Sunday, May 2, 2021

“It was the spirit of poetry that reached out and found me as I stood there at the doorway of panic and love.”(Joy Harjo)

Everyone must find their path in this world. In “Crazy Brave”, Joy Harjo (1952-Present), the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate, leads us on a spiritual journey of the unfolding of her path.

A member of the Muscoque Nation, Joy likens “writing” to “bravery.” “Writing will demand the truth. It’s important to speak the wound in the truth, otherwise the lies dig themselves in.”⁽¹⁾

Joy Harjo was a born mystic. She describes her birth as “my mother’s voice calling me into life” ⁽¹⁾ Her mother was Cherokee and Irish and had a beautiful singing voice, which led to Joy’s love of music.

“In those early years, I lived in the world of animal powers.” ⁽¹⁾ As a child, she played with bees, snakes, and toads. She would catch the bees in her hands and had no fear of being stung, until she learned to be afraid. Though informed by her first grade classmates that “ghosts were only white”, she observed “green balls of energy in her home, that manifested as diseases, like pneumonia. She saw a bright light at the head of her bed and witnessed a ball of fire go through her house during a storm. She felt the “evil” in her house generated by her abusive step-father, an energy that would eventually drive her from her childhood home, while still in her teens. She compares her adolescent years to “an eternity of grey skies”.

WERE YOU A CHILD MYSTIC?

Joy Harjo, the child mystic, grew up in an environment influenced by anger and victimization. Her father, who left her mother early in the marriage, was “an Indian in a white world. He drank to soften the hard edges of Earth existance.”⁽¹⁾

Joy absorbed the belief systems about alcohol that were pervasive in her culture. “When I was five, my mother began standing me on a chair to wash dishes after dinner, because otherwise I couldn’t reach the sink. The front of my dress was often soaked when I finished… ‘Don’t get your dress wet like that,’ she’d warn me. ‘It means you will marry a drunk.’ “(1) The cruelty of her step-father and influence of her alcoholic father led her to an early marriage with an older Cherokee student at Wynadotte Indian School. He lived with his mother and was an alcoholic, and inflicted abuse upon Joy. “I married my father.”⁽¹⁾ About that time, when she lived with them, she writes, “Strange things would happen around the house in the dark. One night, my mother-in-law’s enemies came to her as a bird. It sat in a tree outside the living room window. I’ll always remember the haunting cry, like the peculiar howl of the dog in my family that always foretold a death. My mother-in-law sent out her son with a gun. She told him to get rid of it, that she knew who it was. We heard the shot fired into the tree. The haunting singing abruptly stopped. Shortly after, my husband, the children , and I moved to Tulsa. My mother-in-law followed with her daughter and moved next door.” ⁽¹⁾

Joy remained trapped in this marriage until “a SHIFT” occurred.

HAVE YOU BEEN A PRISONER OF ANGER AND VICTIMIZATION?

One day, as a young mother, Joy began to feel a sense of panic while in traffic. She could not contain the panic. She began to feel compelled to stand in traffic or consider driving her car over a bridge. A native woman, who was a psychic, warned her that she was in great danger. “I knew I had to break off from the father of my child.”⁽¹⁾. He continued to drink, “He would get sad and then get angry. When I began dreaming of killing him with a broken vodka bottle, I knew I had to call and end to it.”⁽¹⁾

During this time of radical shift, Joy began to write poetry. She wrote her first poem “The Eagle Poem” and a doorway opened.

CAN YOU IDENTIFY A SHIFT IN YOUR LIFE, WHEN YOU CHOSE A DIFFERENT PATH?

RELEASE: Joy found the strength to leave her marriage.

Joy found her path. “There are many such doorways in our lives. Some are small and hidden in the ordinary. Others are gaping and obvious, like the car wreck we walk away from, meeting someone and falling in love, an earthquake followed by a tsunami. When we walk through them to the other side , everything changes.” ⁽¹⁾

“To imagine the spirit of poetry is much like imagining the shape and size of the knowing. It is a kind of resurrection light: it is the tall ancestor spirit who has been with me since the beginning, or a bear or a hummingbird. It is a hundred horses running the land in a soft mist. or it is a woman undressing for her beloved in the firelight. It is none of these things. It is more than everything.” ⁽¹⁾

Years later, Joy found a healing for her panic. It was forgiveness. “One winter dusk, thirty years later, I paddled an outrigger canoe in deep turquoise waters off the shore of Maunalua Bay on the island of O’ahu in the Hawaiian Islands. I noticed how my thought had become like waves, rising and falling without anxiety or urgency to them. And I realized that I had let go of the remnant tentacles of panic that had been planted in me years ago, when I was a young mother, lost in traffic. I let it go. I let it go in beauty, with love, in the spirit of ‘vnvketkv’, aloha or compassion. I let my thoughts of forgiveness for myself and others in the story follow the waves of the ocean in prayer.” ⁽¹⁾

WHO MUST YOU FORGIVE TO COMPLETE YOUR JOURNEY?

“I believe that if you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts, they will turn against you” (Joy Harjo)

¹“Crazy Brave, a memoir”, by Joy Harjo, 2012, W.W. Norton and Company.