Are you First Nations?
Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist. ~ Guy de Maupassant
Although there are a few experiences I’ve written about, I don’t share much of my work related to indigenous peoples publicly. They include my initial relationship with the Navajo, how it intensified when partnering with their Slayer of Alien Gods, and how a dead Ojibwa-Cree came into my world and changed it forever.
I’ve held close my knowings about the importance of the mass integration I had nearly a year ago, the reasons why I’m called to particular pieces of ground and bleed into the same, and who my spiritual entourage are. I’ve done so because the band-wagoneering of spiritual things related to Native Americans, in particular, is an overwhelming thing to manage energetically as is the inherent racism bound into discussions of their and my own nature. It’s like trying to corral caffeinated cats.
Running Rabbit and Pat Kennedy may have been the first to join my merry band but they have been followed an inter-tribal, cross-creatural, transcontinental posse of spiritual leaders that cross the boundaries of time and space.
Those that integrated within on October 27 last year knew something of me that I still don’t know. Those that surround me and are active participants in my life and work, too, see something within me that has inspired them to entrust me with their deepest heart and broadest vision.
None of them has ever said, “Well, she’s just too white for this.” Though it is probably worth noting that the entourage has proclaimed me man enough by those who see me beyond white or woman.
So I was taken aback when a lovely lady from eastern Canada who offered to connect me with friends who might be able to help me satisfy the requirements of the CBP who, dammit, turned me away two nights ago. Bless her heart for being the go between, for when I read, “They keep wanting to know if you’re First Nations. Are you?”, I became annoyed and responded:
I work with the old ones across tribal, time, and continental boundaries. Those within and around me have never made requests about my skin color or heritage because they know my heart. I am asked to sit and sing in Cree, Navajo, Chiricahua, Sioux, and other ceremonies by the old ones and those currently breathing. It was the Nootka drum that brings me here and Salish signs taking me to Pemberton. I’m guided by and relied upon ancients that go as far back as to when creation myths began. And some are more recent, known by how they bridged spirit & human. And how we live and move and breathe as one has nothing to do with my possible or known heritage. When I am sent to ceremony or to heal, my whiteness or the lack of obvious brownness is never questioned by those who can see me, those who can feel our heart or hear me sing when I’ve never learned a song.
The need to hold back of what I’ve loosely defined as thisness has now morphed into the need to actually share it all, if only to move this past heritage and race. I will still hold back, for now, on the identities of those old ones who join me in this way of being. They may desire for me to share their names and the necessity for their reappearance in my form or as my partners outside the physical, but I don’t feel comfortable doing so at this point.
Here is what I will share:
Thisness is a term I’ve used to describe the phenomenon of weaving past and present. When I’ve used it before I’ve purposefully kept it simple; a universal, spirit-led happening where I find people and places, often connecting the two, through a number of ways. They come to me in dreams, visions or knowings; they come as non-breathing energies who have specific connections to those who reside within me and they come as breathing ones who may not. They come to me via knowings of a few others who tend to be represented by or partnered with spirit guides of their own.
I’ve previously couched this ‘weaving of past and present’ through bringing healers together and connecting healer with lost tribe. And though it is about connecting healer to self, healer to healer, healer to community, healer to tribe and bringing tribes—via their healers—together, there is much more to this work.
Another aspect of thisness is bridging the past and present by both walking between and being the vessel that ancients have chosen to breathe through again. Walking between is the phenomena of straddling time, or the past as we know it rising to meet me, in a visceral, physical manner that allows information, energies of land and people to merge with me either permanently or for a short time–particularly during ceremony.
Walking between is like a brief trespass into something that is or is thought to be lost; time, experiences, people, wisdom. It is about erasing the boundaries and blurring the lines of that time, experiences, people and wisdom and bringing the same forward now. This is more nuanced than ancient memory. It requires us to understand that while myths remain static, wisdom does not.
I liken this all to dancing between molecules and galaxies. Walking between is something like that but less graceful than those words convey. Ever been tumbled into the sand by an unexpected wave that is discordant from the rhythm you’ve grown accustomed to? When the waves of past reach for me, it is that way. Only the trust that my very birth was all the invitation needed and the realization that there are no hidden bits allow me to keep myself open to the recurrence. Each time I stand naked in the midst of it all and know that all of me is being seen.
The integration with individuals is not entirely dissimilar, though. Each opportunity appears in what often feel like inopportune times. However, when the body and mind are ready, they occur. There is enough somatic and energetic warning to create the allowance through a breath and then they merge. They arrive in hordes and singularly.
