America is complicated place. I am learning to speak English and have hard time understanding about (how do you say) nouns and verbs. In Quechua, the language of my people, there are no nouns and verbs. It is a language more like a river always moving, changing.
Let me explain. In English there is a horse and the horse does certain things. The horse walks to the river. The horse drinks water. The horse rests under the shade of a tree. In Quechua there are many different horses. There is walking-to-the-river-horse, drinking-water-horse and resting-under-tree-horse everything connected, always changing.
The same is true for a woman’s blood. Every blood time different a new healing, learning in a woman’s life. Many people today are looking for teachers from the old cultures. They pay much money and travel far to be with medicine men and women. But truly you have all the teachings you will ever need in your blood.
Think of this way: Every blood time has its own grandmother. Not all grandmothers we can see. But if a woman sits quiet with herself and asks to know, the medicine of that blood time will be revealed to her.And as she bleeds through the seasons of her life she will grow wise because she will know what it feels like to be woman- standing-on-the-earth and woman-planting-seeds and woman-reaching-up- to-the-sun. And when the last of her moons has passed, she will be a grandmother in the world who can teach the daughters that their blood is not one thing, but many things, all things connected.
