for his holy communion. He keeps nothing and consort endlessly with no one, with the emptiness that envelops him, caressing him like the cool palm of an elusive love. The shaman knows where the invocation begins, in the hollow space within his cage of bone.
He keeps himself in the company of many fragile splinters of nothingness and calls these his family. To them he tells stories about Koyote the Blind, who put out his own eyes by pushing them back into the soft matter of his brain with his own thumbs, because it is always easier to watch another do the necessary work than it is to do it one’s self and without eyes he would no longer be tempted to sit back and watch. In his blindness he could see his family for what they were, nothing at all, a hot breathed mass of emptiness which could yet do nothing. He would have to do something for there was no one else to do it. He would have to do the dances and tell the stories, build the fires, mix the paints and cover the emptiness with his mark.
Alone, a solitary star gleaming in an eternally black night, he danced the dances and told the stories and burned brighter and brighter until the fabric of creation caught fire and danced with him. Burning, burning, burning. All the emptiness was filled with fire. Those many forgotten shards of a broken mirror that he called family reflected back the flames that roared before them joining in on the careening dance initiated by one blind man of naual.
The shaman tells this story to the quiet, obedient cast of characters sitting at his feet and does not dwell on the notion that his story has fallen into the ears of emptiness about him. He tells this and other stories with all the passion and finesse that he would employ if he