How Cattails Led Me to Tracker

April 2, 2023, How Cattails Led Me to Tracker

We all have in our memory some story of the cattail. It is a survival plant with many

facets, shelter, water, fire, and food. I hope to learn more of its gifts, yet I know now that it is

the plant person who led me to Tracker. I realized this when Donna asked for contributions

to the Medicine Circle about the cattail. Two years before my first Tracker class, Philosophy,

I had the privilege of helping care for my seven year old granddaughter. I learned so much

from her in those years that I called her my teacher, just as Tom shows us in every class that

we are his teacher. She opened new windows into my personal memory. I have no doubt that

Grandfather learned much from a seven year old Tom Brown Jr in the time since he first

discovered the White Coyote child playing in the water.

My story here, written in my time before Tracker, is one that I share with others, just as

you who are writing and reading about cattails will carry stories back to your tribe. My intent

in offering this story to you is to share how both Natalia and I sensed the Spirit that moves in

and through the cattail. It is but one example of how the plant people touch and move our

inner vision, Knowing without knowing how we Know. I leave this story for you, as Keepers,

to find your own meaning in reflection.

As a preface, I experienced this gift after I had spent the day walking through hilly and

rocky woodlands. My granddaughter Natalia opened my eyes far beyond anything I had felt

all day. Here is the story of how she did it.

…

Below the tree is the stream, and the stream leads me back home. Today, April 7, 2017, it

is swollen and muddied. This is odd. The little feeders are all clear. Did the very old and

abandoned beaver dam upstream break and release some silt? Had someone muddied the

stream with machines, man crossing, making roads or ditches or culverts? It is too late for

me to travel upstream to investigate. I must return home.

My short trip to the mailbox started two hours ago. I gather the mail and take Karin’s

mail to her house. It is six o’clock in the evening and Natalia has played indoors all day. She

is bouncing off the walls. I tell her that it is time for recess. She must put on warm clothes, a

hat, and waterproof boots.

“Let’s go, Grandpa, we have to fix the fort.”,

and she is off running down hill to our teepee made from tall white pine branches, to the

pretend fire place, to the play mountain of wood chips, to all things wild and wonderful.

“The teepee is falling over, Grandpa, fix it quick!”

It is big enough for two or three kids, and the winter snow and wind has given it a bit of a

list to the north. We start dragging more branches to prop it up.

“My hands are cold, Grandpa.”

She runs back to the house for gloves and returns in an instant. It’s not raining any

longer, but the wind is picking up, and the cold evening air is falling down into this valley. I

am truly getting chilled, sweated up from my walks, still in just a flannel shirt and vest, with

no gloves. She has just begun to play, warmed by her copious energy.

Now she is at the edge of the small cattail swamp formed where the stream dams against

our driveway before it runs through the culvert pipe. She wants me to cut some cattails, fluffy

and shedding their winged seeds. They make wonderful snowy wands to wave in the breeze. I tell her that my hands are cold.

“No, Grandpa, we have to stay here and find food for our teepee (the cattail is pretend

food). Here, warm your hands with this fluff.”

She bangs the cattail on my hand, and I am covered with fluff.

“There, aren’t you warmer now?”

I am indeed warmer now. Natalia walks into the edge of the swollen stream, the water

half way to her boot tops. It is flowing strong, waist deep just inches away from her toes.

“Grandpa, look how beautiful the water is.”

She looks me straight in the eye, and with utmost sincerity gives me the pearl.

“Grandpa, there is something that's been really bothering me. I can’t get it out of my

head. How was I created, Grandpa? Where did I come from? How was the earth created, and the stars, and cartoons, and TV? How was God created? I just can’t understand it. I've been thinking and thinking about it. It bothers me all the time. How was everything created,

Grandpa?”

Whew! Seven years old, and she has knocked me to my spiritual knees. What a

responsibility I have now. How do I answer the unanswerable? I say,

“Natalia, I have always wondered about this, and I still wonder about this every day too.”

I know that every religion, every culture, every society, every family, every person has

stories — stories imagined, stories told, stories pondered, shared, changed, written, changed again, passed through generations. Indeed, creation stories laid the foundation of all civilizations. I give her bits of creation stories.

“God created everything. The sun and moon went to live in the sky because there was not

enough room for the sun and moon and water and earth to live together. The eagle and the

bear and the buffalo and the mouse together embrace the spirit that is everything. All my

relations.”

“None of this makes sense, Grandpa.”

“No, Natalia, none of this makes sense. You can’t figure it out, I can’t figure it out, the

birds, the bees, the animals can’t figure it out. It is something we must feel in our hearts,

throughout our whole lives. It is our spiritual sense. But truly, Natalia, you do feel the spirit

of creation when you look into the running water of the stream, and you simply say to me,

‘Grandpa, look how beautiful the water is.’ ”

We go home now, because we are cold and hungry. I share the pearl with Karin, her

Mommy. Karin looks at me in wonderment.

“You are so lucky. She never asks me questions like that. How can you be so lucky?”

“It’s not luck, Karin. It’s just how our life stories overlap, how our life boundaries are

similar, and at the same time are very different. You are the mother. You have your child-

rearing responsibilities, your job, your schedules, and your rules that you must keep in order

to maintain your household. My role is different, as Grandfather. When Natalia is with me,

we have only three rules. No bonking of heads, no breaking off arms and legs, and no blood

coming out. Anything else is fair game. Of course, there are many little variations of the three

rules, like no drowning, no bonking your friends heads, no playing in poison ivy, and stuff

like that. But play with Grandpa is free. And free play leads to free expression, to dreaming

out loud in play, to inventing games and picking up worms and bugs and dead possum

skulls, things that Mommies don’t always have time to do, or must make special rules about,

like ‘don’t touch dead animals’. Grandpas allow play to go to the place where play must go,

while still keeping the three simple rules. When play goes down to the stream and the cattail

fluff floats freely in the breeze, the water ripples by, so clear and cool and beautiful, Natalia

truly sees Creation, feels Creation, and allows Creation to open her heart and share with me

the pearl,”

“How was I created, Grandpa?’”

…

Tom Foote

©2023Thomas Griffin Foote - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED printed 1/18/23 page 14 Daily_2023