Compass of the Heart: A Novel of Discovery - Hardcover

Cogan, Priscilla

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684847647 ISBN 13: 9780684847641

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1998

Synopsis

"Love is very tricky," warns Winona Pathfinder, the elderly Sioux 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 younger cousin Hawk to walk alongside Maggie on a journey of the heart and soul. It is this story that is at the center of Compass of the Heart. Priscilla Cogan, bestselling author of Winona's Web, winner of the Small Press Book Award, is the weaver of this lyrical, incandescent tale of love in all the directions.

With the enigmatic words "It's a teaching pipe. Maybe, just maybe, she'll have the luck I did and meet a man worthy of her spirit," Winona asks Hawk to give Meggie her lightning pipe. This gift marks the beginning of Hawk and Meggie's relationship. As they turn toward the seven directions of prayer, the Pipe calls forth the Spirits, and leads both Hawk and Meggie deeper into a world of sacred mystery. For the first time in years, levelheaded Meggie has to reckon with romance and the risk of passion. Hawk, a medicine teacher, like his cousin, is torn between his love for the white woman and his loyalty to the red road. 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.

All the while, Winona watches over them and their circle of friends and family. Children scar and heal, husbands betray pained wives, aged sisters ease into the late afternoon of their lives, and animals teach the human beings the true meaning of sacrifice.

Love may be very tricky, they all eventually discover, but it's a road that can be navigated with faith and hope. "Maybe we don't have to circle round and round in life," muses Meggie, "chasing the ancient tales. I'd rather warm myself in the creation of a new story." Filled with Cogan's sensuous, intimate renderings of Native American ceremony and custom, as well as her compassion for her characters (whether man or man's best friend), Compass of the Heart is that magical new story, a novel of great insight and artistry.

About this title

About the Author

riscilla Cogan, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist. novelist, screen writer, and playwright of Irish-American descent and a practitioner of pipe and sweat-lodge ceremonies. For many 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 the author of the Winona Trilogy: Winona's Web, Compass of the Heart, and Crack at Dusk: Crook of Dawn. She has published three additional novels, and is currently writing plays.

Reviews

The familiar scenario in which a shared passion overleaps racial bounds gets an unconvincing, New Age face-lift in Cogan's disappointing second novel (after Winona's Web). We first meet Meggie, a white psychologist in her 40s, on her knees, praying with a sacred pipe given to her by the same aged Native American woman who trained her lover, philandering Lakota medicine man Hawk. From the beginning, it's clear who'll be making most of the adjustments in this relationship?but it can't help but raise eyebrows when Meggie prays for the spiritual health of the woman who is her rival. Is it white guilt that makes Meggie open herself so thoroughly to the spirituality of sweat lodge ceremonies and vision quests? (The closest Hawk gets to her culture is baking nut bread and playing golf.) Or is it that Meggie, with her education and European blood, can afford to make herself available to other cultures, while the red man she loves is more primally bound to his own? The novel is too sentimental to address such questions, and the everyday doings of the characters never quite hold our attention. Who can care about (or believe in) a woman who, when she learns that her lover has been shot, blurts out: "Oh jeez, I hope I didn't have anything to do with the shooting. You see, I left him a note, a love letter. What if his wife, Andrea, found out about us?" The ring of human speech is as absent from Cogan's dialogue as hard questions are from the minds of her characters.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Cogan explores the dual quests for spiritual enlightenment and true love in this lyrical follow-up to her first novel, Winona's Web. Winona, a Lakota medicine woman, is the driving force behind the relationship between her psychologist/student, Dr. Meggie O'Connor, also featured in the first book, and Hawk, who is both a cousin and a disciple of Winona's. She introduces them and expects Hawk to continue leading Meggie's spiritual quest after she dies. Although Hawk and Meggie are attracted to each other, Meggie worries about economic and cultural obstacles, and Hawk has his own problems to resolve. Gradually they both learn what is truly important in life by participating in sweat-lodge ceremonies during which they receive messages from the spirit world, including a little help from Winona. Cogan succeeds in combining a powerful love story with lyrically expressed insights into the beliefs of Native Americans and their struggle to maintain their spiritual and cultural identity in American society. Patty Engelmann

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: Coyote's Tracks

"Ah, do not mourn," he said,
"That we are tired, for other loves await us"

- William Butler Yeats Ephemera

"Love is very tricky," cautioned the old Lakota medicine woman, "and Coyote's tracks are all over the territory." She rolled a couple of sage leaves under her tongue while staring out the window at the threatening sky. Over the past few months, she had come to respect the sudden, awesome power of Lake Michigan storms that swept over the Leelanau Peninsula, unfettered by the drag of land.

Hawk watched and listened attentively. Forty-one years he had known Winona, his mother's cousin. She was not one to waste words. As his teacher, she understood more about his love-tattered life than anyone. He pulled out a cigarette; it was going to be a long winter's afternoon.

"People blow a lot of smoke to cover up ignorance," she observed.

He lit the cigarette, slowly drew in blue tendrils of smoke, and exhaled deeply. She was right, of course.

Squat and of lumpy proportion, Winona eased back into the armchair, her moccasins barely brushing the floor. A brown flannel shirt of uncertain vintage with frayed cuffs topped a nondescript housedress. Although her wrinkled face attested to years of sun and hard work, her body was still strong and healthy, her eyes black and keen. Like shuttling spiders, her fingers worried over a ragged spot on the flannel shirt where the button had vanished and only a broken web of thread remained.

