I sit under a peculiar alchemy of fire radiating from the earth across which the lightning moves, invoked by the flow of water.  But in my head, I am sitting by a fire, the lodge -- the womb of the Mother -- waits and the hot stones are having their sweat and my uncle says again and again "There are 4 ways, there are 4 ways, there are 4 ways."

There are more than 4 ways. We all know this, as does he. But in his story can be told a truth and so it will be offered up to you as it was to me.

This is also a story made up of two ladders, of two threads of webs woven up into the sky.  Where they lead, to Nyambe's -- the sky spirit's -- court, to a new world or to a new sun is a secret held only by time.

I can say that the first of our people, two-legged, storied, with all the blessings of 5 gifts and 65 million years of evolution behind them had skin as black as the rich soil over which they lived.  They became the first adventurers, the first to sail the World Ocean, the first to talk and name the spirits of their land, the first to build webs of story over everything around them.

They walked a Night Road; as the Earth spun it would face first the sun and source of life and then the Night, the road upon which all things originally came.  And in the center of our home, the unseen spiral leading to Dark Waters and further out, the first point where the mysteries of our universe sprang.  They dug in deep and explored their roots. Their dead became Gods, looking out over them, families of spirits joined as the hands, the feet, the legs, the heart, the head of greater beings.  They marked time in generations and their hearty young met the challenge of the world head on.

For those whose steps took them away from the Womb of the World, the world changed them, as it always does.  Some skins faded from black to brown to yellow, reflecting the soil and sands of their lands.  These people placed their very lives in the energies that flowed around them, the Way -- the Noon Road -- that required no effort except to echo the spirits and their footsteps throughout the land.  They offered up the empty hand, the silent step and found their peace even in multitudes.

Other brave people placed their faith in the unknown waters that bordered the world, pushing themselves out onto the World Ocean, finding different worlds both small and great beyond the horizons.  Blessed by the sun, reddened by its touch, they set forth on a good red road, the Blood Road, creating bonds of strong kinship with that which they met, learning the language of the land and coming to it as family.  They took two entire continents and reshaped them to the benefit of the People and their neighbors.

Some people traveling far to the North faced the Great Ice and the Death it offered to the people.  They found the Road of Bone and let their skins grow pale walking upon it.  Norroenir who found a ghost language, who forged steel from swamp, who fought death itself and won by taking the power of earth-fire into themself, divinely inspired when both force of strength and force of will had abandoned them.

These are our people: black, yellow, red, white. They are rich in story and they are alive even today.  As long as the stories exist and there are tongues to tell them, they are not dead, no matter how lost they may feel.  That which made them their own people has not forgotten them.

There are many different stories in this world.  Some are kind, some are cruel, some are hopeful, some are tragic.  This is one of them:

It once did not need to be spoken: that the land was mother to us all and she held sway over what was and what was not born.  And the women of the People, reflections of the Great Mother, held decision over what was and was not born, from their body and from the sweat of their bodies.  This is important.

There were a clan of gardeners, shapers of the land, proud people, content in their place and their living.  They had been doing what they had been doing for a long time.  Even the jokes of their tricksters were well known but it didn't matter. Life was good.

Then things changed.  Here the tale spins for the excuses and the destinations were many but two things can be said. The clan's neighbors due to dire misfortune of their own or a change in their land, invaded.

It's a hard thing to be attacked by those you once knew well, especially when it is so fierce that the survival of your people comes into doubt.  That the clan's people were driven from their home, we know.  That the clan was driven so far away, they knew little of their new world, this we know as well.

And we know that, for the clan to survive, they were stripped to the very core of their spirits.

Embittered, the People journeyed far from their homes.  Along the way, the sacred ones, the ones who were in deepest touch with the realm of spirits, tried to guide the way.  It is likely they were male. These sacred ones came to a place of grass and there, they were spoken to.

