At this point, I took a breath and waited to see what would happen next. In my mind’s eye, the old book closed and a new one opened. Each page featured an image of a single leaf, and the green leaf filled the page. I struggled to understand the messages I was reading here:

In the faint crackling sound of ancient parchment turning, I went to the south, the west, the north, the east; round and round. With each turn I met new beings and found new materials – horn, blood, hairs, shells, stones, an emerald, an acorn, a gold spiral, a seed-covered canvas.

As I moved through the directions, the tinkling of tiny bells marked each turn, while the distinct aromas shifted—from cinnamon and cedar to briny ocean and seaweed, then pine and snow to the surprise of sweet jasmine.

No one knew what I was doing or where the words came from that I was singing. There was only a long tone lingering, and a scent like Palo Santo, and the objects in the room disappeared and returned from their flashing into past and future.

Irradiated by their journeying, they assembled on the tray of soil from our sacred place. This soil had always been at our ceremony, for generations. Each year we return it to the gathering circle, and pour it on the ground near the centre pole. After the ceremony and dance, we take the soil into the tray and keep it at home for our own sacred rituals. It is renewed each year in this way, re-magnetized and prepared. Who and what is in this soil of the land?

The soil —a complex of minerals, decay, and rebirth—held a ceremonial space filled with the rhythmic pounding of bare feet on packed earth and the hypnotic pulse of frame drums.

A mound of dirt shaped like a cone sits on a poor man’s home altar. In rapid succession I was shown cabinets of all shapes and sizes. Small chests and elaborate secretaries, organ-like wood structures, and finally a series of castles and miniatures, temple models and mansions. Moveable parts, doors, drawers, lids that were small roofs – inlays and sharp pieces of gold.

All this with the musical clatter of tiny wooden doors opening and closing, miniature hinges creaking, and small drawers sliding on runners—exuding the scents of polished mahogany, beeswax, tarnished metal, in the musty air of hidden spaces untouched for decades.