes to Europe and meets wonderful people, having wonderful conversations everywhere she travels.
Then just as we were wrapping up, Sarah from Ithaca shows up. I told her our theme today was death, and asked her to share the story of how she came across No Word For Time. She said her best friend had died suddenly, and she went over to the house, and found a copy of No Word For Time and the family said she could keep it. We had a closing circle that was very wonderful, and I realized that my blogs were an attempt to make mythology out of my daily life, and I gave the url to Patty.
Then I did a short session with Sarah, the one who’d written the songs based on No Word For Time. Then Sarah sang a jazz song she’d written, a capella, and it was amazing; I could hear the chords behind it. She had a voice like Billy Holiday singing a high, soft lullaby. I had just received a letter from her that she wasn’t coming. But then this morning she had a dream of the Iroquois Peacemaker Deganawida, and she went to this place where there was a T in the road, and a bridge (log bridge) and an empty cabin. I said, “That was my house!!” She said there were these male elders in the dream and they told her to come to my workshop. (Talk about celebrity endorsement, that's probably the best PR I'll ever have!) Ithaca is four hours away, and apparently her car had just been fixed after a long time in the shop, and she knew she’d have to drive back in the snow. She sang me another song, a more bluesy song, and it too was amazing. I gave her an Unquachaug prayer book mark for her No Word For Time and signed it and the name Sarah Windsong came into my mind, so that’s how I addressed the autograph. She left. I sat in the store and rested, talking with Shawna about the new book by Lovelock, Revenge Of Gaia, and then AE walks in again, and wants to talk. So we went back to the meeting room and talked and she wanted to talk about how to protect herself from electricity and harmful electrical fields. I said, "You came to the right place." So we talked about a half hour on how to ground your own energy as well as that which comes in. She started getting very agitated, writing in her notebook, putting it away, then taking it out a minute later, putting it away. She said she was getting too wound up, and had to go away and slow down. I realized she was still in shock from the death of her father, and still had to face the funeral arrangements. Several asked if she was in pain, she said, “no, its all too surreal right now, and that’s fine.” I asked if she was going to be okay, and she said yes.
I went to the Little Bear and dined alone and had some spicy food to heal my throat and it worked. No snow at all! I went home and did more chores. I fell asleep for a long time and was wakened by a call, but I was too groggy to make business decisions. It had been a full day, but beautiful.

February 8th,
Read Mirellas wonderful new book, and wrote a blurb, just making deadline.

Lost Angels: An Alternative Approach to Autism by Mirella Zanetti-Laporte is an eye-opening guide and inspiration for those dealing with autism from the outside looking in. Written with emotionally-gripping authenticity from real-life experience with a truly challenging mother-son relationship, it stresses alternative, energetic healing solutions to dissolving some of the barriers between our world and that of the “lost angel,” including a heaping tablespoon of the most difficult medicine to come by, understanding.

Evan Pritchard, author of No Word For Time, From the Temple Within, the Fourth Book of Light, Light Workout, Secrets of Wholehearted Thinking, and Native American Stories of the Sacred.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home