Sunday, 4/4/10 - Through Your Eyes

This post will be one of the most difficult I have ever written.

Like the rest, it will be written in one continuous stream. It was not written in advance, allowed to mellow and revised before it was delivered to you. You are witnessing its birth.

Throughout my life I have a very strange ability. One that I have never spoken of before.

I have never heard of nor read about anyone with a similar ability.

I can see through your eyes.

Literally.

If we are talking I can see what you see, hear what you hear and feel what you feel.

This is wonderful when the sensations are pleasurable and a burden when the experience is painful.

I can do this across distance and across time.

I tell you this so that you will understand the pain I felt on Saturday when I visited the De Soto National Memorial Park.

I have always disliked history. It is nothing more than tales of war told by the victors. Geography is similar: a series of artificial divisions typically drawn in the blood of innocents.

So, there I was at a national memorial to a band of greedy murderers. But, that's history!

The park is beautiful. A large tree spreads its twisted, copper-wirey branches over the entrance to the park. A journalist would have noted the type of tree and reported that to you. Sorry about that...



Just beyond the entrance is the Manatee River and the Gulf of Mexico. It is spring and the Black-eyed Susans are growing wild along the pathways.



Beyond the flowers, floating in the early morning tides are the sailboats.



I enjoyed the feeling of being at lands end and watching boats traverse the watery divide between earth and sky.







What I have not shown you - and what I took no photographs of - are the life-sized plywood people that populate the park.

As you walk along surrounded by all of this natural beauty you are surprised by depictions of armor-clad Spaniards and natives in nothing more than loin cloths. The Spanish wear large, metal hats with feathers, chain mail vestments, boots, swords and shields. They look determined. The Americans, aside from looking like stereotypical 20th century depictions, appear purposeless, disconnected and adrift.

I couldn't bring myself to photograph these depictions. The story they told was as flat as the plywood they were created from.

Instead, I chose to photograph light through leaves.



And how it made the world brighter.



I chose to photograph the flowers emerging in spring after a long, cold winter.





I tried to stop my eyes from seeing the blood on the pathways, to stop my ears from hearing the flies buzzing on the corpses and to stop my nose from smelling the last embers of the burned villages.

And I almost made it.

But as we exited the park, volunteers were demonstrating what it was like back in De Soto's time.

The first part was a talk on fire and the methods used to create fire. You know the basic premise: rub two dry sticks together, friction causes heat, heat burns dry wood, embers form and fall on fibers, air is added, fire is born.

What followed fire was a demonstration of the firepower and the weapons of that period.

It is hard to say exactly what I saw during that demonstration because it was viewed through the tear-filled eyes of one of the victims. I stood there, a Native American, viewing the weaponry that wiped out many of my brothers, my parents, my children. Weapons that not only rent my flesh and broke my bones but it also tore my beliefs and broke my spirit.



I took one picture of the musket being fired but if you look on the display beyond the volunteer you will see the implements that were used on the Americans to make them tell where the gold and jewels were hidden.

Gold and jewels.

The image I leave you with is of something more valuable than gold and jewels. Something that you would never kill another to obtain because it is all around. It is free (as most things worth having are).