From Kokopelli to Coyote to the Kachinas, I listened to visiting storytellers and read up until I dreamed their legends in fluorescent colors (which might have been the hallucinogens talking, now that I think back on it). But the stories that spoke loudest to me focused on the sacred feminine, powerful chicks like White Buffalo Calf Maiden, Corn Woman, and, of course, the Salt Woman. My veins might not carry a single drop of native blood (biologically, at least, I’m a child of the oppressor), but these are the figures that show up when my fingers touch the loom’s shuttle. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t Mother Mary or even the Wiccan goddess who guided me to my place of healing, but that white-haired desert wanderer who moved westward through my nighttime dreamscape, until I followed her steps past the domes that form her rounded breasts to the sparkling, salt-white cavern of her empty womb. —Entry seven, March 13 Angie’s sobriety journal With the full moon shining through the window and her eyes watering with exhaustion, Dana decided it was high time to collapse on the cot she’d picked up in the camping aisle of the Pecos Wal-Mart.
