“Rainmaker906 Guidelines”
rainmakers2007@yahoo.com
disk: STBK 6/068/28/06

“With global warming, is there a break in the chain of command?
A missing meteorological link? For centuries, with  ceremony, prayer and rituals to the sky gods, indigenous peoples lived in harmony with nature.”

“We are all part of the One Life that manifests itself in countless forms throughout the universe, forms that are all completely interconnected.”
--Eckhart Tolle, “Stillness Speaks”

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES FOR

RAINMAKER’S PRAYERS

Co-creation with the Natural World

 “RAINMAKER’S PRAYER” is accepting submissions of essays, memoir, prayers, myths, legends, folklore, creative non-fiction, short fiction, commentary, interpretations, poems, artwork, digital images and photography—the genre is open. Published, unpublished, original and/or historic works will be reviewed now through January 15, 2007. We prefer submissions of three poems, eight pages of prose and/or five visual images. Although we are flexible, less is more.

Accompany submissions with a stamped, self-addressed envelope with sufficient return postage. Include a brief cover letter and biographical statement. Manuscripts are to be typed on one side only of 81/2 x 11 white paper with the contributor’s name, title of work, address, phone and email address as a header on each page. Poetry may be single-spaced with indicated stanza breaks. Do not send original artworks. We’ll accept preliminary photographs, laser copies, digital printouts and photocopies of historical documents, including source data. If you wish an acknowledgement of the receipt of your submission, enclose a SASE postcard.

Contributors whose submissions are accepted for the Rainmaker’s Prayer anthology will be asked to re-send their work as an email attachment in Microsoft Word .rft or jpeg at 400x400 dpi.  Sorry no Mac’s or Word Perfect.

Depending on the extent of their submitted work, contributors will receive one to three complimentary copies of the anthology in which their work appears.

Mail submissions to:
Shinan N. Barclay, Rainmaker’s Anthology
62296-B Crown Point Rd.
Coos Bay, OR 97420

If mailing is a hassle, send your submission as a Word attachment or dump the text in an email. Email questions and correspondence: rainmakers2007@yahoo.com Additional guidelines and samples: www.shinanagans.com/rainmaker.

“What is required is something very simple. It is the ability to drop to that place within you that yearns to truly hear, see, and understand; to open to the desire for wisdom and ask whatever your gaze rests upon to teach you, caress you, or simply blend its energy with yours.”
Bartholomew, “From the Heart of a Gentle Brother.”

About Shinan Barclay, Writer/Editor

            Shinan N. Barclay, M.A., is the co-author of two books: The Sedona Vortex Experience and Flowering Woman, Moontime for Kory.  Her memoir stories appear in the following anthologies: Chicken Soup for Woman’s Soul II, Heavenly Helpings,  Scent of Cedar, and Open My Eyes, Open My Soul. Her short stories have been translated into Japanese and Portuguese, her poems and essays have been published in more than one hundred magazines, including Washington Women’s Digest, Holistic Life, Tucson Lifeline, California Quarterly, Manzanita Quarterly, Ranger Rick and Canadian National Wildlife as well as the book Sacred Texts of the World’s Great Religions.
            In 1982, Shinan received a Masters degree in Holistic Psychology from the University Of Humanistic Studies/California School Of Professional Psychology, San Diego, California. A tile-maker, gardener and jitterbug fan, Shinan lives in a tiny cottage in a huge rainforest which boarders the South Slough Estuary of the southern Oregon coast.

Through your recognition, your awareness, nature too comes to know itself. It comes to know its own beauty and sacredness through you!  Eckhart Tolle, “Stillness Speaks”
***

SAMPLE STORY: Ritual
“The only cure I know is a good ceremony . . .” Leslie Marmon Silko, “Ceremony”

PRAY FOR RAIN

By Shinan Barclay
shinan_barclay@yahoo.com
www.shinanagans.com

“It’s so hot, everything is dying,” my neighbor moaned while sopping sweat from her neck. Around us, the Verde Valley of northern Arizona lay parched and cracked. Plants bowed limp under scorching days and bone dry nights. Evergreen trees released needles in a last ditch effort to conserve moisture, and residents of our high desert land perspired and complained under the broiling sun. 
I dislike whiners; I’ve learned there is always a way, an answer or solution to be found. So, rather than listen to complaints about the drought, a series of situations led me to organize a weekly Pray for Rain ritual. Throughout time and millennia humankind has attributed celestial forces to the gods. Primitive man once influenced nature through ritual, yet in these patriarchal times humans have been alienated from our connection to the natural world.

As co-author of The Sedona Vortex Experience, my life among the red rocks had brought numerous occasions for full moon ceremonies, solstice and equinox invocations of spirit.  Friends and I had created a “rite of spring” ritual, with masks for the sun, morning star, thunder beings and seed people. Praying for rain was a natural evolution.

