Marya Mann : Blog : Scattering Stella's Ashes

Scattering Stella's Ashes

CHEROKEE, NC ~ We scattered Stella’s ashes here last week as close family watched in joy, grief and wonder. My partner Koakane opened the bag under the late afternoon sun and cast his 91-year-old mother’s remains aloft. White and gray ash swirled and fell, resting finally on the blossoming earth as wisps of fog hugged the ancient mountains of red spruce and Fraser fir.
 
Stella became in 3D terms a 6 × 8 × 8 carry-out carton of mineral and ash, but she left behind multi-dimensional life lessons worthy of eternal remembering. While transporting her ashes from the crematorium to the Methodist service and then to the 6000-ft. Waterrock Knob Overlook in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, we realized spreading Stella’s ashes was actually spreading starseed. Her name means “star” in Latin, but more significantly, her life was stellar.
 
To her three adult children, five grandchildren and a three-year-old great-granddaughter, she was simply Nana. Before most of them were born, Nana sang soprano and performed hula dance, often performing together with her husband Bill. They comforted Pearl Harbor survivors with soft piano and loving words on the night of December 7, 1941, the infamous day Hawaii was bombed. Both entertainers, they traveled the world in USO and YMCA shows. Then she taught kindergarten for 20 years before designing & crafting stained glass windows, lamps and plaques of jeweled colors.
 
Stella followed her callings through to completions, even as they evolved over time, and she never stopped producing beauty. Her life was a work of art, composed as carefully as a Tiffany lamp. It was a testament to attentive beginnings, middles and endings — wise planning, peaceful action and abundant expression — the three-fold movement of artful time.
 
She wasn’t afraid to begin new things, like producing a radio show on Hawai’ian culture and music when the family lived in Fairbanks, Alaska. Stella clearly knew how to complete things: recorded songs, drawings and stained glass projects, as well as grudges, resentments and other useless things. In the moments of the middle, she encouraged the creative spirit of everyone close to her; even you and I, who may never have known her in life, can hear about her after her physical death, and be inspired.
While we stood there, surrounded by the layered valleys, ridges and peaks of the eastern spine of the continent, the Southern Appalachians, Stella stories became a kind of starseed for living a creative life.
 
After long days of teaching kindergarten, Koakane’s mother inspired his path of the healing arts, “letting” him, at 15, rub tension from her neck and shoulders. “I began to realize the power of my hands to help people, and that I could make a profession of it,” said the man who later became a chiropractor and energy kinesiologist — an extraordinary healer.
 
Stella’s daughter appreciated Stella’s big heart which could both arouse and apologize. She knew how to forgive quickly, extract the essence of a situation, and apply the arts of composition to every situation. Her youngest son, now a 60-something adult, valued her ability as a teacher, and the kindness she instilled in later generations.
 
“She took me into the backyard when I was a child,” said her grandson Patrick, now a professional photographer, “and showed me in the viewfinder of a little Kodak how to frame up a picture. She said ‘Draw a line here and here,’ and that’s how I learned the Golden Mean, the Rule of Thirds, compositional basics that have helped me my entire life.”
 
Besides teaching Patrick the basics of composition, Nana gave the people around her a sense of what was possible when you take time to aim, frame and shoot for the stars. Her artistic sense came from a beautiful inner balance, a sense of contentment and efficiency that both contained and amplified her life spirit.
 
She left behind things that sparkle, like the orange and gold patterns in the 20-inch diameter stained glass lamp shade she designed and made, a masterpiece of aim, action and actualization. Mirrored leaves of beveled glass, carefully chosen and cut with precision, reflect Stella’s love of composition, of making broken things into beautiful wholes. 
 
So it was appropriate her last artwork was a dusting of pale gray and ivory ash on the flowering meadows of Rosebay rhododendrons, sugar maple and black cherry of the Appalachian Mountains. As we appreciated the shape, texture and remarkable composition of her final ash art, the subtle smells of bone and pine overcame me. I remember thinking how people live forever in the hearts of those who love them, and in the stories we tell about them. Then I looked at my arm and saw Stella’s ash, starseed, on my very own body, entering me.
 
The indigenous Cherokee of this region live in the stories we tell about them too. Some of them are my ancestors, the Ani Yun Wiya, who farmed and made families in these North Carolina hills. Their lives were a dream of wholesome living like Stella’s, until the nightmare of “forced removal” into internment camps appeared in the middle. Taken at gunpoint to Texas during one of the darkest periods of American history, they were considered expendable, another race undeserving of civil rights. We were treated like slaves and forced to learn European and Christian ways. 
 
How do we explain, complete and forgive something like that, an act that diminished a whole culture? How many generations of aggression, wounding, victimizing and rescuing must we endure before we remember the deeper story, the more complete Cherokee story, the story of the basic goodness of the human spirit. We will thrive and evolve beyond cultural differences and land grabs because we all have a stellar nature, like Stella.
 
Our Cherokee Elders say we were visited by star beings who return to Earth every time we invoke their light. “We remember them,” they say, “for 133,000 years ago they visited Atlantis from the Pleiades, and they brought dances and chants to help heal the world.”
 
Their presence in these hills is strong, because we haven’t forgotten, we’re all artists made of starseed, composing lives IN matter that reflect this ancient light, making lives that really matter.
 
Beyond Methodist or Cherokee or Buddhist or Pagan, we all return, ash to ash, dust to stardust. But in between, what a journey of transmutation we are on! To turn anger to love, shame to no-shame, no-pain, mistrust into forgiveness, again and again, to spark the Golden Rule of loving like we wish to be loved. The Golden Mean of intelligent composition, compassion and clear action are like three hammers to the anvil of peace, shooting light and love into the dark, no matter what it takes, no matter if it takes 91 years like Stella, or the seven generations since Cherokee were removed from this land.
 
We receive what we need, what we came here for, learning to forgive, to focus and to allow ourselves to remember where we came from, why we’re here and where we’re going. Before there were hurts, wounds, hates, deaths, losses or anger, there was pleasure, love, life, abundance and glory. Ancient starseed comes in countless forms, and in every life there is opportunity to remove the forgetting, to illuminate the dark, to let go of every pain that darkens the brilliant light within your very own heart.  
 
Breathing in the unfurling winds at Stella’s starseed scattering, I felt a torch pass from one generation to the next. Her grace touched us all, from beginning to middle to end.
 
Feel it awaken in you and begin anew.
 
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