Using the Wrong End of the Stick

By Susan H Evans

PROMPT — If only ...

I volunteered for the summer at a rugged youth camp on the Isle of Mull, in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. A different group of teens and tweens hiked down the rutted, two-mile, moorland trail every week to camp.

One of my duties as a volunteer was to lead a reflection for our guests — either a cultural exchange or a mindfulness meditation.

That early June, a group of truculent boys from Kibble, a social services agency in Glasgow, tramped into camp, thunder clouds over their brows, mud on their boots.

On the afternoon before I led reflection for those new lads, I scaled the wide stone steps to the camp’s combination art room and Chapel of Nets. One side of the large room stood empty, save for a weathered, dome top trunk pushed to a far corner. Magic markers, glue, and kite sticks lay in the bottom of the trunk. On the room’s far side, the Chapel consisted of a circle of rough, scratchy fishermen nets and ropes.

My bright idea for reflection was to speak about the history and influence of the Cherokee Indians in East Tennessee and North Carolina, and then pass around a facsimile of a Native American Talking Stick.

I thought I’d hand one of the boys the stick and ask him to say something nice about someone else in the circle. The lad holding the stick was the only one who could speak. Once he was finished, he was to pass the stick to the next boy and so on until every boy spoke.

Sweating in my blue camp-issued parka for an hour on the cold, wooden floor, back against the hard plaster wall, I glued shells, rope, and cotton plant tops that I’d gathered to a kite stick, trying to arrange them in some kind of appealing way. Although I tried, the stick still looked like a flimsy bamboo kite frame.

I felt I had nothing to work with! Why hadn’t the useless woman in charge of art ordered more supplies?

Growing frustrated, I almost broke the stick in half and pitched the silly thing in the trash.

Patience, I told myself.

Heaving a big sigh, I held the fragile stick in my hand, realizing that no number of adornments could alter its inherent “stickness.”

After all, it was created to be a stick and could only be what it was.

My ear tickled and a shaman rattling beads in a dried gourd, whispered in my ear, “Hold on to what is good, even if it’s a handful of earth.”

Hmm. Could the good be anything a person could use for the good?

Well, a bunch of feathers, shells and rope cobbled together might make a talking stick. “Hold on to the good,” the shaman chanted again.

I’d just have to make the stick work, inadequate and flawed as it was.

Like myself, too, really, able to only do what I could do with what I am, that essential, inherent me, faulty and insufficient, but created as this soul in this body.

Anyway, I had lost sight of the most important detail that afternoon: the Talking Stick ritual, itself, not the actual stick.

The ritual is about acceptance and respect, and teaches children about taking turns, sharing, listening, and speaking their own truth in a safe place.

Those Kibble lads probably felt unheard and voiceless most of the time, despite their surly outward appearance. I hoped the ritual might loosen their gentle tongues and relax their machismo a little, so their souls might peek out of their usually suspicious eyes.

In a bright shaft of sunlight from the large windows, my inner angels, reposed on the fishing nets, taking a breather from my constant neediness. They piped in unison, “Accept your own ‘stickness,’ girlfriend, accept your rough childhood, this primitive camp, the hard floor, the light from the far window, the ocean roar, and the kite stick. You hold them in your hand. They are good.”

That phrase of another volunteer from an earlier reflection stuck in my mind, about the boniest flowers blooming from the deepest, handful of shit.

The Kibbles seemed planted in shit, all right, and would be forced to work hard with what little they had to create their lives.

I could relate -- once planted in deep manure, myself. As part of my “stickness,” I possessed a deep desire to bloom in my allotted handful, regardless of heavy, non-nurturing deterrents in my way.

From bitter experience, I’ve learned that suffering and endurance — bad as they are — can be used for good, used as stepping stones leading outward and upward.

A secret weapon is born, emerging from suffering and endurance, for pain provides jet fuel for personal power. I am living proof of that, even if I seemed in the eyes of those gnarly boys nothing more than an old, useless, American bag lady ready to nap in a doorway.

Those lads just might be superheroes one day if they could figure out how to transcend their initial poor soils, take the good from their handful, and spin it into gold, even if they appeared as feral adolescences wearing stained tee shirts, baggy pants and insolent frowns.

Standing up, I stretched my back, dusted my pant seat off, and carried the talking stick carefully to my room, making sure the whirling wind didn’t blow it down into the dark bracken far below. I placed it on top of my bureau, ready for the next morning.

Would the sticky Kibbles be able to hear me through the roar of their hormones, the wail of their ship-wrecked feelings, and the shrill voice of their anger? I could only hope that the intent of the Talking Stick ritual might actually stick to them and follow along after them.

I would sow my paltry seeds and cross my fingers that those princes of Scotland would one day use their pain, their unique “stickness,” and the seeds sown by many teachers as impetuses to push themselves out of their handful of mire and into the sunshine, becoming superstars full of light and love and compassion.

They’d like being superheroes, those boys, especially if it involved break-dancing and stick shift automobiles.

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Susan H Evans lives in Baltimore and enjoys writing poetry, creative nonfiction, and memoir. She likes to explore themes centered around seeking the light within the darkness. Susan's writing is published in many online and print magazines, journals, and anthologies. She writes from Rosedale, NY.