When I walk between, the ground accepts and drinks my blood and quakes with reawakening. In those moments, remembrance meets currents of renewed hope. There are places where she begs to be bled into for relief and recognition from the chain of suffering begot long ago.
I am surrounded by beings of strength and grace beyond our and their own imaginings when they were here before. Old ones arrive in public toilets and say to others, “Tell her, she’ll know” and I quake in the fear of saying their, our, truth and in the face of not knowing but bringing it still.
They say, “Speak! SPEAK!” to me and my throat flutters and flounders as unspoken and re-spoken grace begs to be heard.
And those that speak are medicine bundles, are Ojibwe-Cree, Missouria-Choctaw, Oglala Sioux, Chiricahua Apache, Sami, Inuit, Salish, Gros Verte, Assiniboine, Ugandan children, Navajo creation Gods, Siksika, Shoshone-Ute, Maya, faery, Celt, Hindu gods and goddesses, Arab and others who have not yet been identified.
They lead me to through visions and dreams into the deserts of America, islands in Canada; to Guatemala, the Namibian desert, to war-ravaged central Africa, Kashmir, Indonesia, and Jerusalem.
I’m not alone in my own skin. In fact, I’m reminded with some frequency that I not my own at all. Others are woven into me and a larger fabric outside of anything that has been written before. As connections arise, that electric thread lengthens through the heavens and the hinterland of our own terra firma.
I didn’t ask for this. I became it. And, while some opine that my role in ‘thisness’ began long before I was born, I disagree. There may have been inklings in the universe long ago but until Paramhansa Yogananda, his Babaji Sri Yukteswar Giri, and Satya Sai Baba merged into me in October 30, 2011, I was just Ingrid. A law enforcement and corrections consultant with expertise in mental health, gang suppression and community capacity development. In that moment, though, I became another, others. And they, me.
On February 7, 2012, I went for a forty-five minute massage and emerged four and a half hours later, during which another integrative episode brought into me hundreds of energies. Some were immediately identifiable as their energy and the visuals accompanying them had mythological and historical relevance. Others were not in the moment but are coming forward to me now. In this second episode, the first and most striking energy was that of who we call Jesus. The others included a young French girl, Sufi poets, Arab mathematicians, healers, dancers, those who were murdered for their work, those who died peaceably after learning and sharing all they could, those who didn’t, and many, many more. I opened to Other and we became.
On October 27, 2014, there was another such experience after seeing myself in another form on the big screen. Again, hundreds of ancients moved within. Although unidentifiable by name, they were unmistakably and easily placed from particular places on the globe. I became them and they, me. And the man with the needles who helped peace me back together again said, “Make sure you reveal yourself slowly.”
In August 2015, I went for acupuncture and left again as Other. In this single integration, I became what I saw when I was twelve or thirteen. Only what I saw then, was me now. That thing that identified as separate from me then is no longer separate. It never was.
There is no separation between them and I. We live and breathe and speak as one.
That is ‘thisness’ at its very core.
There is an element of thisness that, if it’s words hadn’t been shared from another’s mouth, I’d have ignored for a lot longer and refused to accept. I’ve only couched the work I do as in being a place-holder, a steward for these other energies when I’ve known better. I’ve known better since February 2012. The time for the son that rises in the west to step forward is now. If not now, when? Beyond myth, legend, fears and existing paradigms, bridging the old aspects of a truth into the now—not as a representative of all of those who came before and reside within but as I–as we live and move and breathe as one.
I once gave someone the eyebrow when she said, “You’re just not from here.” In one manner of speaking she was right. However, it’s not about being from a different, alien or foreign place. It’s about being from different places and times and being here in them,
whether I’m walking between or not. Being here now.
In 2011, when I was told. “Be now. For in the light of the one, we all become All That Is.” I knew exactly what was meant. As all those energies were moving, through all the tears and snot, ‘be.now.be.nowbenowbenowbenownownownownowiamnowiamnowiamNOW’ came through me. And in that merging, I emerged as one. I’m now being called to accept, honor and move into not just the knowing that has come with all of them and I merging, but into Being. Now.
I’m being called into more and to do so now. There are others here now as well to help bring thisness to life. We’ve been connected before at many levels, many times. This time we’re are, but differently, with a singular focus: Thisness.
And it is growing into its new name word: Baraka.
And so we weave into and beyond First Nations, whiteness, and rightness. We bring ancestors through and stand for them as called to; speak them as they rejoin us in the here and now, bringing their unfulfilled visions to fruition, and letting the footsteps of the past inspire the legacies of tomorrow.