Wingapo Cheskchamay (“Welcome, All Friends” in Powhatan language)

I share this excerpt from my book with you now because I have lately struck a chord in some of my posts….there are others besides me who do not feel that they fit in, and are looking for their tribe.

Being “lost” is a kind of dramatic tale to weave…..it appeals to many. There are certainly lots of stories in history of “lost tribes” and their tragic search to come home.

I am a prime example of this in a genealogical sense….I see no separation between what lives in my blood, what lives in my mind, and what lives in my heart…..the greatness of my spirit holds all aspects of myself within its hands.

However, I choose that my having been “lost” has brought me many gifts and learnings, and that in the end, I have not been “lost” at all.

An excerpt from “The Blue Eyed Indian”
By Licia Berry www.liciaberry.com
Copyright 2008

Outer Banks of North Carolina

“My European ancestors were among the first to arrive at the remote barrier islands of what is now called North Carolina’s Outer Banks. In the 1500’s, the islands were alive with the Croatoan Indian hunters and fisherman who scoured the maritime forests and the rich waters for bountiful fish and game. When the fair-skinned people with the blue eyes arrived from the giant crafts on the water, my Indian ancestors were intrigued, and being polite, welcomed the visitors to their island. They feasted together, they showed the guests their lovely island (like we would for any tourist to our home town), and eventually, some of them fell in love.

Some of the fair skinned people feathered into life with the Indians; others went north to create the English settlement of Roanoke Island. This settlement later became “The Lost Colony”, when, fearing they had been abandoned by the English and needing help to survive, they returned south to live with the friendly Croatoan Indians in what is now Buxton, NC. These are the people I come from.

When the next larger waves of Europeans would arrive to the New World a generation or two later, they wrote with their quill pens in their journals of the peculiar “Blue Eyed Indians” they encountered along the North Carolina coast.

As more Europeans arrived, the goodness of the land on the Outer Banks was coveted for its rich resources and its location as a close ally to the ports in Virginia. The Indians began to feel the conflict that these fair skinned people brought into their midst. Skirmishes broke out, and eventually, the fair skinned people overtook the islands that had been occupied by Indians for 10,000 years.

Outer Banks Indians fishing on Pamlico Sound

The blue-eyeds among the Indians had a choice to make; were they white, or Indian? They would lose their lands on the island if they sided with their red-skinned kin….Would they survive if they sided with their European blood? For some, the call to explore the blood of their parents or grandparents, those who had come from far across the waters, brought a certain sense of longing, and they stayed with the whites. A few elected to go with the tribes, who retreated inland to nurse their wounds and to make plans about how to carry on. Some went north to now Virginia to be absorbed into the great Powhatan nation; others remained in the woods and wetlands of inland coast and eventually disappeared into the trees with their culture. The Croatoan had lost their best fishing grounds, lost many of their children and suffered humiliation after opening their arms and hearts to these fair-skinned people. But those who were part Indian, those who elected to stay with the Europeans, lost the precious knowledge and support of their Indian culture.

Generations of Europeans came to the Outer Banks and settled on this wild coast, making their living fishing those waters once enjoyed by the Powhatan, and scavenging off of the hundreds of ships that floundered on the Diamond Shoals, earning the nickname “The Graveyard of the Atlantic”. My father’s side of the family still remains on this remote outpost, miles off the mainland of our country. They speak in a soft brogue that reminds of me of Scotland, England and a faint tongue that is lost, the language extinct except for a few words. They are stoic and stubborn, refusing to leave the island when hurricanes bear down on the fragile sands. They also don’t like to admit that they are part Indian.

In fact, I didn’t know that we had any Indian blood until I was in my thirties, when a rebellious aunt whispered to me of our history. I have observed a bigotry and arrogance in some of these noble Hatteras people, as if they are better than every one else, perhaps because of what they have survived as they eke out their livings in this harsh place. I have never understood this stubborn need to protect our “heritage” as all-European (or, all white as they would say). Perhaps when they were forced to make the decision to be “white” in order to keep their homes and land on Hatteras Island, a psychic door closed on any other possibility.

