if there was hate and sorrow the network was negative.
She was impressed by heroes, wise men and saints
but most of all she loved the saints because their love
of the holy was a passion for love and joy that let
her also love the truth of the wise, the good of the heroes,
and the beauty of the artists in a network of affirmation.
Of course, as a child she was not aware of all this
but she did identify with it in the value system
of her young and buoyant mother who in great joy
with her young family could love all her sorrow
and even be confident in the face of any threats.
By identifying with her mother’s belief in joy and of
turning sorrow into joy even though it remained sorrow
mother as a child already began practicing the Stoic ethic
that flowed into St. Paul and St. Francis and the Anglicans.
I.1.6 In the Logic of True Thoughts
When she was six mother finally got to go to school
in a little one-room school house on the Fish Creek Flats.
Through the summer high up the Iron Mine Canyon
she was already learning to read in her two books.
The anticipation increased through late August
and they took the sheep down and they moved into
their fall-winter ranch house and mother’s birthday
finally arrived and her father drove her to school.
Already at six mother began practicing the liberal arts
of reading, writing, speaking and listening in orderly silence.
She had to learn to concentrate and not be distracted
as she practiced in her books and notebooks while
the teacher was talking to others in that same little room.
She began to reflect on words as she heard new voices.
She started making the transition into the age of reason.
Toward the end of that school year she began to lose
her baby teeth and to get the teeth one by one that
would lead her along toward the next stage of puberty.
And she was educated into the very first steps of
grammar, rhetoric and logic and the age of reason
into which she took her first steps was the age of logic.
And she began to learn to connect the dots into
an orderly whole as she moved from the immediacy
of emotional identification into reflection on words
and ideas that began to initiate her in self reflection.
And her teacher brought a very new voice into her life
and she would go home and eagerly tell her mother
about her school work and they already began to do
homework together as mother moved from the realm
of preconscious attitude, moods and feelings into
the realm of conscious thoughts, words and deeds.
I.1.7 In the Intonation of Incantational Words
As a little girl mother identified with her mother’s speech
and its clearly articulated, sweet melodious tone.
The muscles and nerves of mother’s lips, tongue and throat
were formed just as were her mother’s as they spoke together
and worked more and more together doing dishes,
cleaning house, cooking and baking, washing and ironing.
Mother wanted to do all with her mother and though mother
had a child’s voice it was moving ever closer to being exactly
like her mother’s with its world making song and magic.
The sing-song reciting of nursery rhymes was almost
a dance that played forth out of joy and back into joy.
Leona’s shamanic spiritual exercises that converted
absence into presence let her become a reader and speaker
of the word that had a cheering and helping power for any
who heard the near incantational rhythms of her voice.
Mother identified with her mother’s power of speech
which could put a halo of magic around each spoken thing.
There would be bacon, eggs and toast with choke-cherry jelly.
They would look so good and smell and taste so good.
But, if Gramma said: “bacon, eggs, toast and jelly”
in her sweet, prolonged, intoned, musical way they
would become unforgettably lovely in your memory forever.
Mother took on her mother’s lovely and playful tones
and her speech had something of a prayer that deified things.
Already in the second grade the discipline of her school work
was taking mother into a logic that was on the alert for
any mistakes or any self-deceit that might hinder truth.
The teacher gave her spelling exercises and checked each letter
and began to develop in mother a careful precision that tried
to get everything on the map of life and in the book of life just right.
And mother’s attitude guided her words in style, form and content.
I.1.8
