Compass of the Heart: A Novel Of Discovery

by Priscilla Cogan

Overview

The Small Press Book Award-winning author of Winona's Web returns with a magical tale of love and enchantment, in which timeless Lakota wisdom meets a very contemporary midlife romance.

"Love is very tricky," warns Winona Pathfinder, the elderly medicine woman who has introduced psychologist Meggie O'Connor to the spiritual ways of Lakota prayer and healing. Soon, however, Meggie's teacher and friend will cross over to the Other Side, leaving Meggie, just forty and newly divorced, to make her way on her own. But before she goes, Winona nudges her young cousin Hawk to walk alongside Meggie on a journey of the heart and soul. Wary yet optimistic, these two seek out the Pipe Road—the path that will lead them to harmony with the world and with each other. Love may indeed be tricky, but with faith and hope, it is a road they will attempt to navigate.

Graceful and powerful, its story deeply rooted in traditional Lakota teachings, Compass of the Heart is a moving song of wonder and magic, an incandescent tale of love in all its dimensions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385496711
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/19/1999
Edition description:	1ST BROADW
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Priscilla Cogan, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist of Irish-American descent. For twenty years, she and her Cherokee husband have taught workshops in cross-cultural healing practices and Native American beliefs. She lives in the Boston area in the winter and on the Leelanau Peninsula of Michigan in the summer. Cogan is also the author of the novel Winona's Web, winner of the Small Press Book Award.

Read an Excerpt

A touch is enough to let us know
we're not alone in the universe...

-Adrienne Rich XII. Sleeping, turning in turn like planets

The ascending sun roused Fritzie, Meggie O'Connor's wire-haired fox terrier, from his winter dream of chasing rabbits. An unruly mass of coarse and curly white hair, a large saddle-spot straddling his back, a boxy head and button eyes, short but powerful legs, and an upstanding tail endowed Fritzie with an undeserved air of dignity. Sniffing the atmosphere for rabbit, his nose detected instead the scent of his human being. His legs ceased twitching to a dream run; his eyes slowly opened to the outlines of the bedroom floor. It was time to awaken his two-legged from sleep, to ask her to let him out on his early morning jaunt, while he still had rabbit on his mind.

Rousing up into a leisurely stretch position, Fritzie dropped open his cavernous jaw and yawned, revealing two large upper canine teeth. He banked his front legs low and then extended them high, before sauntering over to the large nesting place of the woman. A cold nose into her draping hand did the trick.

She groaned, moaned, and then sighed herself awake. To show his urgency and catch her attention, he pirouetted several times in the air by the bedroom door, metal tags clacking under his collar. Her toes touched the floor. Her hands twisted the knob and eased open the exit. Her feet padded after him down the stairs to the porch. With a satisfying yank, that door yielded passage to the outside.

There, his nose told him, dwelt rabbit.

* * * *

Meggie O'Connor addressed her own reflection in the large hallway mirror, a trick she had taught her clients who needed help in self-motivation. "Today is a special day," she announced to herself. "Today is the first day of the New Year. It is said that what you do on New Year's Day will predict what will happen the following twelve months, and the feelings you have on New Year's Day will haunt you throughout the year. So, today, Dr. O'Connor, choose your actions wisely and remember to be grateful for your existence."

Pronouncements done, Meggie continued her self-examination in the mirror. Her summer freckles had long since faded into the background as her peach complexion bloomed rosier in the winter frost. Little lines etched the edges of her blue-green eyes. With precise movements into her shoulder-length, wavy, fine brunette hair, she plucked out the few gray hairs visible to her. Yes, time was definitely making a march upon her skin and body. In just three weeks she would be marking the midpoint of her life: her fortieth birthday.

Over a breakfast of hot oatmeal and coffee, Meggie made a decision. She would welcome this new phase of life by holding a birthday party for herself at Chrysalis, the family estate she called home. High atop a hill, south of Suttons Bay, Chrysalis stretched for seventy-eight acres of plowed fields, wildflower meadows, cedar forests, ramblings of sumac, and apple orchards. The large white cedar-shaked house, built and decorated in the years preceding the Great Depression, stood as a testament to the vision of Meggie's maternal grandmother. French windows graced the first floor and green shuttered dormers the second floor. Before Meggie moved there two years earlier, the house had endured the long winters unoccupied, empty of family, except for an old ghost or two. Now the house and the land graciously accepted the yearlong presence of Meggie and Fritzie.

