Fourth of July festivities were postponed in Duluth due to the foggy, rainy weather. In so many ways this was fitting after the news of the last few weeks. We are a nation fogged in by Supreme Court decisions, January 6th hearings and mass shootings. It feels like we have lost our way.
Instead of fireworks, my husband, Tim, and I went in search of flowers. Last year some friends graciously showed us a portion of the Superior Hiking Trail where showy lady slippers grow. We grabbed our raincoats and put on our boots and headed out. We hoped we hadn’t missed the rare moment of time when they grow.
Leaving the car on the road near Jay Cooke State Park, we hiked in a couple miles to an amazing stretch of the trail. Here showy lady slippers fanned out along a ridge of cedar trees down to the creek below. In the silence we stood for a long while. Tim spent the time taking pictures. I stood enjoying the flowers, the smell of cedar and the feel of the light rain in the breeze. The wind made the lady slippers dance together. It was so beautiful.
As I stood in silence I remembered one of our girls favorite books, “The Legend of the Lady Slipper”. It is an Anishinaabe story retold by local authors Lise Lunge-Larsen and Margi Preus. We read it over and over to them when they were young. They loved that the hero of the story is a young girl.
The story explains the origin of the ma-ki-sin waa-big-waan, or lady slipper flower. In this story, a courageous girl makes a journey in a snow storm to save the people of her village who are very ill. Wearing deerskin moccasins that her father had made, she walks all day until she reaches the next village where the mash-ki-ki or healing medicine is. She barely rests, rises from a light sleep to travel home. She loses her moccasins in the deep snow; still she goes on, leaving bloody footprints. The mash-ki-ki healed the people.
When Spring comes the little girl and her brother go into the forest in search of her moccasins. She doesn’t find them. Instead, she finds beautiful flowers where she had lost her moccasins. They are growing wherever she had stepped in the snow with her bleeding feet. As Lunge-Larsen and Preus wrote, “The Ojibwe people named the new flower ma-ki-sin waa- big- waan, which means moccasin flower.”
As I sat among the cedars and the showy lady slippers, I also thought of another courageous young woman. I found myself saying a prayer for the safety of Cassidy Hutchinson who dared to speak the truth at the January 6th hearings last week.
As the New York Times reported on June 28th, The extent to which the Justice Department’s expanding criminal inquiry is focused on Mr. Trump remains unclear. But the revelations in the testimony to the House select committee by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, both provided new evidence about Mr. Trump’s activities before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and chipped away at any potential defense that he was merely expressing well-founded views about election fraud.
Hutchison too braved a bitter storm to bring healing to her people. She dared to bring truth to a bleeding and divided nation. Who knows what will grow from her words?
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