***
Raised Irish Catholic, the power of prayer—where two or more are gathered in shared intent—had been a fundamental touch stone within my life. During childhood, throughout the Korean War, Dad and his Catholic men’s group, the Knights of Columbus, conducted “Pray for Peace” meetings. In each neighborhood, Catholic families took turns hosting evening prayers. Children, parents, grandparents and single folks gathered together at 8pm each weeknight to pray the Rosary. There was no chit-chat, refreshments or kids play. With Rosary in hand, we walked in, knelt down and prayed for peace. As I look back on those sacred evening events I choke with tears, knowing that “Pray for Peace” was the finest things Dad did.
Ten years later, as a missionary teacher to the Inupik-Inuit in arctic Alaska, I witnessed prayers to Guardian Spirits and power animals, offered so that the Inuit people might have food. In the harshest of environments, the indigenous Arctic peoples forged a high degree of civilization from bone, mud and ice. Then, after leaving Alaska and the catholic faith and joining Religious Science and Unity churches, I became a licensed prayer therapist, offering prayer treatment for those in need.
Eventually I moved to Arizona and was invited to stay on the Hopi Reservation northwest of Flagstaff.  I and other wellness practitioners donated our time and alternative healing treatments to invalids and elders. While camped at old Oriabi—land that was part of the Hopi reservation for four thousand years—I again witnessed the words of the English poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, who, over 150 years ago wrote: “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams.”
One morning an elder invited us to hike down to his farmland below the mesa where stalks of blue corn thrived in sand. The farmer used a digging stick to make an opening in the sand; he dropped in three blue seeds into the hole, said a prayer and covered the grain with a swipe of his boot. Hopi have no irrigation, fertilizers or pest control; they have spirit-gods, Kachinas, to whom they pray. Each year, despite wind, sand and drought, bushels of Hopi blue corn, the only corn that is a complete protein, are harvested at old Oriabi.

***

I placed an ad in the Red Rock News: Pray for Rain, Thursday  7 P.M. Airport Mesa. The following Thursday evening seven friends gathered. We cleared our body, mind and spirit by burning save in an abalone shell, then letting the smoke cleanse us.
After sprinkling cornmeal around in huge circle, we placed aquatic ritual objects at each of the directions: North, South, East, West and in the center—shells, pearls, coral, a ceramic fish, a toy dolphin, a puppet whale, bronze otter—anything that conjured a connection to water. Then I began  with the invocation.
“We call to the Great Guardian Spirits of the North, the Grandmothers and Grandfathers of midnight, mystery, winter and the great bear. We give thanks and appreciation for your work in the world and your presence in our lives . . .”
Over the years in Sedona, on my walks to the top of Cebola Hill, I invoked the four directions with my own adaptation of the Bartholomew’s  Medicine Wheel Prayer.1 I included names of creatures or qualities which I was dealing with in my life—“hibernation” when I longed for solitude and silence; “the inner child” when I was working on abuse issues; the “creeping crawlers,” when cockroaches visited my apartment. Over time my prayer evolved to five directions and then to seven, adding “The Great Above,” “The Great Below” and “The Great Within.”
In this Pray for Rain ritual, I included Poseidon, Neptune and the Keeper of the Tides, as many names for moisture spirits as I could think of. I requested that each person in the Pray for Rain group chant a refrain: “Moisture Spirits Return.” For an hour we twirled and padded  around the circle, shuffling our feet so they sounded like rain drops on the earth. We sprinkled water from large sea shells and chanted: “O-shoo-wa, O-shoo-wa! Moisture Spirits Return.”
We praised the Thunder Beings, the Lightening Launchers, Water Spirits, Rain Makers and Moisture Spirits.
“Moisture Spirits, we bless you and bless you; Moisture Spirits be fruitful and multiply.”  
An atheist prayed. A Jew, a Catholic, two pagans and two evangelical Christians prayed. No one was a rainmaker, no one a shaman and none had ever experience a rain dance, so our ceremony was heartfelt and spontaneous rather than dogmatically structured. 

The first four Thursdays, the sky remained blue, the air dusty, hot and thick with pollen but having acknowledged the weather spirits, we felt better, something changed, a shift, if only in our individual attitudes. The following Thursdays we repeated our ceremony; more people joined. After five weeks our prayers for rain yielded results. One night we shared the exhilaration of cool drops of moisture kissing our faces.
 “Did you feel that?”
“A rain drop?”
“I felt one to.” Finally, on Thursday night of the fifth week, it started to sprinkle. We turned our faces skyward.  Seemingly from nowhere, drops of water fell pat pat on our faces and plop plop on the ground.
“Blessed be the Rain Makers!” someone shouted.
“Blessed be the Moisture Spirits!”  another answered.
Could the cure for drought be as simple as naming and honoring weather spirits, I wondered. Suddenly everyone was dancing, shouting and screaming. “It’s raining! It’s raining.”
I licked raindrops from my lips as distant lightening flashed. Thunder boomed, the sky darkened and rain poured down.
***
“We are talking about a reciprocal orchestration of power.”
Bartholomew, “From the Heart of a Gentle Brother.”

