At the start of our journey to France, nearly a month ago now, we stayed for a few nights with my eldest daughter, who lives in mid-Wales. Sophie is a silversmith, a celebrant, and a healer who works mainly with groups of women.
One evening after dinner she brought out a pack of Native American medicine cards. In the pack there are fifty-two cards, each bearing the image of a different animal: bear, skunk, eagle, snake, raccoon, coyote and so on.
The cards are accompanied by a book which offers interpretations, or teachings, to be drawn from each animal.
The invitation is to hold in one’s mind some personal question or issue, while drawing a card face down from the pack. Then to see what the animal drawn might have to say about it.
Over dinner, Sophie had been talking about deceit in the context of close relationships. She was the first to go. The card she drew was Owl. Owl stands for deception.
Had I not known her as I do I would have fallen off my chair. But Sophie is extremely intuitive and so, while it was pleasing to witness – and helpful to her (Owl also signifies wisdom, which she is not entirely short of; a fatherly observation, I know) – it came as no great surprise.
When it came to my turn, the rather vague question in my mind was to do with the project that’s now occupying me here in France.
More than twenty-five years ago I started writing a novel, The Witness. In the tradition of Stevenson and Buchan, it told of a young man and a small boy with learning difficulties, on the run in the Highlands of an independent Scotland, during a conflict of the relatively near future.
It was picked up by a big publisher, was well reviewed, shortlisted for awards, and sold decently. But, I always felt it was hampered by having been published as a Young Adult title. A measure of my own arrogance perhaps, but I believed it deserved better, or at least a wider audience.
Happily, Jenny, my agent, has always loved the story. So when, last year, I presented her with some chapters of a rather half-baked attempt at a memoir, which she politely declined, she suggested instead that I revisit The Witness.
So here in our gîte the re-write has begun. The two main tasks are: to change the casus belli, since things have moved on politically in the last quarter century and the contemporary story calls for a different kind of conflict; and to increase the age of the main character, lifting him from the cusp of adulthood into full maturity.
My very vague question to the medicine cards was to do with how I should handle his relationship with the small boy, now that he is to become older.
There was, Jenny had pointed out, a certain innocence, a tenderness to the original relationship which gave the story its heart and needed to be preserved.
The card I drew was Porcupine. Porcupine stands for Innocence (I managed to stay in my chair). This is what the book had to say:
“The South of the medicine wheel is the place of childlike innocence and humility. It is the home of playfulness, and the position of Porcupine on the medicine wheel of life. Porcupine has many special qualities, and a very powerful medicine: the power of faith and trust.
“Porcupine is a gentle, loving creature, and non-aggressive. When fear is not present, it is possible to feed a Porcupine by hand and never get stuck by its quills. Through understanding the basic nature of this animal, you may come to understand your own need for trust and faith, and for becoming like a child again.”
Now, the cards were not saying that I am Porcupine, any more than that Sophie is Owl – that’s not how it works – but they did seem, in answer to my question, to underline the fact that that quality of childlike innocence is essential to the story.
I took them also to say that both characters have to trust: the small boy because it’s one of the few faculties available to him; the main character because the opposite of trust or faith is hopelessness and despair, which in the circumstances of the story he cannot afford.
I don’t believe that mass-produced, commercially available medicine cards have magical properties in and of themselves. That said, I’m not sure how to explain two such striking ‘coincidences’ in two successive draws from the deck.
Sophie would say, I think – and she’ll correct me if I’m making a false assumption, that on some level an energetic connection takes place between the animal and the questioner. Or to give it a Jungian framing, perhaps in the moment our individual subconscious connects with a universal consciousness. She knows a lot more about these things than I do.
More prosaically, I would say that they allow one to tap into some kind of universal wisdom by offering powerful metaphors for the human condition. Of course, one brings one’s own projections to them, but that is part of the point. That is how they allow one to arrive at insights that would be hard to come by any other way.
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” said Hamlet. I believe he was right, and the world is a much more interesting place for it.
A Few Kind Words 