Meggie drew up a list of friends to invite to her birthday party: her colleague, Dr. Beverly Paterson; her neighbors, Katya and Paul Tubbs; her veterinarian, Sam Waters; and the elderly identical twins, Sasha and Savannah Todd, who lived down the road. Pausing a moment and absentmindedly chewing on the pencil, she impulsively added Hawk to the list. It was time for her friends to meet him. Meggie decided that she would ask each person to bring a gift of a love story, a lyrical poem, or a silly song -- something to share from the heart or the funny bone. Grinning with that thought, she barely noticed her hand appending another name to her list: Winona. "Time to get on with life," Meggie scolded herself and crossed out the name of the old woman.

The mind, however, held no such eraser. Thoughts of Winona commanded Meggie's attention. What a puzzle you were, Winona. You took all I knew and held dear about symbols and psychology and challenged me to look at your world filled with signs and paranormal events. All of which, you told me, pointed directly "to the truth of things. " What you knew scared me, Winona.

Meggie shook her head to clear her thoughts and rose from the table.

Heading toward the door and the job of shoveling snow, Meggie stopped suddenly and twisted back around, catching sight of the crossed-out name. The power of a name, carelessly scrawled on a birthday list, called out to her, telling her there were more urgent concerns than clearing snow. Changing her direction, she turned toward a closet.

On an upper shelf, enclosed in a leather bag, rested the lightning pipe. After the memorial service, Hawk had surprised Meggie with the gift of Winona's pipe. "She wanted you to have this, so that you could learn from it." That was all he said, but his eyes and the reluctant tone of his voice spoke volumes about his anxiety surrounding the gift. Meggie wondered why it should worry him. After all, Winona had taught her the ways of respect.

The pipe had become familiar to her. In the therapy sessions with Winona, the old medicine woman had used both the lightning pipe and traditional stories to wrench Meggie from her scientific, agnostic worldview and guide her toward a sacred world -- a world alive with Spirits, ancestors, and the medicine wheel of life. With the lightning pipe, Winona had taught Meggie how to pray real prayers. With the stories, the old woman had shown Meggie how to listen to her own heart. In the Lakota tradition, Winona was known as a healer of lost souls. At first, Meggie had gone along with the old woman's teachings, hoping to ease her into the conventions of psychotherapy. But it wasn't long before Meggie began to question who was healing whom.

Everything Winona taught pointed back to the Pipe. Even a crossed-out name on a list. From the closet shelf, she took down the tanned deerskin pipe bag. Cradling it in her arms, she headed outside to pray.

Laying an old rug on the open porch, Meggie unlaced the pipe bag, extracting the long dark sumac stem decorated with a beaded lightning design and fringe, the salmon-colored, chipped catlinite bowl in a nest of light gray dried sage leaves, a ziploc bag of dark brown sacred tobacco mix, and a tan braid of sweet grass.

To greet the New Year, Meggie found herself on her knees, making prayers of thanksgiving for her life up to that moment, for the present journey of Winona to the Other Side, and for guidance into the near future.

* * * *

Fritzie danced around his human being in the cold morning air, thrusting a frozen tennis ball toward her hand. She paid no attention to him but busied herself with a leather bag. He could catch no scent of food, only the stale smell of old grasses. She sang in a high voice, never once mentioning his name or addressing him. After many words, a pungent smell of smoke plumed out of the stone and stick she held in her hand. And still she showed no interest in playing ball with him, no matter how much he feinted at her.

Disheartened, he dropped the ball by her feet and wandered off to survey the fading scent of night animals about the place. If she wasn't going to throw the ball, then he had important work to do. The early morning sun reflected into his pitch black eyes as he scouted to the east of the house, his human being having gone deep into silence.

* * * *

"Winona," Meggie cried out in the silence, "was I one of those lost souls you were meant to heal?" The fingers of her right hand brushed alongside the stem, as if to guide the smoke through the lightning pipe. She did not expect an answer.

I wonder where you are now?

* * * *

Death had come quickly when, at last, Winona had given her consent. In blinding speed, crashing through dimensions, through layer upon layers of filamentous light, Winona's arms had gathered shrieking ghosts, trapped aeons between the worlds. Hanging on tenaciously, she thrust them with her toward the concentrated, blinding brightness before her. Turning her head neither to the left nor to the right, she clung onto the back of the powerful horse of the warrior woman.

The last barrier to the Other Side assailed all her senses, threatening to topple her and the ghosts back into the void, but she pulled the haunted forms close to her and followed the lead of the Spirit guide. Over to the Other Side, she slid off the horse, exhausted, releasing the ghosts. They slithered off toward the Four Directions, fleeing in terror from the backward void which, for years, had sucked upon their energies.