Shifting her gaze back to him, Winona added, "Men are blind when it comes to love. They look to the sky for high and mighty visions for themselves and the people. They forget what is important. Visions don't mean shit without grounding. If it weren't for Mole Woman, Coyote would never find his way home."

Hawk nodded, thinking back on the first of his two marriages. Young, wildly in love with his new wife, he had been unable to tolerate the truth of her restless eyes. Only six months into their marriage, another man claimed her heart, spiriting her away in a beat-up Chevy. He swore at that time never to trust a woman again.

But he soon learned never to say "never."

"Love is very tricky," Winona reiterated, "and we two-leggeds need all the help we can get. It seems to me that when a wind blows in one direction, it sucks the energy from the opposite direction. It creates a hole. Anything flows into a vacuum. Nature always seeks a balance. Don't you see?"

But what Hawk discerned was that Mole Woman was blind too.

"As soon as death shivers by, life begins to sprout. We are always wheeling round into our seasons, Hawk." Winona studied the sad, contemplative face of her cousin's son, a rugged handsome man. The mother in her wanted to reach out and soothe his troubling thoughts.

His eyes lost focus as memories of his second marriage, like uninvited guests, piled into his imagination:

A ferris wheel, spinning to the top of the world,
then plunging to the bottom of the universe.

Rising Smoke, at the county fair
her black liquid eyes, straight ebony hair,
white teeth in a dazzling, world-toppling smile.
Crazy, crazy in love with her.

Rising Smoke racing the rodeo barrels,
tamer of wild horses,
riding him crazy into the ground.

Rising Smoke, pregnant and proud,
belly hanging over the saddle knob,
spurring the rodeo audience wild.
Her horse slipping, falling
Crowd hushed,
Running, running to her
Underneath,
The baby crushed.

Rising Smoke drinking with him
Rotgut whiskey days blurred into weeks,
Two lives wasting.

The carcass of a marriage:
furniture, photographs,
empty bottles,
ferris wheel memories.

"No sooner does one think one has discovered love, then hate is set into motion," Winona said. "No sooner is one into the joy of living, then death begins its stalk upon that life. The Creation is always balancing itself. We human beings are the only ones who delude ourselves into thinking that love makes us permanent, that love is unchanging, that love is the endpoint." She waited for him to say something, but it was too painful.

"I get up each morning," she continued, "take my Pipe out, the Chanunpa Wakan, and offer it to Wakan Tanka. I thank the Creator for my life. I am grateful for what the Pipe has given me, for the teachings of the animal and plant nations, and the kindness shown to me by Wakan Tanka. It was through the Pipe that I married Davis. When he died, I felt my life was over too. I know he's there waiting for me to cross over and join him. Even when a person dies, the love keeps on living."

"Death is one thing. Divorce is another." Sourness saturated his voice. The unforgiving hardness of the wood chair pressed against his spine. His eyes shifted to the window. Stripped of leaves, the trees outside looked as if they were begging the sky for a winter's white robe.

"Listen, Hawk, you and I both know that love can bring great happiness and fullness," Winona interrupted, "and it can also pierce the heart with its deceptions and false expectations. The tracks of Coyote are everywhere. He's always looking for the careless pleasure of love. Just when you are about to give up hope, pay attention, Hawk! You may spot an entrance into a deep passage where the only way is down. And you must go, for there is no other way to the heart, and in discovering your heart, you may, perhaps, be lucky enough for Love to find you."

Of course, he thought, Mole Woman lives underground.

The short, stocky woman pulled out her lightning pipe and began to fill it with tobacco. Winona noticed that the zigzag beaded design held as steady as her words. Sometimes the tiny beads vibrated, and the lightning bolt would shiver on the leather, drawing her attention to the pipe.

Hawk patiently waited, no word having crossed his lips. The appearance of the pipe signaled that Winona had more to say. He settled back into the chair. She tamped down the tobacco with a sliver of deer bone, as if to poke each word into his soul.

"You'll have to find your own way now. It's time for me to go home. I've taught you what you need to know. It's time you take another teacher."

A shudder moved through him. He guessed at what was coming next.

Winona continued. "All my medicine articles I leave to your care, except for my two pipes. This lightning pipe, my social pipe," she stroked the long sumac stem, "was given to me by Davis as my 'learning pipe' in those days when I first started living with him. I prayed with this pipe every morning, asking for direction, asking for love. Long before I knew I was in love with Davis, I knew the pipe loved me." With her right hand Winona encouraged the smoke to travel up the stem; her left hand cradled the red bowl of catlinite stone.

"Every morning I'd pray to the Grandfather of the Yellow Face, Wiyohiyanpa, to tell me where I could make my home. It was this chanunpa that woke me up. Sometimes we twoleggeds can be so empty that we don't even recognize the door to love when it opens before us." She looked at him sharply.

The familiar sweet smell of tobacco permeated the living room. All was quiet. The grandchildren had not yet arrived from school. Winona's daughter, Lucy, and her husband, Larry, were still at work. It was the time of day, midafternoon, when Hawk was able to catch precious moments alone with the elder, his teacher.

"I want you to give this social pipe to Meggie O'Connor, the psychologist. I know that I am not the only one here with special feelings for her." She cast a knowing glance in his direction.

He started. How much did Winona know?

He parried, "But she's a white woman."

She brushed aside h

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684847647
• ISBN 13: 9780684847641
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352