But I was different.

All of my life the spirits of the wind, the water, the rocks and trees and earth have spoken to me. As a child, I was a wild nature girl; tangled hair and dirty face were my costume….I fought taking baths and showers, preferring to remain sister to the dirt. In frustration and in answer to my defiant nature, my mother chopped all my hair off at age 6. I tried to get lost in the woods and never could, because I knew the way home. The animals were my guides and messengers. The forest whispered of its love for me. The universe supported me, and Nature was my friend.

Yet, I was so different than the family who surrounded me. I didn’t fit; when I spoke of the subtle energy that I tapped into, I was ignored or strongly corrected. I wasn’t hearing and sensing and seeing those things; I was making things up. I got quieter about my feelings, but they never went away. Under the protection of the dense brush and out of sight of my elders, I performed ceremonies to honor dead birds or lizards that I found, to listen to and guide the ghosts that needed help to find their way home, to dance with all of creation as my cohort in life. No one had taught me these things; I just knew how to do them. And then came my initiation into the shamanic world….”

To be continued….

A Blue Eyed Indian

Well, more changes to report in the never-ending stream of it our family has seen in the past year!

Since the ankle break forcibly sat me down, I have become a person who is more still and who is becoming more quiet.  I learned LOTS of amazing things during the whole ankle incident (and am still learning, although it seems the insights are slowing down a bit to a steady, manageable flow rather than a torrent).  But what is interesting to me right now is the change that has happened in my family as a result of me not taking energetic center stage.

Each of my fellow Berrys-in-the-patch is stepping up in a new way into their own power.  They all got to see how much I do and how much I manage (read: control) in our lives, even subconsciously.  This shifting of power has been a positive change for all of us.  The burden for me of carrying such a load has been too much, and I have paid the price in some ways in my own creative life.  Peter has stepped up in new ways as a man and caretaker of his family, and that is a miracle and a delight to witness and be part of.  And my two boys are stepping into their own power and knowing, as well.

Part of the miracle of this change is that my family of peacemakers (read: people who don’t always speak up about what they want in the name of not making waves) is now being more real about their feelings.  Honesty has always been a core value for me, but sometimes I don’t say what I feel for fear of creating conflict, getting hurt, or fearing I won’t be believed anyway.  I also bought in to that crazy “spiritual” myth that if I am an evolved person, I should not feel angry, sad, frustrated, miffed or otherwise less than blissful, and that if I did, that meant there was something wrong with ME, not that a boundary had been crossed that was my job to defend…that’s another story for later. 

My family is like this, too, but fortunately are relearning this pattern.  In the name of this occurring, my Beloved husband shared a deep truth that he had been withholding for fear of the very things I’ve mentioned above.  It all happened one Friday when he got home from a brutal work week (he is working extra hard in his business to make our income and having a rough go in this economy); he was just exhausted and beaten.  We had been trying to figure out how we were going to manifest a move to California with the financial difficulties we are having, as well as California going through a really crazy time right now.  I offered to massage his neck and shoulders, where he holds tension.  As I worked on him, he softened under my touch, and then, out f the blue, he said in a small voice, “If it were just me, I would live on the gulf coast.” 

Something opened up in the energy field between us…and I felt a sensation of being “breathed” (channeling sometimes feels this way), and heard come out of MY mouth, “If you deal with your issues about X, I will follow you to TALLAHASSEE.”  As soon as I said it, my eyes got big, and Peter turned around, and his eyes were big, too.  We looked at each other and felt our energy expanding from the inside and getting bigger.  It felt GOOD. 

We sat with this, talking amongst the two of us for weeks, not wanting to say anything to the kids (or anyone else) due to the number of times we have changed course with this whole moving thing.  We finally felt sure enough that we were on to something because of how genuinely good we felt, and we told the kids,  To our great surprise, they were ecstatic, and shared that they had wanted to go to Florida to live, but thought we would never go there again.  Ah.  The truth finally outs.   

So, we went for two weeks, staying at no cost in a friend’s house.  We fell in love with Tally; it has all the things we are looking for in a place to live, is even better for us as a family than the lovely central coast of California, is half the cost to live…the list goes on.  We plan to move in August in time to get the kids in school.