The warrior woman deposited her at an intersection, saying, "This is as far as I go with you. My job is to return across the Great Divide and find the others willing to make the journey." She wheeled around her horse; they disappeared back along the torturous path they had just traveled.

Winona settled down on a soft spot, unable to find her bearings in the unfamiliar place. Nothing around her made any sense. It was as if cataracts had clouded her vision, permitting her to perceive only swirling movement, bands of sharp light, and shifting shadows. It was one of those rare occasions when Winona didn't have the slightest idea what to do next. If Space could offer her no clue, then maybe Time could...

Holding onto her Sacred Pipe, the Chanunpa Wakan, she decided to wait. Dazed and bewildered, it took a few moments for her to realize that her Pipe, filled right before her death, was now empty. Somehow, during the passage through time, space, and other dimensions, the Pipe had been smoked. She clung to it as her only source of certainty in the new world.

Every time a human being Back There called out her name or brought up her image, she felt the gentle tug of gossamerlike strands at her back, strings that dangled through the foggy boundaries between Back There and Here.

At first there were many tugs.

Winona faced the direction which her Pipe told her was west. She was content to wait a long time. For Davis or a guide. For a sign or a signal to tell her where to go and what to do next.

Even if it would take forever.

* * * *

Meggie prayed hard for Winona's passage into the next life. Following the pipe ceremony, Meggie experienced a rush of energy. She busied herself with chores. She shoveled snow and hauled firewood to the east porch. Inside, she stoked up the woodstove, simmered a lentil-and-ham soup on the electric range, baked low-fat oatmeal muffins, and cleaned the dog dishes. She changed the sheets on the bed, washed three loads of laundry, checked in with her answering service to pick up client messages, and only then sank back exhausted onto the living room couch with a book, praising herself for the productive morning.

What she really wanted to do was to go to the telephone and call that enigmatic man, Hawk.

Cousin to Winona, Hawk had appeared in Suttons Bay soon after Meggie's first encounter with Winona in her therapy office. One day, he had arrived at Meggie's kitchen door, sent by the crippled caretaker of Chrysalis as a replacement handyman. By working part-time jobs in the area, Hawk found he could support himself, while spending valuable time with his medicine teacher, Winona.

Lanky and laconic, Hawk had introduced himself to Meggie as "Slade," his white name. Sparse on information about himself, Slade gradually revealed that he was a mixed breed: part Lakota, part Cherokee and Apache with a dash of German, Irish, and Mexican thrown in for spice. Alongside each other, Slade and Meggie worked on the place, chainsawing trees and stacking wood. Not once did it occur to Meggie that Slade was kin to her client, Winona, or that he was, in fact, the mysterious "Hawk" whom Winona kept mentioning in her therapy sessions.

Disillusioned with marriage and men, Meggie initially kept a wary distance from Slade. Fritzie, however, unabashedly adored the new handyman who, under the table, secretly slipped oatmeal cookies to the terrier. But events conspired to bring Meggie and Slade closer and closer to each other, and underneath the modest exterior of the man, Meggie discovered a delightful, delicious sense of humor. During one vicious snowstorm, a birch bough had crashed down upon Meggie's head, and if Slade hadn't arrived in the nick of time to find and transport her to the hospital, Meggie might have died.

After that incident, Meggie began to suspect that there was a great deal more to Slade than what she had already learned. Right before Christmas, he gifted her with a colorful pair of quill earrings, made from a porcupine she had shot while they were out hunting. In gratitude and out of her growing affection for him, Meggie had placed her hands on his cheeks and kissed him full on the lips. And later, without thinking, Slade had answered her kiss with one of his own.

Meanwhile, in the therapy sessions, Winona continued to dangle Hawk's name in front of Meggie. She extolled his charm with women, his respect for the old ways, his keen intelligence, the difference between Hawk and other men, and his need for a strong woman to stand beside him. Meggie wondered if Winona was spinning a web, lacing the two of them together. But Meggie remained confused, mistaking Lucy's handsome husband, Larry, for the "Hawk" of Winona's focus. Only during the memorial prayer meeting after Winona's death did Meggie finally discover that all along her friend, Slade, was a pipe carrier and practitioner of the old medicine ways. And that his ceremonial Indian name was Hawk.

Meggie sighed. Now that Winona had died, there was probably nothing in Michigan to keep Hawk/Slade from returning home to South Dakota. Pushing the novel in front of her face, Meggie sternly reminded herself to get used to the idea of his departure.