SAMPLE STORY: Inspired Action
“The power is there for you to use and draw upon at any time. But unless you draw on it, it cannot flow.” Eileen Caddy, “The Spirit of Findhorn”

GRANDMA’S GOLDEN PITCHER
By Shinan Barclay
shinan_barclay@yahoo.com
www.shinanagans.com

At times, I wished for an Aladdin’s lamp. Then my longing for a miraculous light came true when I inherited Grandma’s golden pitcher.  As far back as I can remember that pitcher glittered behind the etched glass of my grandmother’s china cabinet. Its dimpled surface, reflecting light, added sparkles to its lustrous glaze. Over the years, much like the lamp in the fairy tale, that shimmer, in places, has been softened with use.

Grandma had inherited the pitcher from her grandmother. Its feminine form reminds me of Grandma and my matrilineal heritage; its narrow waist rounds into ample hips; the strong backbone handle links base to spout and the tongue-like spout, like a grandma's wisdom, flows into the close at hand youngster,  its nourishing contents.

A retired stage actress, Grandma had delighted in reciting dramatic monologues and in telling humorous stories. Orphaned as a teenager, she had taken the train to New York City at the turn of the century, found an apartment and landed a job in an off Broadway play. Thus began her career in musical comedy. 

Grandma told me stories about “playing the circuit,” –stage performances in Boston, Bangor, Montreal, Winnipeg and Edmonton. While she darned my socks, I sat on the ottoman at her feet, listening to her tell about “The Rose of Panama,” and “The Mayor of Tokyo;”  stories that, for me, opened the door to a world of mythical characters and the larger human story.

“Once, the costume trunks were lost and the whole cast performed “Madame Butterfly” in street clothes,” Grandma chuckled. “An admirer gave me a bottle of brandy. But it was winter in Saskatoon and my feet were freezing, so I drank a little and dumped the rest into a basin and put my bare feet in the warming alcohol.”  As she laughed, her cheeks rippled like a waterfall. Gray strands of hair tumbled down the back of her neck, falling loose from the bun atop her head, while her soft perfume scented the air.

Ten years after my grandmother died,  I was living in San Diego. Before going to work, I’d get up at 5:30 am to write. One morning, I looked up from the page to see the rising sun over the eastern Cuyamaca Mountains. Dawn flamed across the sky turning the heavens from purple to orange to gold. Ashen clouds turned brilliant gold and formed a fluffy image of Grandma’s pitcher. A moment later the clouds reformed, spilling light onto the landscape.

“Pour love and light on your work and life, Shinan.” It was Grandma’s voice. Tears welled. I closed my eyes and imagined golden love-light streaming into my typewriter and atop the recently smashed VW Bug sitting in my driveway. A few weeks earlier, after working overtime, my intuition had prompted, “Go to the beach.” The ocean has always renewed me, but I’d protested, “I don't want to go to the beach now. It’s raining.” So, instead of turning west toward the seashore, I’d continued driving toward my apartment. Two blocks from home, I’d failed to stop at the throughway, so another driver had plowed into the VW, crunching both cars. Luckily, neither of us was injured. The accident was my fault. But worse, the VW was not mine. I’d borrowed it from a friend, and there was no insurance on it. I should have heeded that inner voice and gone to the beach because I ended up paying thirty dollars a month for five years to the other guy’s insurance company.

“Two thousand dollars includes a new fender, bumper and door,” the auto body shop man had said, then had stated bluntly:  “It isn’t worth fixing.” I had neither credit card, nor money to pay for the repairs. It was a struggle just to pay the rent. So, as I’d sat at my desk, early that morning, feeling Grandma’s presence, hearing her voice, I’d mentally poured love over the battered VW.
Two days later, an Hispanic man knocked at my door. “I fix your car. I make you good deal. Five hundred dollars.” 

I was lucky to have fifty extra dollars left from my paycheck, but I was desperate. I wanted to jump at the offer, yet I was afraid of a scam. “How will you work on it?”

“I can do it here in your drive. I have tools. See. Portable torch. I am Manuel Vargas, one of the best welders. Twenty years with Laguna Hills Chrysler-Plymouth.” He paused in his sales pitch, looked down and scuffed his old boot on the cement stoop. “Sometimes, I drink too much.  Now no job.  I need food for my children.”

“I have food, and I could borrow some money.” We bargained. Manuel spent the day pounding, soldering, sanding, puttying and welding the Bug. I bagged up all the canned food I had. By nightfall, I had come up with three hundred dollars, and, to my amazement, Manuel had smoothed out the fender, bumper, door and chrome.

“Just needs spray paint,” he said. 

“Thank you!” We shook hands, pleased with our exchange.

Grandma’s magical pitcher is precious to me, not because it’s an antique or because of its sparkling gold glaze but because its reminiscent of Grandma’s courage and humor—the zest she brought to life and her gusto that lives beyond death. Her ongoing presence shows me what’s possible as her golden pitcher shows me what’s magical.  Now, as I write, Grandma’s golden pitcher sits atop my bookshelf, reminding me to widen the love of my work and words.

***

“You have to build up your own faith, step by step, until it is unshakable.”
Eileen Caddy, “The Spirit of Findhorn”