Old Roads of Iktomo the Spider

Iktomo the Spider,
one of the legendary patrons of the Heyoka, weaves a web of light that holds the world together.
One has to be cautious of Iktomo--he's very helpful, but if you touch his web, well, he is after
all, a spider . . . .

Back when I was living alone I used to hit the road and just go wandering, when I had a few
days and no particular place to be. If I was curious about a place I'd go there, and if I had no
place in mind I'd just go. I call this "motel camping." It's outwardly rather pointless, but on
these trips something important would occasionally happen, like the thing I saw when I
stayed near Cahokia Mounds for a night.

When I sleep I don't usually wander far from "home," keeping within about thirty miles of
where I physically put myself. I suppose some people might wander around without limits,
but I work on a little different level than what is called the Astral Plane, so going beyond
that first boundary requires some extra effort. It's very complicated to explain. Long
journeys, say to the other side of the world from here, take a long time to accomplish and I
may work at them for months. Once the route is established it isn't hard to go back, if I have
a good reason to go--building the road is what takes time.

The only exception to this rule is that some places, the old places of power, are very easy to
reach if you can touch a connecting point somehow. The roads are already set--people built
them long ago, and even though their physical manifestation is long gone, the shamanic
pathways are still there. One of the first things I saw as a shaman, after my awakening in
1991, was a maze of light roads above me in the night sky. I looked on this with old eyes
and felt sad that they were so empty, knowing that in the old times they'd have been full of
travelers streaking back and forth like meteors. My vocation has fallen on hard times lately,
and the roads go unused.

I stopped for the night about twenty miles from Cahokia and went to sleep, hoping
something grand might happen. I'd been trying to dream of the place for a few months, but
hadn't been very successful, lots of dreams that didn't make much sense but nothing really
clear. There was a building with huge black doors that you had to kind of sidestep to go
through, and a glass case in the middle of a room that held something very small and very
important, but I couldn't reach through to see what it was. There was a gray forest of dead
trees and green ground that was absolutely flat--when I walked on it I had the feeling I was
about to fall through, a very eerie place.

That last night I was closer, so it wasn't so hard to Dream there. I had one powerful
experience that I felt was too good to be true, probably just imagination at work. I was on
top of the big temple mound, the one they call Monk's Mound now, and it was late at night
and very dark, no one there but me. I was standing at the edge of the plateau, facing west,
wearing a strange costume of woven feathers, robes over my arms like wings and a tall
headdress like the crest of a bird. The wind was strong and cold and directly in my face as I
raised my arms and ran forward, as though intending to fly. Then I woke from the dream,
thinking it was just a fantasy.

In the morning, half awake, I had a brief but clear vision of Cahokia in its glory, the city
teeming with people, the streets wide and white and raked smooth as though no one ever
walked there. It made no sense, in real terms. Roads are for transport. These weren't.

A few years later I would learn about the old cities; the maps in the Mayan towns that show
things that exist and also things that don't, as though an invisible town overlies the one you
see; the roads that lead in straight lines to no place of great importance, so far as one can tell
with physical eyes, but that lead to new cities and even new worlds, if a shaman flies them in
spirit. Back then, the first time I entered Cahokia, I just saw things without understanding.

That morning as I drove closer to the mounds, I passed a forest of dead grey trees half
submerged in a swampy lake, the water flat and still and covered with a thick bright green
mat of algae. Driving up to the museum, I saw that it was the building I'd dreamed about,
the black doors cast from heavy bronze, difficult to open, so the easy way past the bas reliefs
of Raven that guard the room beyond is to pull them open a foot or so and slide behind, as
in my Dream.

A mural on one of the walls showed what it might have been like there in the old days,
priests gathered on the tallest mound at sunrise, wearing headdresses and feathered robes
and welcoming the sun. (It was almost right.) In the center of one room was a small glass
display case. I walked up and looked into it, at a small stone tablet with a carving cut into it,
the outline of a being who is half bird and half man.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I could touch the Birdstone, and sometimes I try
to go there in my Dreaming, to reach through the glass for it--but it seems beyond my
reach, and I suppose it is that way for good reasons. If I were to hold it again, and a flood of
memories came back, maybe I'd just be overwhelmed, and the thing I'm here to do in this
life would be forgotten.

I remember too many things already.