Daily Micro: Yesterday’s Visionaries in Today’s World ~ Pocahontas

In Yesterday’s Visionaries in Today’s World, Stephen J. Bergstrom gives creative voice to visionary souls in process of awakening.

Through imaginative device, Yesterday’s Visionaries in Today’s World reveals two contrasting visions that shape contemporary existence.

In one, conquerors traverse the world as a series of endless privileges secured through material means and patriarchal oppression.

In the other, conquered and oppressed individuals and groups perceive that consciousness animates nature, humanity and the spirit of a Living Earth.

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Acknowledging Pocahontas (Matoaka)

The Council of Women whispered to me in my mother’s womb. Their words and songs vibrated in me always. “You are a White Feather,” they sang.

I lived amongst the people and they gave me the name that means White Feather – Matoaka – in our language. And my uncle gave me a nickname – Pocahontas.

As a White Feather, the people treated me with great dignity for to be a White Feathered Woman is to be called to sacred duty, to enter into the spirit worlds.

When I was seven, the Council of Women took me a sacred place – a hobbomak – a place bordered by sacred stones in which spirit lived and emerged onto the earth. For days too long to count, without food or drink, without sleep, I stayed in the hobbomak until the spirits gave vision to my inner sight.

And this is what I told them I saw.

Houses with great white sails appeared in the waters off our shores. When they approached our land, our villages grew smaller, shrunk and became nothing, less than wisps of smoke disappearing. As we tried to escape, I stumbled against a mound of seashells, oysters and clams, lobsters that turned into a pile of human bones.

In my hand was a quahog shell that became a three-feathered fan and from the house with the great white sail that anchored on our shores came a strange bearded man.

And I shook at this vision until a silvery-colored mist like lava flowed out of the ground, out of the sacred place and transported me through time into the place from which I now write.

In that other place, I wave the three-feathered fan and the bones reassemble and become my people in a distant world and the oysters and clams and lobsters return to a future sea and the house with the great white sail and the strange bearded man becomes the broad chest of a powerful vulture, aloft in the sky, ever-watching the earth, terrifying the weak and defenseless.

 

~ Stephen J. Bergstrom

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