Ode to Marie
Greetings of the growing light to you.
I spent the day with Marie Summerwood (shamanic apprentice number 50) recently.
We cried. We laughed. We reminisced. We kissed. We told stories. We drank infusion. We ate goat cheese lasagna. We enjoyed chocolates from Krause’s. We sang songs, songs Marie wrote for me, for us all. We looked at photos. (Here are a few.) We talked about the many workshops Marie taught at the Wise Woman Center: on grief, on chanting, on sacred sex. I thanked her for helping me with so many apprentices and cooking with me for so many years and for so many women.
We always joke that when Marie started her apprenticeship, she was a professional macrobiotic chef. And when she graduated, she was a damn fine cook. I have a macrobiotic background myself, but tend to follow dictums rather than practices (when they don’t agree). The main dictum of macrobiotics – “Eat what is in season where you live” – becomes, in practice, “Eat what is in season in Japan.” Teaching Marie to harvest and eat weeds brought to a whole new consciousness to her macrobiotic cooking.
Marie, my apprentice, my help mate, my friend of thirty years. I cherish you. Marie gave me books and a tray carved of teak and anything I wanted from her jumble drawer. I gave her a pair of green silk pants, a bottle of rose water, and an embroidered red silk scarf. Marie was diagnosed with stage 4, metatastic breast cancer this past August. Nothing modern medicine has to offer touched her cancer, but the treatments (chemo and radiation) weakened her to the point where she could not stand. She was taken care of with great finesse and grace by loving women of her community. Hospice was too late. Marie left her body before they could come.
Read the rest here:
http://www.wisewomanmentor.com/wise-woman-ezine/7014125
Comments