No, we haven’t sold either of our properties in Colorado yet (see here to check them out  http://www.berrytrip.us/Sanctuary.htm and http://www.670grande.com/)

No, it is not logical, especially at this time of old systems break-down, to move across the country and take on more expense.  But it is a mental health issue at this point.  As much as we have loved the land and some of the people where we have lived the last three years, we MUST move on.  There is no other option. 

So, I ask for your prayers and cheers and encouragement….at the hardest and most uncertain of times, we are choosing to do what is right for our family regardless of what it looks like to others (this is getting to be a familiar pattern!)  We are running into the arms of a new life, new community, new soul family, and a new opportunity for goodness in our lives. 

view from our front porch looking towards South Fork CO, early spring

We are back in Colorado after our almost 6 month journey to find our new location; we have been here for a couple of weeks, getting settled in and focusing on healing.  In a little while, we will start packing up and making our arrangements to get back to California.

Snow Beauty

But in the mean time, we really want to enjoy the rugged and pristine beauty of the San Luis Valley here in south-central Colorado.  It is a little known gem that has yet to be discovered by the mainstream for its amazing resources.  Skiing at Wolf Creek Resort is 45 minutes away.  We have sunshine over 300 days a year.  There is organic farming and ranching, and a thriving arts community.  There is clean, artesian water and pure air to breathe.  Alternative energy abounds in solar and wind farms.  There are very forward thinking, super cool people here.  In fact, one of the world’s most revered spiritual places is here in our majestic valley in Crestone.  

Emergence Place

What I fell for when we first got here three years ago was the vast open space, the immense sky, and the stunning beauty of the mountains that ring the valley.  When you look at a map, the San Luis Valley literally looks like God made a thumbprint on the southern edge of Colorado, hugging its southern neighbor of New Mexico.  The valley floor averages at 8000 feet in elevation, but the peaks that protect the valley all around go up to 14,000 ft.  They remain snow covered until the depth of summer.

The Indians that lived in this valley for generations called it a holy land; the San Luis Lakes were considered to be the emergence place, or the center of the universe, and Mount Blanca was the home of the Thunder Beings, perhaps a nod to the many UFO sightings this mysterious valley boasts.

Crazy Colorado Skies

Many people have second homes here; summer is an ideal time to get away from the hot cities, as here it only gets up to a mild 80 degrees.  With property as inexpensive as it is here, it is easy to get a nice spread to have as a second home or one to retire to.  Hunters and fishermen flock to the valley for the outstanding wildlife opportunities and the mighty Rio Grande, whose sparkling headwaters are 30 minutes from my house.  Others love to come up in the winter to access the excellent skiing.  We cut our own Christmas tree from up the road in the national forest, where we hike in the summer to load up on geodes and crystals. If you love the outdoors, this is definitely a place to come experience.

Exquisite Summer

The San Luis Valley will always hold a special place in my heart.

I was realizing that I have not written a straight family-whereabouts-update in ages, so for those of you who might be a little weary of my philosophizing, this is for you!

We are in Pismo Beach, California and enjoying the most spectacular warm, sunny days and cool nights right on the Pacific Ocean.  We moved down here on January 18, and will stay until February 6th.  The park we are staying in is a mega-resort-thingie….usually not very appealing to us back-to-nature types!  But we have had uninterrupted internet service, laundry right on site, a place I can spread out and do DDR (hard to dance like a maniac in the RV), and a place to ride our bikes for hours on end…the waterline on the beach.  We have had the BEST time here. 

It has been a nice break from the intensity of the inner work we were doing at the campground in San Luis Obispo.  I find that SLO has an energy of healing, which means to ME that it helps to bring up, in the most loving way, those energies within that are outdated and ready to heal.  Sometimes this feels very good and welcoming (in fact, that is how we have felt about SLO most of the time!)  Other times, it can be intense and a little trying.  Asheville NC was that way for us, but we are much more conscious now, so we are not experiencing the whumps-on-the-head that we did in our 7 years there. 

