Energy and Imagination

“Energy is eternal delight.”—William Blake

About 15 years ago I met a Native American medicine man. He was a half-breed Choctaw, one of the Five Civilized Tribes that had been forced on the genocidal Trail of Tears by Andrew Jackson. He was basically a nomad and had settled here in town for a short time before moving on. During that time we became friends, and in our conversations he would sometimes tell me of what it was like to grow up on the reservation, learn the traditional ways, and then leave because that world was too small.

When I first met him he took a look at me and said, “I see the Energy has been beating you up.” By Energy he meant the vital force of my life, what the Chinese call Chi, the Japanese call Ki, and the Hindus call Prana. Though his talk of the concept of Energy sounds a bit New Ageish, he was anything but that. As he worked over my body he kept up a stream of interesting non-precious conversation. He was as matter-of-fact as if he were tuning up a car engine. Sometimes he would step outside his house for a smoke; not the nervous habit I normally saw in smokers, but one of simple release from world-weary experience before he returned to his healing trade.

What he meant by his comment to me was that my Energy was running amok. He described how in his tribe the Elders would watch the children, and when the children were five, would select those with the greatest Energy for training in the Medicine Way of the tribe. Without this training and discipline, the selected children’s Energy would run amok and they would end up crazy, alcoholic, or dead. I thought of my alcoholic father and his sprawling, catatonic, deadened binges. I said, “I bet the Energy beat up my dad so bad that he drank to kill the pain. I bet a lot of drunks do.”

He replied, “If you were to round up all the winos in L.A. and wire them together, you could blow up the whole goddamn town.”

While talking to him I could picture the beating I felt inside, and had felt inside since I was a child. I knew that I had needed someone to show me how to construct banks for the river that coursed through me. As it was, the flow just flooded my internal landscape and left devastation in its wake. I asked him how I had managed to survive all those years without guidance. He replied, “You used your imagination.”

Article Author: John Spivey

John Spivey is a writer and furniture maker who lives in Santa Barbara, California with his family. His personal blog is called Nature, Craft, & Soul. He can be contacted here.

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