The Grass understood what it meant to be the children of disaster.  The Grass understood what it was like to be transported far away.  And it offered to the Children of Echo a solution.  Be like the Grass it offered Be fruitful and multiply.  It offered up its body for the taking and the lesson of the Serpent Kings, the twining snakes in each cell of the sacred one's body spoke.  You can be greater than you are it said You can be grander.  The War Council had already been convened.  The People had thrust aside the Gift of the Pack to use the Gift of the Hand in this terrible crisis.  They looked to the strong to help save them from death.  And the strong looked to the sacred ones for a sign.  So the sacred ones wove a story: a god destroying a dragon of chaos, an eagle clutching a serpent...

The people followed the way.  They gardened and they used the grass and they started to multiply.  But they found the dangers of it as well -- the famine as that which also ate the grass swarmed upon them.  The children, stunted and deformed, the adults sickened by what little they could eat.  The strong ones were consulted, the sacred ones conferred.  The decision was made.  They would do what they had to do.

For the people to continue, new people must be born. And for new people to be born, the women would suffer.  And their choice in this matter would no longer be their own.  It would be the province of the strong ones, the men.

And as it was for the little mothers, so it was for the Great Mother.

The People walked down a new Road, a Ghost Road.

In the end, it took them all.

From the north end of the Womb of the World, two branches of this story emerged.  It tried to spread to the South, but a wall of life prevented their passage.   It tried to spread to the East and swallowed up the people of the Noon Road, though their own Path persisted even in the face of possible destruction.

It spread to the West, finding fertile soil around a small sea.  There, it flourished, a poisonous plant in pristine waters, until the Children of the Road of Bone came upon it and destroyed it.  Time and time again, the Western Branch attempted to spring forward only to find itself thwarted.  This did not settle well with the People of the Ghost Road.

With great deceit they offered up their tainted women, their treasures wrested from the dead ground, their knowledge profferred by ghosts and slowly seduced the Children of Bone into their fold.  It took time and much effort but all but a few were so thoroughly converted that none could see a difference between the Children of Bone and the Children of the Ghost Road.

And when the Ghost Road swallowed up the wealth and heart of its original walkers, the Children of Bone were seen as the only ones on the Path.

They swept across the world with a vengeance. They freed themselves of the old rituals and religions of the past to proffer up their own unique perspective, tempered by the Ghost Road.  They overcame the people of the Night Road and stole them from their home and their ancestors.  They corrupted the land of the people of the Blood Road so that the bonds of kinship was broken.  They broke the spirit of the people of the Noon Road, converting their youth into ravenous followers of the Path of Bone.

And yet, and yet...

My uncle sits by the fire. "The people are coming together, the people are coming together, the people are coming together..."

The People of the Night Road weave their stories into the lands of the new world.  They give up the music in their spirits to forge a new beat that few can resist.  The People of the Noon Road show the power in an empty hand and a silent step and their Way winds its way through sheets and sheets of ghost language.  The People of the Blood Road survive almost total devastation to still retain the rituals of kinship and to offer a hand to the newcomers; the pull is so strong only death by their leaders prevents many people from taking up that offer.

The Path of Bone, it offers its strength too as its power to break things down begins breaking down the very barrier that keep the Skins apart: we are one race, we are one People, life is all related, we see things from different views, diversity is a strength.

We can only deny our strengths for so long.

10,000 years ago, the people were lost; they damaged the great wolves who had stood by our sides, hurting them and molding them into as lost a people as their own.  They gave up the way of the Pack.

Into that void stepped the Great Cats, diminishing themselves in size to present no obvious threat.  There to remind us that the world never abandoned us, that even our once-enemies were there for us.

Coyotes and other canines hid the wolves very spirit inside themselves, waiting for the time to return the wolves back to their place in the world, when we would finally recognize them as the brothers they once were and still are.

We have never been abandoned.

Five gifts, four paths,  two stories, and an ending.

We listen to find the strength to tell it.

Completed in part 4