I am walking with Betty in a primitive village with dirt lanes, and thatched houses of unpeeled poles and rough boards. We are talking in a small, shady, quiet earthen square in the center of the village. As we approach some old stone steps in the square, I am overcome with deep sorrow. I begin to tell her that my loneliness and lifetime of longing for my mate have reached the point of being unbearable, but the feeling is so intense I can’t put the words together. I know I can’t live this way any more, and slump, exhausted on the stone steps, crushed by a sense of hopelessness.
Betty has wandered some distance away, and returns with a pretty, younger Native American woman from the village who has something to show me. Smiling, the woman extends her hands to me. Her right hand grasps my left wrist, drawing me closer, as her left hand places something repulsive in my right. It is a squirming, flat, hairy triangular creature with little ciliated feet on each end of the triangle’s short side. It is wiggling and looks like it is built to suck blood, like some kind of land leech. I don’t want to hold it, but take it anyway, not wanting to appear cowardly in the sight of the village woman who is brightly, enthusiastically proffering the disgusting creature.
She asks what it is, and I say it is clearly some kind of horse parasite, since I have seen horses nearby. I am looking for a way to kill it when I feel a sharp sting in my right heel. Looking down, I see 2 little metal darts, like pins, each with a small feather attached. The thought flickers across my awareness that the heel is a curious place to be attacked. I know they are blow darts, and wonder if some drug or poison is already in my bloodstream. Then, I see a dark, coarse-robed figure aiming the blow gun at me again, from under the dirt street somehow, as if the street has become a web of tree branches underfoot, and my attacker is below the ground. Before the strangeness of this setup can even register, I feel the sharp stings of several more darts, and feel intense fear.
It is then that I see the Shaman, a dark, smallish figure, perhaps the same one who attacked me, standing next to a repulsive, viscous, breathing, talking pit in the earth which looks as if it is filled with organs, membranes and guts. It is a disgusting and terrifying sight. Before I have even a moment to take it in, a voice from the heaving pit asks me, “Do I have your permission to kill you?” I know it is actually the Shaman talking. I counter with my own question, “Is this a way to know who I am?” He says simply, “Yes.” I say, “Yes, then, although I know it will be rough, and I am afraid, Yes!”
I know I am going to have to enter that suffocating, disgusting pit, the entrails of the earth as it were, and endure a terrifying ordeal which my personality will not survive. I also know this is exactly what I have been searching for. I am awakened by the fear of personal annihilation.
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