I’ve just finished my first week at the College of Natural Healing.

Since I left the yearlong, Abigail and I have accumulated a variety of different experiences. Starting from Connecticut, where her parents live, we drove west until we got bored, and then while we were in South Dakota we found out about the school via the Internet, and made a beeline for Silver City, in southwestern New Mexico. I was readily accepted into the massage therapy program, and we spent the next couple of months going to and from Silver City — first to Colorado, then to Los Angeles to visit my parents, and then up to Wisconsin to get my belongings from Teaching Drum.

So why massage?

I have no easy answer to that. I hadn’t really thought about it myself, until the option came up on the computer screen three months ago. The crux of it is that I’ve become more attracted to healing and health, and we had a maximum of a year to travel (Abigail’s taking a year off from school). My interest in healing has ranged more into the realm of “alternative” or holistic therapies such as massage; I’ve taken some Reiki and am considering going back to school for acupuncture and Oriental medicine. Massage seems to be a good basis for working with the body — the energy body, and all that entails, not just the physical body. It’s also a way to make money, though money is merely a vehicle for enlightenment, so to speak.

What of Native ways? I haven’t abandoned that, really. Recently we went to a gathering of Native elders near Taos, NM. There were two Cherokee medicine people there: Ven. Running Wolf, whose spiritual grandfather is Rolling Thunder, and Ven. Dhyani Ywahoo. From them I’ve gotten some inspiration and hope for walking my own medicine path, however I am called to walk it.

Eventually, I think, I’ll find myself living much closer to the earth than I am now — though perhaps not as close as I did last year. I have a desire to learn to hunt my own food, in a balanced way, and to live free of a toxic environment. I want to see my children grow up healthy. I want to create a good space, in order to survive the earth changes that so many people say are coming. Hope we can do that.