Coming down to Pismo has been literally that…it has felt like coming down into an easier vibration, one in which we can relax and assimilate all of the inner changes we have been making. 

SO, what’s the plan?  Well, here we are in the most fabulous winter I think I have ever experienced, enjoying the heck out of it.   We feel we have found paradise, and we have no desire to go elsewhere.  The Central Coast is a gem and definitely the right place for us.  

But we have these properties in Colorado that we need to sell, which are located in a spectacular remote region most people have never even heard of.  Colorado’s real estate market is doing pretty well, but in the San Luis Valley of Colorado, you have to WANT to live there.  We believe someone very special will feel called to own our homestead in the largest alpine valley in the world.  Here is a link to our house if you’d like to have a look: http://www.berrytrip.us/Sanctuary.htm.  Until we sell THERE, we can’t become permanent residents HERE. 

So we are kind of floating in a grounded way.  Sounds funny, I know! 

We are being welcomed into the community here, we are doing our homeschooling and working and living our lives, but doing it an RV in parks surrounded by people that are on vacation or retired, full-timing.  We want so much to be in a house and get the kids in school and SETTLE IN.  But it is not time yet.

We are developing a “PLAN A”.  PLAN A says that we will remain in the RV, bouncing around the RV parks in the SLO area until the end of March, at which point we will put the RV in storage and go back to Colorado to pack up our belongings.  We will plan to be there for four weeks.  The snow should be fairly gone by then; it will still be pretty chilly compared to coastal California, but we can buck up for a month.  We will pack up a moving truck and bring our belongings to California, where we will rent a house May 1st.  At that point we will become residents enough that we will feel part of things and can get the kids in school.

It is not ideal, for sure…I would rather not have to move twice; for once our properties sell in Colorado, we will want to buy a house here.  But I suspect a larger logic; perhaps it is a timing issue.  California is going through a very difficult time economically (except for little pockets such as San Luis Obispo, for some reason that I could pontificate about for many hours).  Perhaps it is not good to be tied to the state in a more permanent way just yet. 

And so we will remain as grounded as we can, as much a part of the community as we can, while we also remain stretched and flexbile.  Fortunately, we learned on our 2-year journey that our groundedness is in our own Beingness and in our family.  We have been practicing this ever since, the way the Buddhists practice meditation.  This seems to be something that we have become good at as a family, as we have been called to do it many times now.  Perhaps it is a skill that will serve us well in the future.

Boys in the Redwoods

While here, we have explored Santa Cruz and found the best burritos we’ve had since leaving North Carolina (found at Tacos Moreno, where you will find a line out the door every day).  We’ve driven up the most gorgeous Pacific coastline north of Santa Cruz to Half Moon Bay, watching the windsurfers battle it out with the waves at Scotts Creek Beach (apparently a nude beach, but there weren’t any nudies when we went there!), and we have walked among the Mother and Father trees in Big Basin State park, a true wonder to behold.

Peter Hugging a Redwood

The town of Felton is fairly small, population about 6500, but it has a lot going on, and as we have found in California, towns are smacked up right next to one another, rather than having lots of space between them.  So if you don’t find what you need in one town, you drive 5 minutes and you will find it in the next town!  Felton has a sweet main street with a few cool shops and restaurants, and the people are super friendly.  Many here, once hearing what our family is up to, have insisted that we move here to the Santa Cruz area.  Well, who knows?  Nothing is a done deal at this point…the mystery of how we will pull off buying property in California has not been revealed to us yet.  But it is safe to say that all four of us are still yearning to get back south to San Luis Obispo.  IN the mean time, we have enjoyed the magic of this area very much….we’ll be back!

Redwood Dragon

We are headed south to Monterey for the Thanksgiving holiday to be with Peter’s family again, then we will go back to San Luis to spend some quality time getting to know the area and the people there….it felt so right while we were there, and now we are going to test those feelings and see what we come up with.  We can’t wait.

