Lemurian City of Ladies

Based on the Soul Food Cafe Exercise:

Muse Hymn Box

http://www.dailywriting.net/MuseHymnBox.htm

I liked this exercise because in the past I never really thought about my “ Muse” or where that sense of joy comes from when I finish a story.

It felt good, that’s all I cared about.

How shallow is that?

After I completed this exercise I re-discovered and remembered my Grandfather’s wonderful way of explaining the world to us.

His stories convinced me the ‘other world’ was as real as this one…and in the end, despite the fact that world was full of ghosts and demons and witches and spirits and cannibals I wasn’t afraid of it

Which is a good deal considering what I write about now

Amm

I wanted to write a story about a Witch- a no holds barred story about a Witch that plagues a town and drives it’s citizens to mind numbing distraction (which takes some doing because it turns out the residents of this town are Werewolves). https://anita64.wordpress.com/2006/06/18/the-witch-of-white-ash-mountain/

Where oh where to start looking…

I needed inspiration, I needed a face and in the end I found her and named her Calisaya Stoneroot. If you want to know the truth, even though I put Calisaya in a weird little town that’s suppose to exist here in Washington State she was actually born in the Sugar Cane Fields on the Big Island of Hawaii.

When I was a kid my Grandfather, Cypriano use to tell me about a demon-lady that hid in water and made a sound like a crying baby and when you leaned over the water or got close to help the baby she would reach up and snatch you down and drown you.

I could never really recall the entire story and when I checked into folklore discovered that my Grandfather (who was a storyteller himself) had probably combined two legends and created his own tale.

In part I discovered he had based his demon-lady on   La Llorona    “ The Crying Woman” According to legend The Crying Woman drowns her children after she is spurned by her children’s father.

If you see or hear the Crying Woman you are cursed and you will die.

I’m not sure how my Grandfather heard of the Crying Woman or why he changed her story. He kept certain elements intact, the children, the water, and the woman who is waiting to take you to your death.

However, the feeling I got when I heard the story was that he was warning us about something…or someone and to this day I don’t go near the water at night.

Even though how the Crying Woman came into my Grandfather’s life is still a mystery to me the theme of angry spirits living in the water is not.

These spirits that wait in the water so that they can hurt you may have worked their way into my Grandfather’s tales because in 1946 the worst Tsunami in Hawaii’s history struck the Waipio Valley and my Mother’s Family was living on the bluffs above the “ Valley of the Kings” when this happened.

Since then the locals shunned the valley as being cursed and no one except for maybe a few dozen families live down there now.

I have the impression that tourists and the outside world thought that the ‘simple field workers ‘ that settled above the valley in Honokaa had no idea that they were sitting on top of a potential money maker.

Actually we knew full well what was down there…and we still do.

So there it is, my Muse…it turned out to be my Grandfather Cypriano Guzman. The funny thing is no matter how dark or morbid or down right odd my stories are, when I write I can see him smiling and I can hear him laughing.

And I know he’s proud.

 AMM