My favorite thing as a kid was a stick horse that my mother made for me. It was beautiful: brown corduroy with soft dark brown pinto markings, reddish brown yarn mane and exotic silver coins for eyes. There is a photograph of all the kids in my family--cousins, my little brother, myself-- lined up biggest to littlest in front of my Grandmother’s house in El Paso, with their new stick horses. I am the biggest. I am also in what I call my “Fully Upright and Locked Position”. My brown pinto is inserted between my legs, also upright, also ready to take off into the sagebrush. I am staring at my horse with a glazed kind of reverence. I am completely in love. That thing my mother had made was fully alive to me, endowed with the speed, grace, power, and beauty of all the horses of my horse crazy dreams. I wound up spending hours in the back yard riding my horse, training it for dressage, hunting, running wild over the hills, charging into battles. Finally I turned 13 and felt the shame of puberty that wouldn’t let me gallop around on a wooden broomstick with a stuffed horse’s head tied to it in full view of other people anymore.

I have constructed a one person mobile puppet stage called a “bag theater”. It is an object created with the intention to combine my impulses as a performer and my intuitions as a healer. Amazingly, as the theater neared completion I realized that this object was fully endowed with the same sense of presence that I had known in my stick horse and had seen in the ceremonial robes. It is its own entity as surely as a shaman’s drum, or a totem image. I have named it a Ceremonial Vehicle. In traditional cultures the shaman rides a spirit horse to other worlds to confront mysterious powers. Often the shaman literally rides a long board around the room as the spirit rides through dimensions.