The woman we are going to visit is S'ledge. She moved new to the outback. Camels hauled her house in pieces.
I looked for a thing of beauty to soften old scars. I found a colorful Indian paint mine in my palette of research, near where I live in Colorado. I looked at it carefully, studying it, hoping it would give me a strata of metaphor of women's friendship's gone bad. Most often because of women masking addictions and chemical dependencies, incapable of understanding intimacy, in denial of lifestyle, preoccupied with material possessions, a jealous third party, co-dependency and serious shortcomings of positive social interaction, fails miserably of seeing self-worth, living falsely, any or all of these things listed.
Carefully phrased based on the decision of the natural process of erosion over time, it needs to soften and heal instead of continually masking and dressing up and putting on false pretenses when it is quite obvious it is disguised compromise, which further undermines and sabotages right living.
To do this requires looking closely at the softness of the clays and sands which over time, have crumbled from what once was a hard rock.
When we look at the scenic beauty of the multi-hued walls of the paint mine, it reminds us of the color of good relationships. I'll wager a pinch of red ocher between the fingertips that this folktale hits home with many women. It is a selection from my book FEMINIST FOLKTALES: A CATHARSIS FOR ANXIETIES AND A SOURCE OF POSITIVE FEEDBACK FROM VIEWING LIFE FROM A FEMALE PERSPECTIVE. This book was written for a dual purpose, also intended for the college classroom, studies on feminism.
S'LEDGE AND THE EMU BUSH
...The Indian paint mine is a few miles out. The colored clays were once mined by the prehistoric Indians for use as ceremonial body paint. The colors are caused by various iron oxides, yellow limonite and red hematite mixed with sediment. Erosion exposes layers stained by bands of bright yellow, ocher, brick red, shades of pink and mauve, and pure white.
...Based upon the decision the fact that clay has not been taken from the paint mine in nearly a century is why this story is being included, giving it a natural process of erosion time to remove old scars, saying perhaps women need to experience this same natural way of softening without damaging her chiseled beauty.
...So, the author is going to show women all about the soft clay that lies beneath a hard layer of white cross-bedded sandstone, which makes for a balanced rock (woman). The paint mine is a strata of metaphor embe dded with crystals of gypsum. Just wait until you see it when the moon comes up. The canyon walls twinkle with a sparkling, silver glitter on a clear night. And when you see it, that's when the magic begins.
...Look up at the capstones, pedestals, and arches. After close inspection, it isn't hard to imagine the Indians separating and milling the tinted clays into paints. Be capable of appreciating the scenic quality and beauty of the multi-hued walls. Is there a treasure at the end of the rainbow?
...That treasure can be the imagined spirits and totems of a vanished culture or the treasure can be the pastels of solitude...or that treasure can be a story from another culture, Australian...why it is told from the Colorado/New Mexico outback where the paint mine is located, where the sky is deeper and the moon and stars brighter than any place you can imagine. It's where the women Dreamtime followers store their metaphors when they're not using them. You want magic? The Colorado/New Mexico outback is thick with it. These are real women living their daily lives. They are religiously and culturally private and they open their land only to those women in need.
...This Dreamtime story is told around a bush telly, Australia's campfire. Dreamtime is a place...a place where stories are brought from the supernatural Australian Aboriginal ancestors. You can build a whole religion around it. Every woman in a Dreamtime story will know one another. They're having a bit of drama. Dreamtime followers pursue life as they see it.
...It takes a lot of self-discipline to create the Goddess. There's a different way to look at in out here in the Colorado/New Mexico outback. You can find your soul...soften your edges with the softer rock broken down into colorful sands and clays. The red ocher would be the one you're looking for...it's one of the weathered compounds of iron...the same stuff you're made of.
...Look at it...it's all here...the things that matter the most...friendship, softening, beauty, courtship, love. Your hand is soft as a rabbit's paw...you've got such soft palms for such a hard outline. Why are you whispering? Are you softening some? Nervous or aroused...or both? You're feeling the convert. It works a strange magic on some women in their 40s. They buy mini skirts, change jobs, wear gold, and disappear with exotic female dancers...some even carry it well into their 50s. Something happens. It happened to you.
...Does that hit home? Wherever that is. Maybe here. You're one of the smart ones...you bought Dreamtime, just over the Tropic of Capricorn under the mango trees, where there's just the right story...the story of S'ledge and the Emu Bush.
...The woman we are going to visit is S'ledge. She moved new to the outback. Camels hauled her house in pieces.
...She set the house over an emu bush, cut a hole in the floorboards so it could live inside. S'ledge catered to the emu bush for all the good it was going to do her. She became so entangled up in the emu bush, she could see nothing else...not the soft, clean sand of Yagga Yagga...not the deep sandstone gorges of Pilbara...not the botanical walkabout.
...Growing, growing, and growing more, the emu bush covered her windows. (don't you hate that?) forcing S'ledge to choose between the emu bush or her good relationships, the spirited ones who wrote S'ledge heartfelt letters of poetry and wisdom. She chose to lock her good relationships out, instead living lonely and cold, hiding her life behind the emu bush...like it was controlling her...poisoning her...making her choose (good relationships or bane).
...S'ledge's story illustrates the letdowns and heartbreaks life can inflict. So this is what happened.
...Are you listening? Are you picking up on it? Where the women you meet in a Dreamtime story will know one another.
...One hot day, the beekeeper was hauling his hives by truck to pollinate sunflowers. Tire blew out from the heat...the truck rolled over, spilling the hives...bees headed straight to S'ledges's house. They moved inside getting in through the mean cracks caused by the gloating emu bush pushing out everything that lived large and happy.
...Stung her bloody...made her curse...but what was worse, she walked across the road to the house of the ones who used to be her good relationships to get a compassionate poultice for the welts, neverminding how she pushed those good relationships away, but her good relationships didn't answer the door. Perhaps the good relationships were out on a National Geographic botanical walkabout, looking at dried billybuttons in the talcum-fine sand the color of paprika, fields of lilac pussy tails, gathering bush bananas and wild onions, stopping off at age-old rock carvings of circles and tracks near a waterhole where the kangaroos, emus, and wild turkeys watered. Entangled with an emu bush once herself, the author knew very well the manipulating ways of the emu bush, killed cows on the spot if they ate it. Killed off a woman's spirit too.
...One day at the end of the dry season, just before the wet..................
...What's the ending? On rare occasions, the author doesn't cite Dreamtime endings. She just leaves it dangling like a crumbling rock about to plunge its way off the cliff into soft sand.
...Oh, there is no real ending...it's all chiseled in the mind, not in the books. Really think about this one.
...No ending!
...Some say S'ledge never did get herself free of the emu bush and it smothered her. Some say lightning ignited a bush fire and it spread to S'ledge's house. She couldn't get out because the emu bush had her trapped and there was no way out for her. They say her family took her ashes to Barossa Valley in South Australia and spread them over the Shiraz vines heavy with grapes, by stout Lutheran churches built by German settlers many vintages ago. See that soft powder by your feet? It's red ocher that's crumbled into sand from a Dreamtime cliffhangar. Ocher and ochre...two spellings. What do you think happened to S'ledge?
...Pick up a pinch of the red ocher and rub it between your fingertips. It's soft, and home. Think for a minute. Take a soft dirt nap into the night...that is all...
Sage Sweetwater has closed her story board for reviews on Authors Den. Please feel free to read Sage's stories, but she asks that her readers leave no reviews. Thank you to all of you who have been generous and left reviews for Sage Sweetwater since July 2005. Thank you.
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