Chapter I.
My Forest of Feelings
In the “Daughters of Copperwoman”, Anne Cameron breathed life into a story of
beginnings. A young girl was set adrift in a bowl boat with twelve old women. They
taught her how to live as they wobbled across the sea. By the time she reached the
British Columbia Coast, all the others have died. She drifts ashore at the loneliest place
she has ever known; a foreign land. Many spirit teachers come to her aid. She learns that
we all go through our own wastelands but that we have been prepared, in some way, for
it. The story teaches us how to deal with those things that come in our lives that we may
not see as blessings until much later. Some of us never get through the wasteland
because we never learned the teachings of the lessons put before us. Some people pass
part way through and get lost and forget what they have learned. Some, through effort
and determination get through and are given the secrets of life: surrender and endurance.
Surrender and endurance are themes in my story. In pain are we born. In pain, was I
born. In pain was I put out into the hinterlands of Adoption. I am a child of many
beginnings because of this.
I was born in Fort McMurray, on the river banks of Athabasca River, in Northern
Alberta.
Keep My Place
Oh piney forest, where birch stands guard,
did you see his boat lumber up the slow moving river,
draw him in to drop his supplies?
Did you shelter them
when the decision was made?
Don’t tell me,
I have a love story in mind.
Oh to be born of love: Born of something more than need.
Wanted. Needed. Necessary. A knot of wound left
in the leaving.
Did the wolves mourn more loudly?
Did the willows lean further into the river?
Mother, how did you live through the loss?
Alone and milkless,
you made the best of it.
We do that, those like you and I.
Something of me is buried there.
I hope you took it
to your roots
and memorized it, wrapped tendrils around the stone
that marks the spot for the child born of that forest.
I have spent a life time questioning my beginnings. I have come to understand that I was
saved and given a life of many opportunities. My mother’s sacrifice was a great gift to
me.
Mercy, Mother, Mercy
Mercy, Mother,
Mercy, Mother, Mercy, Mercy, Mother for I am in need
of remembrance,
fusion to the breast of your knowing
who it is I am.
I drift through life, without you.
Each grinding gust of wild wind
captivates a little more of me. I am
becoming more translucent
on this canvas.
I wither with the need to be known by you.
This forest is perplexed by this subtle shift
I have fantasized.
Draw me to you,
paint me with vibrant colors of your choosing.
Pinned to this plea is part of your possibility.
Mercy, Mother, Mercy.
I was left without family, without relations, without kinships, with any blood to recognize
me, to comfort me. In my own gifted way, I was pitiful.
Bone Cracking
I cannot trace my bones
back to the bed I was born on.
Ah, but these trees
are Poplar and not Pine.
Their sap does not run
in cells of my blood.
I will quest for a lifetime
for Truth and follow it to its falling,
be drawn by the sound
of branches and leaves
tapping out code
until I am led
to top, touching heaven
and history
waiting
in hunched blue sky.
The river is dammed
somewhere near the throat,
womb-shriveled and long laid lost
in the muskeg of home.
I can not find the roots of Self
in this prairie soil.
Oh, your tissue is warm
and I am hoping
the muscles of the North
remember me, while
poplar roots works
on cracking my bones.
I do not want my story to vanish into other people’s ideas about who I was, how I came
to be, what I did with my life. My writing becomes a gift I give, not only to myself but to
others who may have gone through such things as I have. This story becomes my sacred
soul songs.
The first six months of my life is only known through telling, through search, through
other’s knowledge of me and my experience. All my life will be hearsay if I do not write
it. I have been a gift to the world! I must tell how I was this. The more I share in my
stories, the more I realize that, yes, indeed, I was a gift too many. Life was serendipitous.
Synchronicity came into my life when I disappeared into the system. What mode of
travel took me to Edmonton, I do not know. How I ended up in Calgary at the Foundling
Home, I do not know.
©Carol Desjarlais 7.26.21
**excerpt Page 1 - 6
