Chiron Communiqué

Author's Occasional Newsletter

from Steven McFadden

Vol. 8 No. 2

© - Copyright -March, 2003

Journey of the Waters

West of the Sangre de Christo Mountains in New Mexico, between a river and a rocky ridge, the Earth-heated waters of Changing Woman rise to the surface and gather in healing pools. Further to the West, just beyond the pools lies a place where geology has marked the Four Directions: four high desert plains intersect at a power point. This is a region of origins, a place of birth and beginnings. From this place each year the Journey of Waters begins.

As seekers have done for thousands of years, pilgrims who have committed themselves to the Journey of the Waters purify themselves. Then they enter into the steaming, healing, mineral waters. The chanting begins, and the waters awaken.

In due time, when all is completed at this origin point, the pilgrims move on to the North. For eight days they travel from healing spring, to river, to lake, to a vapor-filled cave. At these sacred sites the pilgrims encounter the powers that percolate from deep within the Earth Mother, remembering all their relations, and learning of the feminine aspect of Divinity which is known — to some — as Changing Woman.

Long experience has shown that once a pilgrim encounters the aspects of Changing Woman in this manner, nothing is ever the same. Fixed realities dissolve. Truth arises.

Oh Shinnah Fastwolf is an elder and a warrior woman who long ago accepted the charge to speak and sing on behalf of the Earth. With Bright Owl and Deep Arrow Woman, the Accomplices she was told in a Spirit Dream to train in the journey ceremonies, she guides the Journey of the Waters each year, and leads the ceremonies.

When she was young, Oh Shinnah endured all the physical, mental, and spiritual training undertaken by the men of the Chiricahua Band of her Shishindi Nation (Apache). She bears also Mohawk and Scottish heritage, and she has studied with some of the best-known Native elders of North and South America, and taught with many of them.

Now in the Grandmother phase of her life, Oh Shinnah is a poet, song writer, singer, activist, ceremonial leader. She holds two degrees in music, two in psychology, and a Ph.D. She is a winner of the Chicago Critics Poetry Award, and a winner of the Helen Caldicott Humanitarian Award for Women (2000). Her name appears with Dr. Martin Luther King’s on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Wall of Tolerance in Alabama.

Long ago as a girl, before her coming-of-age ceremonies, Oh Shinnah made the Journey of the Waters with her father. They accompanied several Shishindi families who sojourned by horseback. It was understood then that everyone called to walk a path of Medicine in the world, would make the Journey of the Waters.

In recent times the Journey of the Waters has been Oh Shinnah’s particular focus. For 15 years she sought permission from her elders to take people not of her tribe on this pilgrimage — people of all the races of the world. Twenty years ago she received permission. Thus, she has been guiding one group each year on this challenging and life-changing experience.

Once each year with the help of her Accomplices, she leads bands of pilgrims along the ancient route to enter the waters, to shed the limits, to make the changes.

Changing Woman is an ancient, revered spiritual figure in the traditions of the American Southwest. She is a benevolent figure. Changing Woman offers teachings that allow the people to live in right relationship with all things. She offers abundance. Pilgrims engage the power of Changing Woman that they might learn the values of love, hospitality, generosity, honesty. She shatters all that is not truth from the pilgrim’s past, and paves the way of compassion in their future.

As Oh Shinnah see it, "In our difficult era or purification and transition, Changing Woman in all her aspects is an especially important figure. Her capacities are essential. She takes people beyond fixed realities to the truth of what is going, and then into taking action to live out that truth in their daily lives.

"The feminine energy is what’s going to change the world, not the masculine energy," Oh Shinnah says. "Actually, it’s the feminine combined with masculine energy – the coming together of the two of them that will make a difference."

The annual Journey of the Waters schools the pilgrims in the graces of the Goddess: patience, humor, forgiveness, humility, willingness, courage, responsibility, and unconditional, compassionate love.

Changing Woman helps to ease people through changes. She helps them to see who they actually are and what actually is. The Journey of the Waters challenges people to face the inconsistencies in their lives, especially inconsistencies which hold people in fixed patterns below their potential. The ceremonies are private, protected, powerful.

In carpools, the modern journey traces the same pilgrimage route that Oh Shinnah's relatives used to take on horseback, and that their ancestors used to take on foot.

The pilgrims immerse themselves in natural hot springs, and in cold-water rivers and lakes. Each water source comes from deep within the Earth Mother and rises continuously as a gift to the human beings so people can relax, refresh and renew themselves. Each body of water has its own individual mineral content that affects opening and balancing the emotional, physical and mental bodies. In the progression of the Journey, with the ceremonies and teachings that Oh Shinnah shares, the connection is made on an archetypal level with the abiding spirits of the mountains (Gahn) and the waters.

The Journey of the Waters continues, as it has for generations. Oh Shinnah, Bright Owl, and Deep Arrow Woman will set out from Northern New Mexico again this year, starting on May 31, 2003.

For More Information:
Deep Arrow: 631-287-9000, moonfire@optonline.net http://www.moonfiremeetinghouse.com

or Bright Owl: owlchild@hotmail.com
http://home.earthlink.net/~owlchild/index.html

More to come...

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