Beginnings

 

 

 

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

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