In 2008 I returned to University and majored in English Language and Creative Writing. I joined the school newspaper (the old elephant in the room.) This is one of my posts published in the newspaper.

Pothier_Creative_Story-telling Dream Free write

Ken Pothier_11/26/2009

A Story-telling Dream

I had a storytelling dream. In it I was camping on mother earth with father sky above me. Alone, but for the spirit of the ancestors surrounding me North, South, East, West, Above and Below. Felt in the knowledge and magic of medicine animals. I wanted to write, but there wasn’t a way. I was consumed with the need to get my feelings and observations recorded, to tell a story.
I then proceeded to observe, read, feel all of the great spirit in nature around me. Dusk came over the dream and I could not record what was felt in the subtle and palpable lessons of the land. I spent last light organizing the campsite getting ready for the night.

Alone, but for want of a way to write,
But for want of a fire to light,
But for want of a means to share,
It could have been a good dream.

I awoke with longing and frustration in my being. In a life tinged with sorrow I could not shake the feeling of the dream.
If I could not write:
I could live with it, carry it, carry on, and not put the heavy load of feeling down.
I could make a blanket of my tears for they roll down and carry salt of the earth.
I could leave signs, in the bank of streams and water’s edge of lake and ocean, where waves of wind, water, and time could wear them away.
I could etch my life sketch in stone, but there is too much to say, and words alone would consume the day.
I could read signs of nature and learn to live in wilderness on my own.
I could watch the seasons pass never knowing when it’s my last.
Could I not write?
Feelings, emotion, experience, knowledge, and lessons learned, would stay lost in time.
Though experienced and felt, never seen, not thought out, and only mine.
Dark and lost in shadow, never letting in the light of memory and time perspective,
Never leaving a clue to how I found my way as pathfinder.

Out on the lake appeared a lone snowmobiler, having a day with some time and a fresh coat of snow to play on. He circled the lake in an outline of the shore. Curved in at coves around the circumference and out where the land reaches to meet the snow covered ice.
A sixty acre oval repeated counterclockwise over and over and over, until it began to look like the concentric rings in the wood of a tree.
Carefully the task was completed, parallel journeys in time, close but never the same, he marked his time on the lake while I fashioned a dreamed story.

One man found a good rhythm in space and time, and beat out a path for all to see, until waves of wind, warmth, water, and time slowly take it all away.
Could I not write…? The day would be held only in memories, of the one who felt it, of the one who observed, and gone forever as they fade away.

Could I be a storyteller…?
Last light of sun’s rays break the clouds, and spotlight one man’s circles of time in motion…
As a work of art, in a rhyme of time, space, light, and words.

Dreams and signs can show the way…
See them, feel them, and own them-live as a warrior, storyteller, and pathfinder.
Tell the tales…etched in time…Hanta Yo…Go Forward…

© Ken Pothier

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