Great Turtle Rises

The ancestors are calling, calling. Not only the ancestors of our bloodlines but of the land where we live or travel, and of traditions to which we are connected, across time and space, in our multidimensional families. This morning a dream of power carried me deep into the cosmogony of the First Peoples of the land where I live. May its energy and potential for healing reach you with these words and images.

December 2, 2020
Dream

Great Turtle Rises

I am with a group in a rural location. We agree to enter the healing night together and bed down in a room full of mattresses. An elderly man moves among some of the dormant bodies with sprigs of wildflowers with lilac blossoms. I see that whatever he is doing brings immediate healing.

A woman elder is lying near me next to the wall and I notice there is a strong energy connection between us. I can feel juice streaming back and forth, balanced and powerful. I look at the wall. It is now natural stone, maybe limestone, with the clearly defined shape of a turtle. The stone turtle starts to revolve. It comes alive. Turtle raises its head and stares at me.

"Aksotha," I greet it in Mohawk, with reverence. "Grandmother."

Feelings: blessed

Reality: I know Great Turtle, as Teacher of the Deep as well as Great Mother, in the traditions of the Onkwehonwe, the Iroquoian peoples of the  land where I live. Years ago, I was invited by a Turtle Clan healer to teach a circle of Mohawk women to dream in the ancient ways on a reservation in Ontario. I was presented with a turtle pendant (see photo) by a Huron/Wendat dreamer from the birth people of Island Woman, the ancient woman of power who called me in dreams half a lifetime ago. Here is a poem I wrote in honor of Great Turtle, whose form (be it noted) is that of the snapping turtle which (like the sea turtle) cannot hide in its shell. 

Anonwara (Turtle Dreaming)

I am the turtle that does not hide.
I wear the armor of a knight, not a skulker.
My vulnerable belly says, Get me if you can;
I stick my neck out.

You call me slow, but on water
I am faster than you, and fast on land.
Deep down, I am the teacher you need
to show you how to fight the Dark One.

I am the broad back you live on.
Ignore me for too long,
go on harming my other children
and I will shake you off my back.

Call of the Hawk

Many years ago, I spent a weekend driving around the upper Hudson valley of New York. I was profoundly dissatisfied with my life. From the outside, that life may have looked like a dream fulfilled. I was a bestselling thriller writer; publishers competed to offer me high six-figure advances, laid on stretch limos and made sure the Dom Perignon waiting for me in the hotel suites they paid for was perfectly chilled. And my life felt hollow. I knew I had to make a break with big cities and the fast track I had been on and get back in touch with the spirits of the land and my own deeper creative spirit.

      On that upstate weekend, a few miles from the village of Chatham NY, a Realtor showed me some land with a run-down farmhouse that might be available. The house would need a ton of work, but as I walked the land, half of it still primal woodlands where the deer drifted in great droves, I knew in my gut this was a place I needed to be. I sat under an old white oak behind the house, feeling the rightness of the place but also that I needed a further sign.

     A red-tailed hawk circled overhead, dipping lower and lower, screaming urgently at me in a language I felt I ought to be able to understand. I did not speak hawk, but I could not fail to get a message when she proceeded to drop a feather between my legs.  That visitation by the hawk was the clincher. I purchased the farm, moved to the country, and soon found myself changing worlds, which is what can happen when we radically change the way we inhabit the world.

     When we had restored the farmhouse and moved in, I was drifting one night in that in-between state of consciousness the French used to call dorveille, sleep-wake. I found myself gently rising from my dormant body on the bed, in a second body, a dreambody - not an exotic experience for me, as far back as I can remember. I floated out over the night landscape, and found that in my dreambody, I had wings - the wings of a red-tailed hawk, scaled to my size. I had a marvelous time enjoying a highly sensory experience of flight, riding thermals, swooping and soaring, seeing the world at different angles.

     I found myself flying north, over Lake George and then Lake Champlain. I noticed the Northway and modern towns were missing from the landscape below me. I felt the tug of someone else's intention, and followed it, out of curiosity, to a cabin  in the woods somewhere near Montreal, where I was received by a beautiful, ancient indigenous woman. She spoke to me for a long time in her own language, her words like lake water lapping, while she stroked a beaded belt that hung from her shoulder, with the design of a she-wolf and human figures. I was fascinated, but did not understand a single word, any more than I had understood the language of the hawk. I knew I had been in the presence of a woman of power, and I hoped that, since this felt urgently important, more would be revealed.

The design of the belt, in my night vision, proved to be the equivalent of the hawk's feather: a way I could receive and confirm a message even though I lacked a necessary language. My first Iroquois friend - met later through an interesting series of coincidences - was able to show me a wampum belt identical to the one in my vision. It was in the archives of the New York State Museum at that time; since then it has been returned to Onondaga, the traditional capital of the Confederacy of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, or Longhouse People, among whom the Mohawk are Keepers of the Eastern Door. He told me it was believed that the belt was the credentials of an ancient mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk People.

    I entered deeply into the study of the traditions of the ancient dream shaman who had called me, when I was flying on hawk's wings. This opened to me ways of dreaming and healing that were possibly shared by all our ancestors, but which have become atrophied, when not actively suppressed, in modern society. I came to call the ancient shaman Island Woman; this  reflects the fact, which I was able to confirm through historical research, that she was captured as a young girl from the Huron/Wendat, called by the Mohawk the Island People, to be raised as Mohawk. In order to receive her teachings fully, I had to study the Mohawk and Huron languages, and reclaim terms from early sacred vocabulary.

