Memory Walking

This is now my third attempt to get this specific post done. I suppose this will happen frequently, whenever I try to explain a concept that has roots and tendrils everywhere in my psyche. If I could explain it simply, I wouldn't have to include it here.

I left off last night with the idea of growing my hair out, intertwined with the seedling idea of adopting a mostly new piece of self-identification. I say mostly; I'd toyed with it before, and I'd introduced myself at the Brock Aboriginal Students' Organization fairly soon in the school year. I borrowed the book "Changing Ones" out of their library - and returned it three weeks later, almost untouched. I couldn't study this from a book first; I needed people. Go ahead and tell me that a tradition originally passed along around campfires by word of mouth can properly be transmitted in print - I'll laugh, or maybe cry. (I'm not trying to put down the book in the slighest, by the way! It is an excellent text, and I do intend to read it later.)

I needed people, real people, telling stories one at a time. And eventually I found them - in the form of a Facebook group, of all things. Dancing Moccassins is a group formed to share any and all fragments or whole pieces of Native culture that its members and staff have access to. It also frequently shares along information about Two-Spirits in general or in particular tribes; for example, this note about the legend of Turquoise Boy, the first Two-Spirit among the Navajo. This group was exactly what I was looking for, and with it as a starting point, I've started branching out and finding articles like Shaking Our Shells (about and for Cherokee male-bodied Two-Spirits, but not exlusive of others), and this list of other places I could look for information.

And then, about two weeks ago, I had a dream. Now, I dream frequently enough that every one could not possibly be significant, but this night was different. I dreamed that I had searched the internet and finally found a Cherokee elder (on Facebook, of all places - FB, get out of my dreams!) who was willing to tell me whatever I wanted to know. In my dream, I fired off a bunch of questions, and was so excited by the answers I received that I essentially ran off to go process it all - forgetting to continue the interaction. I came back some time later, my head now full of all the new questions raised by the answers I'd gotten, and fired them off too.

In the dream, the elder gracefully responded to the new set of questions, but also included a section of personal reflection. (He?) said, with a certain friendly amusement, that what I had done had suggested the name of "Memory Walker". My memory of the complex significances of the name slipped away like a fistful of water as I woke - which was immediately after 'reading' the elder's response - but I managed to capture my non-verbal impression of it, at least. The best I can describe it as is this:
Someone who walks in memory, both as in thoughts and as in the past. Someone who spends a great deal of time thinking, and thinking about what other people think (walking in others' memories). Someone who deals with information and thoughts and memories the way that other people deal with thread or leather or wood. Also, someone who can get so caught up in the world inside the mind that they forget about the world outside! This is Memory Walker.

And isn't that me, now?

I woke from the dream with a sense of immense significance, that this dream meant something. I shook my partner awake (or she woke herself as I woke) in the too-early morning, and told her the gist of the whole dream while it was still fresh in my mind. I repeated it to her in case I forgot, and I repeated it to myself a few times to try to avoid losing details - I knew I needed to go back to sleep, and I outright refused to let unconsciousness wash away how I had felt in that dream.

I immediately fell into a second, distinct dream. The details of this one are very hazy, but it involved someone finding the body of an animal that had died and somehow scattering its remains. The moral of the dream - and my dreams don't usually appear as fables like this, either - was "Don't scatter the bones of a creature - otherwise it is disrespectful to the spirit of the animal that died". I woke myself up from that one by accident, because as soon as it reached that point, I thought (while still asleep) 'omg! it's another significant dream! I have to remember this one too!'. As soon as I started trying to review the dream, I belatedly realized that I had actually stopped dreaming and woken up. Even still, it felt like exactly the kind of dream that, back in the day, I would've reported to the rest of my village, and everyone would have dutifully started obeying this new request from the Spirit World...

(Side note: okay, probably not new. It just seems like common sense to not scatter the remains of a creature hither and yon with no good reason; would you want some brickhead to come along and make merry with your corpse? I didn't think so.)

There was a third dream, but it is long gone in the mist. Still, all that in one night - within days of telling myself that yes, I was going to actively find out if there is a place for me in Cherokee culture as a female-bodied Two-Spirit individual - is simply too good to ignore.

There is another note I should make - I suck at coming up with names. I liberally abuse baby name sites and fantasy name generators whenever I need to name a character or a location. My X-Men character never got a codename at all. My first SCA name was just what my parents figured they'd call me at events when I was little, and my second one is just my mundane name with 'of Ravenglass' tacked on the end - which is itself also my parents' invention. Me dreaming a name, as clearly as I did, is like someone else dreaming the structure of the benzene molecule.

I sent out a tentative message or two to people I thought might have an education opinion on whether I was full of crap about this. I always worry about my 'significant' stuff being full of crap. The answer was: 'you may have just been named! Congrats.' Relief! Success! Dreams are significant in the very culture I am starting to investigate - and to be named in one so soon after beginning my search feels like both an honour and a welcome. It encourages me to continue looking.

And I like being Memory Walker, there's the thing. It's not just a variant of 'Walking Softly' or 'HikeQuietly' or any of the other variants I've used around the internet for the past couple of years. Those were (actually a misquote) from Theodore Roosevelt's phrase, "Speak softly, but carry a big stick" - something I found very clever around when I really, really needed to stop being Moonshadow, and when I was toying with the notion of trying to be hardcore. Memory Walker is very, very different in its significance. I thought of a half-dozen other ways that the name could work for me in the days following the dream. It would be an excellent name for a psychologist or a teacher, the two things that I'm interested in becoming; one guides people through their memories to help them heal, the other guides the young in forming their own memories.

I'm not going to go around starting to call myself Memory Walker everywhere online, or in person - or even tell very many people. It would stop being special, then. But I have it now, the first feather in my medicine pouch, and I will keep it safe.