Odyssey of the 8th FIre

“One of the principal things we need to do as we move into this new time is to become aware of personal fears. People give energy to fear and it blocks their growing.

When a person becomes frightened of something, then they have that scary feeling in their solar plexus. Then they know that’s a fear. Becoming aware of it—for instance, how many times it has happened, and can a person remember when it first happened, and to really look at the fear that way—that can help to heal and to release the fear.”

- Yehwenode (Twylah Nitsch), Seneca

Day 131 - Tuesday, October 31, 1995 - We got our walk back on the road and did some serious traveling, making many steps toward the west through the day.

Late on this Halloween afternoon, we pitched camp on a parking lot out behind the YMCA building in Chickasha, Oklahoma. Hard ground will make for a hard night, but at least it's a place to stop and we can use the YMCA's showers to clean up.

We encountered gruesome, wicked, persistent demons that evening. They were grouped in small gangs and they stalked the streets of Chickasha as we sat and gaped, and marveled. We witnessed a vast assortment of maurauding ghosts, politicians, witches, super heroes, pirates, and even Santa Claus himself.

Most of the goblins and gargoyles we encountered were happy children in costume, of course, but—unmistakably—some were psycho-emotional specters of the very real horrors we had encountered on Sunday in Oklahoma City as we sat in ceremony in the crater left by the explosion and demolition of the Murrah federal building.

Now, two days later on Halloween in Chickasha in the parking lot of the YMCA, we were still eerily reverberating, individually and collectively, from the shock wave we felt in that place. As a band of pilgrims, we were highly unsettled.

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Late at night big thunder came over Chickasha. The storm shook the streets and our fabric lodgings. We huddled in our tents, pitched upon the unyielding concrete of the YMCA parking lot, and weighted our tent corners as anchors against roaring wind gusts and driving rain.

We Sunbow pilgrims still have a long journey ahead of us, perhaps another hundred days of walking on the road to the spiritual portal known as Humquaq, the Western Gate along the Pacific Ocean in California. No doubt we will walk in some unexpected places, some dark places, too. We intend to honor all those places with our songs, our drums, our good mind. Come what may, we are going on.

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Read Day 132 -- Odyssey of the 8th Fire