     New dreams eventually called me to leave the land to which the hawk had called me and teach what I had learned about dreaming the soul back home and dreaming for our communities. We sold the farm to a woman who promised to conserve the land.
    As we were leaving the house, after our final checks, I was inspired to go back inside for no reason I could express. I heard a scuffling in the family room we had built, overlooking the old white oak. I found the noise was coming from the hearth. When I removed the firescreen, I found a young red-tailed hawk - a fledgling - that had somehow managed to fall down the chimney between my last two visits. My last action, on the land I acquired because of the hawk, was to carry the young hawk outside, next to my heart, and release her. She flew straight into the branches of the while oak where the first hawk had delivered her message.

The red-tailed hawk has become my most important bringer of omens. A hawk in good shape, flying my way or grabbing a good meal, will give me a surge of confidence for the day that has yet to be disappointed. A dead hawk in power lines will make me batten down the hatches and watch out for challenges.
    I was once very late for a phone interview with a California journalist who was irritated and pressed for time. I wasn't sure the interview was going to go well. She asked me to give an example of how I navigate by synchronicity.

    I was standing on the balcony of a villa overlooking Long Island Sound. Right below me, three bunnies had been scampering about in the grass. As I considered my response to the journalist's question, a red-tailed hawk made a vertical ascent, talons outstretched. It grabbed a bunny and shot straight up with its dinner in its clutches.
    Given my affinity with the hawk, I took this as a good sign, indicating that despite our bumpy start the interview would turn out fine. I was about to recount what had just happened when some inner caution made me pause. I was talking to a journalist for a Californian holistic magazine; for all I knew, she was a vegan who might be horrified by the scene of the hawk taking the bunny rabbit, especially if I reported it with the relish I was feeling. So I told her a black dog story and she loved it and the interview came out just fine. The hawk sign was, once again, reliable.

For fuller versions of my encounters with the red-tailed hawk and Island Woman, please see my books Dreamways of the Iroquois and The Boy Who Died and Came Back.

Drawings by Robert Moss

"Thank you for dreaming in our ancestral ways"

I know it is hard for some people to grasp how an Australian outsider came to find himself in the position of helping to restore lost or interrupted dreamways to Native American peoples whose ancestors called him to this work in dreams. The story is not an ordinary one. I did not go looking for the ancestors of the Onkwehonwe (the Real People, called Iroquois); they came looking for me.
    When I moved to a farm on the edge of traditional Mohawk country in upstate New York, I started dreaming into the lives of people who had lived seven generations before me - above all into the life of Sir William Johnson, an Anglo-Irishman who lived with the Mohawk and became King's Superintendent of Indians, and a Mohawk clanmother and "woman of power" who sought to influence him for the good of her people.
    The Mohawk woman called me in a lucid dream, to a meeting where she showed her wampum credentials as Mother of the Wolf Clan. She insisted that I should study her language, which was unusually difficult because she communicated in the Mohawk of nearly 300 years ago, employing a spiritual vocabulary derived from her birth people, the Huron or Wendat.
    I have described the personal odyssey that unfolded in my books Dreamways of the Iroquois and The Boy Who Died and Came Back (where I write more openly about my trans-temporary engagement with William Johnson and his world than I have cared to do previously).
     I call my dream mentor Island Woman; a Mohawk name for her birth people means People of the Island. She was captured by a Mohawk war party when she was five years old. Her precognitive dream about this led her to try to rouse her village but her people stayed asleep. In the Native American way, once taken and adopted, she was fully integrated into the Mohawk community and became a respected atetshents (dreamer, healer, shaman) as well as a clanmother. But she retains that Huron/Wendat spice in her speech, when she communicates with me across time and dimension.
     I have been honored to have many Native people from Island Woman's territory approach me for help in reclaiming the old dreamways and even the old words that have gone missing from modern vocabularies. I am blessed by the friendship of Nathalie Shendaehwas Picard, a fine Huron/Wendat musician and educator from Island Woman's birth people. She is one of the gifted Native American dreamers who have graduated from my training for teachers of Active Dreaming.
     She offers this testimonial:

Thank You to Robert for Dreaming  in Our Ancestral Ways

I am from the Turtle clan of the Huron-Wendat people of Wendake, Quebec. After almost a century of dormancy, our ancestral language is now being taught in the community.

I used to feel alone, as a Wendat dreamer when this heritage was trying to connect with me in a way that I could not really understand... Until one day, I discovered Dreamways of the Iroquois by Robert Moss, one of the most significant book that opened a door for me, changing my life and helping me connect the dots. This Australian writer who was living in NY, was dreaming in our ancestral ways, after his encounter with a Mohawk-Huron clan mother in the dreamtime. I am so grateful that he made his life journey to share with the world her teachings, in his own original innovative and empowering way.

I believe that as for our language, the same things is happening with our old ways of dreaming that has awakened, thanks to Robert Moss.

In Wendat tradition, dreams were matters of survival, guidance, medicine, power, and the best way to connect and nurture your soul.

Now, Robert's creative work is building an International community of dreamers who are weaving again a dreamspace that contains all possibilities, along with Island woman's and Robert's wisdom and makes alive the Wendat dreaming tradition.

Robert Moss "yatonwes" (I thank ) for learning Island woman's language and making your dream come true! Tho ïohtih!

--Nathalie Shendaehwas Picard, musician and dream teacher from the Turtle Clan of the Huron-Wendat people.

Photo: With  Shendaehwas at my training for teachers of Active Dreaming