Writing a Spiritual Memoir

As an author and blogger, my days are spent writing stories and blog posts. When I first entertained the idea of writing my spiritual memoir Riding Spirit Horse, I asked myself: "Why should I write my story? Will anyone care about it? Will anyone read it? What does it matter?" Of course, we can talk ourselves out of anything because ultimately very few of us will live extraordinary lives or have remarkable stories from the past. Nevertheless, I believe in the value of writing our stories because the life it could change may not be a reader's but our own.
 

Writing a memoir encourages self-reflection and self-examination, which can stir up long-buried emotions. Looking back over the arc of my life was a cathartic process that purged repressed emotions linked to events in the past. As I read through my journals, I relived past events that I had tried hard to forget. It was difficult but very therapeutic. I also rediscovered many fond forgotten memories, evoking nostalgia and a warm sense of joy. In writing my story, I feel like I have integrated all of my life experiences into the present moment. I remember who I really am and how I got here. I am truly more whole.
 

The process of writing a memoir becomes a meaningful and fulfilling journey to wholeness. The past self is fully integrated with the present self. In large part, this is the power a good memoir evokes in both the writer and the reader. Healing takes root through storytelling when the author makes self-discoveries. When those discoveries are revealed in a well-crafted narrative, the author has the makings of a compelling story. As author Thomas Larson puts it in his insightful book The Memoir and the Memoirist, "a memoir imaginatively renders our evolving selves and critically evaluates how memory, time, history, culture, and myth are expressed within our individual lives."
 

So I would encourage you to write your own story. Writing helps you claim a conscious identity, grounding you in a firm sense of self. Writing your story is very empowering. It helps you find your own unique voice. Through writing, you begin to make meaning of your life. It's a fundamental human need to know our past, how it links to the present and where we fit in. Many of us walk around in a fog of past events that we never fully understood or processed. When you write your story, you create an ordered pattern out of past events, and thereby construct meaning. You form a clearer understanding of who you are and how you got to where you are.
 

Once you have expressed an understanding of what your story means to you, you can then share it with others. Though we write for ourselves, a story implies both a narrator and a listener -- it is created for the purpose of sharing meaning and understanding. Stories help us connect with others and create relationships. For those of us who feel alone, our stories act as bridges to others and build community. Our stories allow us to be known and seen, understood and appreciated.
 

Willa Cather, an American Pulitzer Prize writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, once wrote that: "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before." When writing a memoir, we may each be telling "the same stories," but we do it with our own unique use of language, imagery and style, which to me is what's most important. Every story has its own distinctive personality, tone and feeling.
 

Writing our life stories is an inner pilgrimage of transformation -- both cathartic and enlightening. We cannot help but grow, expand and change through this conscious probing engagement with our inner worlds. We learn more about ourselves and often bring closure to unresolved issues. Transforming our life into words is one of the most creative pursuits we can engage in, fostering a great sense of achievement. So treat yourself to the experience. Forgive yourself for past mistakes, embrace the past sorrow, appreciate the good times, and start writing your legacy!

The Importance of Corn Deities

First grown in Mexico some 5,000 years ago, corn soon became the most important food crop in North and Central America. Throughout the region, Puebloans, Mayans, Aztecs, and other Indigenous peoples worshiped corn deities and developed a variety of myths about the origin, planting, growing, and harvesting of corn, also known as maize. Secular and ceremonial life centered around the growing cycle of corn. Corn became an archetype planted in our collective unconscious.  
 

In the process of writing my spiritual memoir, Riding Spirit Horse, I discovered a recurring theme. One motif that keeps repeating itself in my shamanic journey and trance experiences is that of corn. On my first shamanic journey into the spirit world in 1988, I met a spirit guide who became my lifelong mentor in the ways of the spirit world. Known as Corn Woman or Corn Mother, she is an important deity archetype in Pueblo mythology. She represents fertility, life and the feminine aspects of this world.
 
The importance of corn deities in Pueblo mythology reflects the importance of corn in the Pueblo diet. Each pueblo performs a ritual Corn Dance to honor Corn Woman and pray for rain, growth and fertility. A drummer and a chorus of chanting men support the lines of colorful dancers who move in a continually changing zigzag pattern. The graceful dancers turn and pause, then turn again, creating a sweep of movement that ripples through the line like a breath of wind through stalks of ripening corn. The dancers make gestures to indicate their requests to Corn Woman: lowering the arms depicts the lowering clouds, moving the arms in a zigzag motion denotes lightning, lowering the palms signifies rain, and lifting the hands symbolizes the growing stalks of corn. It is a dance that evokes the timeless Pueblo way of being.
 
On my first pilgrimage to the Maya pyramids and ceremonial centers of Mexico in 1995, I had a vision of the Maize God, giving me insight into the mystery of death and rebirth. The Maya Maize God is a mythical dying-and-reviving god who was killed by the Lords of the Underworld, brought back to life by his sons, the Hero Twins, and emerged from the Underworld as corn. For horticultural societies like the Mayans and Puebloans, maize is the substance of life. Its growing cycle is a metaphor for the death, burial and rebirth of humans. When the corn seed from the harvest is blessed and interred in the earth, it is as though a dead human is buried. The embryonic seed germinates in the dark, moist earth and begins to grow. The corn plant turns its leaves toward the light of the sun, growing taller and taller. At the end of the season, when the corn cobs are fully ripe, it is as if the dead person surfaces to join the living. Just as darkness gives rise to light, so life grows from death.

Kamloops Indian Residential School

A haunting image of red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside, with a rainbow in the background, commemorating children who died at a residential school created to assimilate Indigenous children in Canada won the prestigious World Press Photo award on April 7. The image was one of a series of the Kamloops Indian Residential School shot by Canadian photographer Amber Bracken for The New York Times. 
 

It was not the first recognition for Bracken's work in the Amsterdam-based competition. She won first prize in the contest's Contemporary Issues category in 2017 for images of protesters at the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota.
 

Her latest win came less than a week after Pope Francis made a historic apology to Indigenous peoples for the "deplorable" abuses they suffered in Canada's Catholic-run residential schools and begged for forgiveness.
 

Last May, the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Nation announced the discovery of 215 unmarked graves near Kamloops, British Columbia. Established in 1890, it was Canada's largest Indigenous residential school and the discovery of the graves was the first of numerous, similar grim sites across the country.
 

"So we started to have, I suppose, a personification of some of the children that went to these schools that didn't come home," Bracken said in comments released by contest organizers. "There's also these little crosses by the highway. And I knew right away that I wanted to photograph the line of these crosses with these little children's clothes hanging on them to commemorate and to honor those kids and to make them visible in a way that they hadn't been for a long time."

 

Source: World Press Photo