I personally felt like the Pacific NW was our final destination point, as I feel a strong draw to the culture there.  The big hitch with living in the Pacific NW is the weather….my boys are all sunshine folks, so that was a major stumbling block to seeing us there.  I could see me there just fine, but what about my sweet Berry peeps?

But in mid-September, as I was sitting in session with the Angelic folk one early morning, I was told to “expect a surprise in November.”  Ooooh, mysterious!  I asked some questions about it, trying to unwrap the package early, but no go….nothing was revealed to me at that time except that it was concerning something good for my whole family.

Well, I think we now know what that good surprise was.  San Luis Obispo.

We arrived here after a gorgeous trip up the coast from Los Angeles (wow, Ventura through Santa Barbara is stunning), and pulled into the El Chorro County Park, just on the north edge of town off of Hwy. 1.  We immediately felt so comfortable…the hills are here, and some trees, but it is not a choking feeling of claustrophobia….we can still see the sky as there is plenty of open space.  We met my dear friend Terry Musch, a soul brother that I reconnected with last year, downtown for a fantastic Thai dinner. We walked around town in the dark, not seeming to mind the drizzling rain that was coming down….we were exhausted from the day of travel, but something was holding us up as we gazed upon the downtown lights and felt the awesome energy of place.

The subsequent days were mostly spent driving around with Terry….you could never want a more fantastic tour guide!  Terry is such a generous soul, and genuinely wants to share the goodness he has found in SLO.  He connected us with a beautiful friend Lori Steed, who among other talents is a professional photographer.  It was Lori who organized and invited us to the election party in Avila Beach on Tuesday, November 4^th, a historic day which we will all remember in this family until we croak!

The more time we spent exploring the area and checking in with our feelings, the more we felt how comfortable we were in SLO.  It was as if there was a magic curtain around SLO, and every time we went out of the area to explore a little further out, we felt a pronounced feeling of being out of that yummy space.  We talked about our feelings a lot, both intentionally asking each other and just spontaneously blurting out how god it felt to be there.  Very telling! 

We remembered that in 1993 Peter and I came through SLO on a west coast tour, again looking for our next location (we were living in Tucson at the time).  I was 5 months pregnant with Jess, and we were taking our last hurrah trip before our lives would be changed forever by having a child.  We had the sense of itchy feet then, and were looking for what was next for us.  On that trip, we drove through SLO and stayed in the area overnight at a B&B, and I remember having the best afternoon nap of my life as the cool breeze blew in the windows.  We walked around downtown way back then and thought this would be a great place to live.  Another contender on that trip was Corvallis, Oregon…..but the west coast was not to be our home at that time.  We wound up moving to Asheville, North Carolina to open the door to some healing work with my family of origin.

Now, 15 years later……it was on Wednesday, waking up in a country I am proud to live in, that the Divine Comedians (another one of my names for the Angelic spectrum of consciousness) told us, “Look no further, you have found it”.

Well, we are very tempted to believe this pronouncement from the Keepers of the Cosmos…. It sure feels right to all four members of my family, and SLO offers everything we hoped for in the next location we would call home.  But we also know that calling something a done deal before it’s a done deal has not been very smart in this last year….as I have been told, 2008 has been a year of so many changeable factors, all the balls thrown into the air at once, and it has taken several months of the majority of them to come down.  Somehow, with the election, I feel the factors settling in, and the future looks a lot more certain.  Maybe when we get guidance now, it will stick.  As a channel, it has been frustrating to hear and feel and see that so much was up for grabs this year, and that when my ego wanted to have The Plan and chart a course, the response from the Larger Picture was frequently “there are too many unknowns at this time”.

I sense a larger cause if we do indeed call San Luis Obispo home….a time of healing and expansion for us and those we love.  I already feel myself changing to fit being the mythic Californian, a creator of dreams, an embodiment of happiness, and knowing that I am worthy of all the goodness the Omniverses have to offer.  The next step in our evolutionay process.  Oh, my….a large future awaits us should we claim this place.  Here’s a prediction: a greater radiance of Who We Are, us four Berrys, as a family and as individuals.  Stay posted!

Next we head north to Monterey to spend some time with Pete’s Mom and Dad and Sister and her family….