She'd loved someone who hated himself. A fellow artist. Who hated and mocked her for loving him & strung himself out on drugs, surrounded by people who mirrored his self hatred. When she eventually stopped loving him and walked away...all hell broke loose.
She left. Hell followed. Stalked her. Angrily. across many states. God moved one of his own friends to slow him down. Fed up, she was scheduled to go to the southwest to write ( and hide), running towards what she felt would be freedom, some semblance of the kingdom of god she felt the pull of. But god made her return from volunteering in New Orleans to nyc to wrap up loose ends first. Plane ticket to ABQ in hand & at the airport with 10 minutes to spare, the airline inexplicably wouldn't let her through to the gate. God made her stay through what was supposed to be the worst winter yet...that he turned into the longest "indian summer" on record in the region.
And In lieu of exploding in rage towards the man who stalked her and ruining both of their lives God flung her into outright courtly love with the man who tried to shield her and made her process the whole thing via raw, wild poetry, conquering the hate asked by one with an outpouring of inexplicable love towards the protective other..
What Americans refer to as Indian Summer is the season of warmth after the first frost, a season the native Algonquians viewed as a gift from the creator-God Cautantowwit, whose heavenly court was situated, you guessed it, in the same southwestern region of the united states she'd been trying to run to.
Indian Summer is a story of harvests. Artistic and otherwise. Each raw, original collection chronicled a season in that poetic, 21st century courtly love affair that extended the heat wave of Cautantowwit's Indian Summer into the far reaches of the following year. This volume showcases an assortment from each book of poetry.
...From the headiness of tasting true love for the first time to the eventual purging of all the scar tissue still inside that blocks one from fully experiencing that love, Cautantowwit (Indian Summer) is a portrait of an artist untwisting dysfunctional ideas about the reality of love in order to receive all God has for her in regards to it.
