DIANE

I remember sub-contracting to a job at an Embassy Suites hotel in Washington DC. This was years ago. At the company's office was a beautiful, and mystical young white woman. She held me captive before she ever spoke a word. I noticed all the men at her job were held at her arm's length by the silence she drew around her that was neither threatening, or unkind. It was simply a matter of light. How much light could one share with her light was all I saw.

My ex-wife had gotten me this job. She worked for the people I was gonna be working for. I asked her about this woman teasing that she could be the next Mrs. Woods. Renee said all the men wanted this woman, but she just did her job, and paid them no mind. I probed but all I got was, "She don't want your butt, Gregory..."

She told me her name was Diane driving me into the city in her truck to the hotel. She was supervising this landscaping job. I relaxed in her company, and we started talking. Immediately we connected. She was one of those magical people I often attract. Every time she drove me to the work site our conversations were 'light' and airy, and fun to be a part of. It was easy to work with her because she was clear, and with clarity made it easy to comprehend the job's requirements, and she'd leave me alone to do my work.

Riding down Suitland Road in Suitland, Maryland one morning she pointed her mother's house out. "My mother lives there on the corner. She teaches metaphysical science in her house." There was something to ponder. I began to speculate and wonder to myself what it would be like to cross the color lines and have children by a woman like this. It was a difficult conversation I kept to myself, but it was circulating within me in a pot; a melting pot of sorts.

I didn't keep this job long. It was a temporary gig tiding me over during the darkness of separation, and child support enforcement, but working in the dirt tending the outside gardens of the Embassy Suites hotel was such a splendid time. It mended and restored me to the degree it could, and I eventually moved on to other things, and dilemmas. But Diane stayed with me for many years in my thoughts and meditations.

Excited, we were, when we first spoke to each other she unearthed what she'd been keeping to herself. She knew men desired her. She knew her looks befuddled men, and she got that. What she could not grasp was how easy it was not to engage men in conversations along the lines of her existence up and into the realms of her endeavors to be light; to be whole, to be Diane! I had 5 questions held secretly in the Medicine of my Heart that discerned the spirit of women separating the wheat from the chaff. Diane told me she simply asked men to live in the present for a day.

I have never seen Diane, in person, since then as far as I know. If I have I couldn't recognize her because the only thing I saw was her spirit-body. I couldn't tell myself what she looked like physically. Did she exist? She did. Renee introduced me. Renee unknowingly introduced me to a healing spirit that fanned out with a look and words the pain of separating and breaking up my family and establishing hope I could begin anew, and perhaps have another son with a woman I could carry in my spirit and provide for at every level of my being.

Medicine stories never occur where you expect them to and they never become what we want them to be.

- Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories