Tricksters

First of all, my grandfather was a playful man, a trickster, in the wily and subversive and mythological sense of the word. Second of all, when I was a young girl, my grandfather taught me how to blow into my hands to make a whistling sound that he called an elk call. He cupped his great big hands around mine and showed me how to fold my fingers together, how to purse my lips into the gap between my two thumbs and blow steadily, raising and lowering my fingers to change the pitch up and down, puffing my warm breath into my hands to make music. I loved it.

I loved imagining the power of this newfound skill. That I could go into the mountains and make this eerie flute sound and magically summon elk. I assumed they were drawn to the music of it, so I practiced different notes, making up my own little snippets of song—pinky, pinky, ring finger, index, index, pause, all four fingers, repeat, etc. And then I would finish with what seemed like the perfect dramatic flourish for the ending of an elk song—I would take a deep breath, begin blowing, and then make a fluttering trill with all my fingers moving up and down—getting faster and faster, like a pianist playing a glissando, gliding the back of her hand up and down the piano, playing all the notes, until there were no notes or breath left, or until all the elk had been called. 

A few years ago, I was remembering this little trick at a family gathering, and I asked my uncle, who is a hunter, if my cupped-hands-whistle-thing really calls elk. He laughed and said no. Perhaps my grandfather knew that someday I would discover that this breath-into-my-hands is not, after all, an elk call. And that when I made that discovery, I would get to rename it myself, choose what or whom I most needed to call. Or maybe not. Maybe he just knew it made it more interesting to an eight-year-old if he called it an elk call. Or maybe he never called it an elk call at all, and I just imagined that. Regardless, I’m grateful. 

Because now that I know my call  is not an elk call, I’ve decided I must play it for myself. I’ve decided that it’s me and the fragile, fragmented parts of myself that I want to summon. After many years of intense neglect, it’s me, all of me, that I want to gather and hold—especially the depressed me, the frantic me, the scared me, the part of me that says it’s selfish to focus on myself, the controlling me, the goofy-awkward me, the afraid-of-disappointing-everyone me.

So, I’ll walk into the mountains or into the backyard and call to myself. Like the elk, first some, then more of me will emerge from behind the lodgepole pines or the lilac bush. I will make the call back to me, and I will gather myself, and I will offer my prayer for the ordinary woman that is me, for the wounded me, and the holy, other woman that is me, all of me blowing warm breath into my bony hands, making a beautiful sound for myself, playing the most magnificent fluttering trill my body and mind and heart can play.

Yes.

And, I’ve decided that I’ll teach this call to my children, and like my trickster grandfather, I’ll give it a name that holds their imagination until one day they are ready to name it themselves, to name what they most need or most want to call forth in that moment. And I say in that moment because I’m sure our calls change over time. I look forward to them changing over time.

I've been reading Elizabeth Gilbert's book Big Magic, and I loved discovering her section on the deep connection between creativity and "the way of the trickster" as she calls it. I agree with this connection, and I think our artists and writers are tricksters, too, giving us these calls and stories and images that capture our imagination and invite us to lean in toward one another with all the fragmented parts of ourselves cupped together, laughing and weeping over the beautiful paradox of who we are—gloriously brave and magnificent frailties.

First appeared in Ruminate’s Issue 39.