Spirit Sister	Spiritcatcher	Flamekeeper	Trading Hearts	Blue Shell

 I sought the face of the Goddess in a path of colored pebbles, that I might use the painted earth to mirror the woman in the land.  I found Her in the form of an ancient spirit-woman whose dark skin shines with blue ochre.

Blue ochre is vivianite, an uncommon iron phosphate mineral that gives a rare indigo color to fossil mammoth ivory.  It forms in mud that is rich in bone, shell, and iron-rich earths such as green clay and yellow ochre.  Its crystals are the color of ancient seawater, and grow in the heart-shaped hollows of fossil clam shells.  Blue dust fills the spiral crypt of a snail shell and decorates the curved dagger of a sabercat tooth with delicate porcelain patterns.  It is one of the minerals that forms the "jewel-like relics" described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the pale green glassy pebbles found in the cooling ashes of funeral pyres.  As a mineral pigment, blue ochre lacks the exotic intensity of azurite or lapis lazuli.  But its murky coolness flows in closer harmony with the other iron earths.  It is the color of the Oldest River that flows between the worlds, a symbol of the transformation of death.  Where bones crumble into chalk and blood dissolves in Riverwater, where the rusting Iron Gate collapses among petrified tree roots, vivianite crystallizes into a map of the Hidden Land on the threshold of the House of Blue Earth.  The spirit who guards the house is Blue Shell Woman, an Ice Age shaman, my guide and tutelary spirit in shamanic work.  This story is a bridge between her land and mine, and between my world and yours.

Her home is hidden in dark cliffs below a glacier, where a gravel river widens into the sea.  It is a small cave with a ceiling of pale green ice and a pool of clear water in the smooth black floor.  She wanders among the rocks, her long brown hair tangled in mussel shells that clatter and tinkle like bells.  Her skin is painted in blue spirals.  She has outgrown the weathered brown skin of age, and left her blood as red ochre dust in the gravel ten thousand years ago.  She wears a deerskin coat adorned with curling hornlike fringe, stone beads, and carved twig figures.  Shining dark bone flutes huddle like tiny children among the amulets, their airholes watching and blinking as if alive.  Her brown eyes are shy and wild, and her ageless face is wise, loving, and severe, at once lonely and self-sufficient, familiar and utterly Other.  Long ago she was a shaman for the People who followed the reindeer across the ice.  She kindled precious Fire, called the spirits of animals and ancestors with her flutes, and climbed a giant antler to the moon in search of lost souls.  When the People no longer wanted her magic, she summoned a snowy owl and flew on its back along the river until she saw a huge fossil tortoise shell, round and white as the moon, and marked with patterns that spoke to her in a new language of divination.  She counted the thirteen plates on its back, one for each moon of the year, and found an oracle.  None of the People ever saw a living tortoise and she knew the creature only through dreams.  But she crawled into the hollow shrine of the shell and found the gate to a deeper, older magic. Through it her soul entered the earth.

Now she sends me a white tortoise as a spirit guide.  When I stand on the dome of the carapace, the lines in the shell deepen into rock fissures, white clay canyons, and stream channels floored with black rocks.  I follow the rushing water until I find the tortoise again, shining like a small white stone in the shallows beside her cave, and she appears.  Sometimes she is dancing and eager, a young girl with a secret.  Other times she is solemn and remote, a wisewoman with a lesson.  I sought her in a time of illness and isolation, when I discovered her power to connect and transform...

Her hands glowed with golden light as she braided white-fringed grasses in my hair and painted seven blue tiger stripes on my back.  She crumbled my ribs into burning charcoal and replaced them with finger streaks of cool white clay.  She asked for my heart and I gave it to her in the form of a small red bird that fluttered into her breast and lit up her body like a rose quartz lantern.  Purple light rippled over the blue spirals.  She reached into her dark pool and shaped a ball of clay that sprouted in her hands, and offered me a new heart made of leaves.  I took it and felt a forest open behind my new clay ribs.  She gave me a spiritcatcher, a hollow brown bone filled with blue dust that became first a glacial waterfall, then a shower of white earth that she poured from a turtle shell filled with chalk, mica flakes, and quartz crystals.  She conjured a single flame out of a hole in the cave floor, and asked me to breathe in all the fire through the spiritcatcher.  She played a wild, piercing tune on a long heron leg bone, and her other flutes echoed this Call.  Shadows, golden eyes, and more flutes appeared beyond her in the dark.  For a moment I saw the smoky outline of a more ancient figure, the Ice Age earth goddess, mammoth-haired, holding a human baby with the face of a lion cub.  The cave became crowded with ancestors while I breathed in fire under singing eyes that flickered like lightning bugs.  The flame curled up inside my chest and disappeared.  Sounds and shadows vanished, and the pit in the black rock grew cold.  She tossed the little white tortoise in, and it became the moon reflecting on water far below.  I followed the moon through the hole and floated in the night sea, wrapped in shining threads hung with stars, and washed up on a tiny round island.  I stood on the warm chalk of the tortoise shell once more.  Pale clay and mica covered my skin, reflecting the desert sun.  Beneath the white earth I was as cool as damp sand under a stone, with a double spiral in blue ochre painted over my heart.