* * * *

Fritzie sensed that his human being was not happy. Leaping up onto the low divan by her sprawling legs and feet, he thrust his damp nose under her book, demanding an ear rub. She laughed at his antics and scratched behind his ears. Mission accomplished, Fritzie turned round three times on the soft divan, nestled his nose across one of her legs, and settled himself in for a winter's nap.

* * * *

With the plow attached to the front, Hawk's truck rumbled up the mile-long driveway to Chrysalis. Hawk noted that while his pick-up was old and cranky, the old girl still had a lot of life left in her. She coughed in protest when he turned off the ignition. The afternoon sun sparkled off the wind drifts of snow. He noticed that the path to the kitchen door had been recently shoveled. Hawk knocked twice, wedged open the door, and shouted for Fritzie. The wire-haired fox terrier came flying out of the nether regions of the house like a white, hyperactive mop, skidding across the tiled kitchen floor, flinging himself with joy at the man. Meggie soon followed, book in hand.

With a grin, she motioned for him to come on in from the cold, but he gestured for her to come outside, inviting her to share in the dazzle of snow and sun.

"Okay, I'll get my jacket and boots on while you entertain Fritzie," she answered.

Already the dog had dashed around the house to the east porch, the last site of his beloved but tattered tennis ball. He returned with the ball safely ensconced in his jaws. He dared Hawk to grab it for a game of tug and shake. Each time Hawk was able to yank the ball out of his mouth, Fritzie threw his body skyward, teeth clacking together like a shark in a feeding frenzy. High up in the air, the yellow ball twirled round and around, caught in the blindness of the afternoon sun, only to fall gracefully back into the snowbanks. Fritzie, too, leapt high in pursuit, springing stiff-legged from the ground, eyes focused on the ball's eventual return.

A snowball clipped Hawk's left shoulder, rudely interrupting the dance between man, dog, and tennis ball. Hawk turned around just in time to see a second missile aiming for his chest and Meggie sporting a wicked smile. He abandoned the game with Fritzie to face his new predator.

Seeing that Hawk had revenge on his mind, Meggie bolted toward the kitchen door. An old rodeo hand, Hawk caught up to her long before she could reach the security of the house. With a low tackle, he brought her down into a big pile of soft snow. As if she weighed no more than a sack of potatoes, his arms turned her over and over as they rolled down the hill, legs and arms akimbo, to the sound of her shrieks and his laughter. And there, midpoint on the hill, red-cheeked and snow-encrusted, full of her humbling, Hawk planted a New Year kiss upon Meggie.

Standing up and brushing the snow off his body, he looked down at her triumphantly and said, "That will teach you white women not to attack us red men willy-nilly." Gallantly, he proffered Meggie a hand to help her up.

She posed as if ready to arise, all the while restoring her sense of balance, tensing her muscles, and smiling up at him. Meggie thrust out her hand toward him. Grabbing it, he pulled her upward, tilting his own body off balance. Catching that very moment of suspense, she yanked him forward. Out his feet slipped from under him, his whole body nose-diving forward, arms flailing -- much like a dodo bird trying to attempt flight. "Ah-ha," she proclaimed, and with an exuberant push on his plunging bottom, she guided him in a tumble past her to the bottom of the hill. Only then did she stand up, hands on her hips, announcing, "Perhaps that will teach you red men not to underestimate us white women."

And that was when Meggie walked over to the sprawled form of her friend and bestowed upon him the second kiss of the New Year.

Thus, the New Year began with grief, a gift, a prayer, rabbit dreams, the beginnings of a new journey.

And two kisses.

Copyright © 1998 by Priscilla Cogan

What People are Saying About This

Jennifer Barker

Reencountering Winona is more than a pleasure. It's the relief of meeting a light—bearer on a dark night. Cogan's voice of ancient wisdom is one we need to hear.
—(Jennifer Barker, author of The Goddess Within)

Steve Wall

Compass of the Heart is not just another novel, its much more. It's a must read, a real education.
—(Steve Wall, author of Dancing With God)

Sue Harrison

In Compass of the Heart, Priscilla Cogan spins another delicate web. Her story reminds even those of us who have chosen 'the Jesus way' that religion has little value as merely an outward ritual, but must center itself around a Living Presence Who can change our hearts and open our eyes.
—(Sue Harrison, author of Mother Earth, Father Sky; My Sister the Moon; Brother Moon; and Song of the River)

Editorial Reviews

"Compass of the Heart is not just another novel, it's much more. It's a must-read, a real education."—Steve Wall, author of Dancing with God

"Reencountering Winona is more than a pleasure. It's the relief of meeting a light-bearer on a dark night. Cogan's voice of ancient wisdom is one we need to hear." —Jennifer Barker, author of The Goddess Within

From the Publisher