Waking up the Rake

By King Meera -

It was the aim of our syllabus committee to include marginalized voices, such as Linda Hogan's. She is not mainstream because (a) she is of Native American ethnicity and (b) her themes are somewhat metaphysical: life, death, rebirth, the circle of life, oneness with nature's people etc. This essay on the Native American perspective w.r.t. Linda Hogan is a lifesaver.

Let us examine the many, many themes in this essay.

Firstly, work: 
-according to Elana here, working shapes the way people live, from individuals to communities, to the globe. When I think about it, “work” means to me to exert physical or mental effort in order to do, make or accomplish something, or the function of completing a process or carrying out a task.
-Hogan carries the words "Our work is our altar" throughout her life, the words having deeply resounded with her on account of just having been healed and nursed by the woman who uttered them. 
-She sees her work - cleaning cages - as an apprenticeship, with the birds as her teachers. Thus learning to be equal to them is her worship of nature and its cycles of growth and decay, birth and death.

Second, the intertwining of the new with the old:
-Hogan understands the dynamics of the old and the new in her recounting of a childhood incident - her braiding her grandmother's hair by the fire. Ancestry and family are a manifestation of this endless cycle. "I saw my future in her body and face, and her past alive in me."

Third, beauty in death: (page 371, start reading at "carcasses")
Her work of cleaning cages has allowed her to encounter the wondrous aesthetic in death, where once leathery flesh becomes a delicately veined coat for the inner fur, the small intestinal casing, holding excrement like beads in a necklace, pellets spat out by birds, with an occasional claw or sharp bone inside, looking as though it were woven, and the stark beauty of bone fragments.

Fourth, the lessons she learns at the Center:
silence, stillness, equality of all life forms, the actual form that life takes, our paradoxical wounders/healers relationship with other life forms (*)

Fifth, the rewards of this work:
oneness with nature, being in the presence of birds, witnessing life and even other life-forms like the occasional snake or turtle

Finally, sixth, work, again, but: 
raking, (*) repetitive work; (page 375, "Raking. It is a labor round and complete...")
"Work is the country of hands, and they want to live there in the dailiness of it, the repetition that is time's language of prayer, a common tongue."
In raking there is healing; and when the rake wakes up, all Earth's gods are reborn and they dance in the dusty air around us.

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