My Name is Slow Thunder

I have been given many names in many lifetimes lived in many places. For the most part, I have been given a birth name that served to identify me as I moved through each of those lives. Yet in this long life lived in this time and place, I have been given many names. Please don't ask, for I am not allowed to tell you all my names. I'm a shaman, and some of my names are secret, known only to me and to those who gave them to me, and must remain so, lest their power be lost. The name I am allowed to tell you—and it's not the full name, but only the first part of it—is Slow Thunder, the name I was given when I accepted my calling.

It does occur to me that for the uninitiated, this may sound strange, but I hope you'll bear with me, for there are many teachings hidden within the shamanic journeys and adventures I'm going to share with you, which I hope you'll be able to discern and integrate, and you're invited to contact me with any questions that may arise as you read them. There are also many things about these tales that I'm not allowed to share with you, things that only shamans are allowed to know, but truthfully, I doubt very much that that will weaken the energy of the tales, or your enjoyment of them.

You see, when I was initiated by fire, and had left my body in response to the physical trauma of my injuries, I was prevented from continuing to move towards the death that awaited me—and which I preferred to having to deal with those injuries— by five members of the Bear Spirit Clan, who called me to this path. Now, you may not know this about shamanic initiations, but in reality, genuine initiations are very few and far between, and can be very specific in their nature. For example, in my case, I was asked to use my creative writing and painting skills to give others an experience of shamanic consciousness. Being rather obtuse and totally ignorant of what shamanism was, I spent decades bumbling about, trying to cope with the complete upheaval my initiation caused in my life, and learning how to manage the enormous energies that came with it. It is only now, when I'm an old woman who's staring death in the eye, that how to carry out the commitment I made back then has begun to come into focus.

This is what happened:

As the first concussive wall of wavering, flickering blue flame hit me, looking eerily like the shimmering mirages one sometimes sees in very hot desert landscapes, I was slammed violently against the hutch in the dining area. The first blast was followed by another equally powerful wall of flickering blue flame, and then another. As each wall of flame hit me, I was lifted up and slammed from one wall to another, trapped in a raging inferno that felt terrifyingly alive.

At some point during those first few moments of horror, I thought, “This is it. This is what those visions were warning me about.”

My next thought, in a moment of stark awareness, was that I couldn’t possibly survive what was happening to me. With that realization, my consciousness fled my body through the top of my head in a spiraling dance of blue-green energy and light that I could both feel and somehow see, and I was suddenly free of what was happening to me. In my new, blue-green-spiraling form, I floated high above the earth in a strangely familiar midnight sky, far above the maelstrom in which my body was trapped on the earth below.

Although I could see the fire from that height, I felt completely detached from it, completely at peace. I turned away from what was happening to me in the now-distant world of physical matter and looked about. Countless stars sparkled in the indigo darkness, and there was a glow, as of moonlight, that limned the ethereal form my consciousness had assumed, softening the feel of the cold, deep space through which I now traveled, my new form of being moving in response to my intent as my physical body had always moved.

In the distance was a golden, arching doorway filled with blinding white light, toward which I was powerfully drawn. I longed to enter that arch. I knew I had died, and I knew I preferred death to dealing with the physical trauma my body was enduring so far below me. I was entirely at peace with leaving the body behind as I slowly floated towards that welcoming arch of light.

However, as I made my serene way towards whatever awaited me in the glorious light beyond that arch, large wavering shadows moved now and again across my path, like clouds passing before a full moon. Then the shadows slowly began to take shape, until gradually, they completely blocked my path towards the light.

“Angels,” I thought, having been raised so thoroughly Catholic, “Angels have come to guide me.” To my amazement, as I gazed at the formless, shifting shapes, they slowly took on the solid forms, not of angels, but of five very large, very real grizzlies. Like that midnight sky, they were somehow familiar to me—known to me, as though I shared an ancient kinship with them. The largest of them, who would later identify himself as Standing Bear, Chief of the Bear Spirit Clan, moved closer to me, gently touched my heart with an outstretched paw, and asked me a question, one that I dimly remembered having been asked before, long ago, in another reality, not by Bear, but by the great red serpent that my beloved cousin Little Deer and I had sensed lived beneath the coastal landscape of our youth… “Will you honor me?”

Back then, I had not dared to answer that question, but this time, my answer arose spontaneously from some previously inaccessible place in my psyche, and I said, "Yes. Yes, I will honor you. Then Standing Bear asked me if I would return to my body so that I could do “a work” for his clan, the Bear Spirit Clan. Again I responded from that deep place in my psyche. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I will return to my body. I will do a work for the Bear Spirit Clan.”

He then told me that he and the four other bear spirits, who were his assistants, would help in the healing of my burns, and leaning towards me, he placed his forehead against mine. In what seemed like a split second, he somehow transmitted to me what I could only perceive at the time as an enormous number of densely compressed images.

“Look at her,” he then said, indicating my physical body, which was still trapped in the firestorm far below us. As I did so, I felt a profound compassion for the suffering my physical self was experiencing. At that moment, Standing Bear touched my heart with his great paw, and I was literally slammed back into my burning body. Thus began my decades-long odyssey through the mythic world of shamanic reality as it presents itself on the continent upon which I walk.

Over the years since that life-altering encounter, some of those densely compressed images have opened, and have become paintings, books, and yes, stories. But now as I'm facing down death, those that have to do with the commitment made during my calling are opening at a startling speed, and there is a sense of urgency about fulfilling my commitment to use my skills as a writer and an artist to offer others an experience of shamanic consciousness.

That's what I now intend to do.