Joy Harjo's Web Log

“The singing always teaches me something. The other day I had a sore throat, had started getting sick. This song came and after singing it my throat was healed.” From a message I wrote this morning to J.W.

Sometimes I forget these things.

Last night someone without the power to show themselves, or me without the power to see was to my left again. Kept feeling D.H, my recently passed cousin. I told her to come to me in my dreams and let me know if there was something she wanted. For instance, does she want the truck to go to S.? Or was she forced by fear and painkillers to sign a makeshift paper because this one promised to take her home from the hospital when the staff said no, she couldn't go? She told me more than once that it was to go to P., a young man who had helped her consistently through her difficulty. That makes more sense. In the end months of her life, she was duped by her daughter’s druggie friends. D.H. wanted to badly to go home and yet it was in that place that she fell ill due to lack of care. Home is home. I can easily understand that ache. What does she know now that she has left this world? Was the sense of it all illuminated? Did she remember the shine of the inner home, who she really is? Or did this freshly left place feel consequently like a dream, the way that some of our dreams feel now? We wake up with stories to tell, lives and deaths lived, visions, and question: dd it really happen? Then the day unfolds and we tell ourselves: it was just a dream and I have awakened. Then, in that world after this one, do we go on our way with our same cloud of disillusions, lack of knowledge and foresight?