the Shaman's Journey

The boy trod softly along the lonely path, not with any real sense of where he was going but only that he had been told he needed to walk until it was time to walk no more. The Shaman had been very explicit in this – his vision quest could not begin until he was where he was supposed to be, and so therefore he must walk until he heard his Spirit Guide calling to him to stop….and so, he walked...

His journey had begun many moons before when he first became aware of his surroundings…he understood the path of life that surrounded him and how it related to the People. He had few friends as a child, no one wanted to be near the boy with eyes that saw forever….he believed he frightened his parents as well for his father would never look him straight in the eye….Then the day came when the Shaman came to his home and told him to come with him and take only what he needed – he picked up his bedding, made sure he had his knife and called his horse to him – he left the tent of his father without a backward glance…the journey to apprentice to the shaman had taken another step. He spent the next several years serving the Shaman, observing all he did and how, whether it was speaking to the Chief or the child looking so forlorn when his warrior father left him behind. He attended to their daily needs, and assisted those who had none to help them. He helped the Shaman prepare for rituals he still had no understanding of, but somehow always managed to set the stage for without being told how…..

The day came then when the old man roused him well before the dawn sun had cleared the far horizon….”You must go,” he was told….”I can give you nothing more until you return.” And so the boy-now-almost-a-man, left the Shaman’s tent and began his journey anew….

And so he walked, placing his feet softly upon the ground so that unless you physically saw him walk by you would find no trace of his passage upon that ground. How swiftly the miles passed beneath his feet, yet still he walked…the horizon still lay far before him, and surely what he sought had to be found there….No unusual sounds pierced his reverie as he trod ever onward, nothing that called his name or made him pause…he stopped only to rest or drink from a passing stream. … he lost track of how many suns and halos of stars lay between him and from whence he had come, he only knew his journey was not done …..

On a day filled with blue skies and still air, he beheld a tree standing beside the path…a tree with bare branches that moved ever so slightly in the still air. He stopped to look up at the branches…they appeared as a net against the sky and he could almost feel them wrapping themselves around him -- but this could not be, the branches were above his head and he could not touch them…was this then how his Spirit Guide was finally reaching out to him? It seemed to the boy that all else around him faded from his consciousness so he knew that he had found the place he sought, and so he sat himself near the base of the tree – not touching or leaning into it, but in front of it … He sat for he knew not how long before the images spilled into him as the Tree Spirit breathed the story to the man…….