An image came to me. A shamanic image in ironwood after the Maori fashioning in ironwood that I have known and felt since college anthropology.

This appearing image was of a skull etched deeply and adeptly, with elaborately interwoven geometries, part no doubt of an extended, skeletonized body. But the apparition was all skull.

Visible from the top down: two extremely deep eye sockets with other eyes lightly etched in cascades from the forehead above to the cheekbones below. The left eye socket holds a small, most intricately carved, crouching figure fitting precisely by design in its small cave and covered with a hinged hatch of an eyelid, also embellished.

I am aware that I have been summoned to this whole scene to behold this crouching figure that echoes the skull’s angle of repose. I am aware of numberless beings who inhabit the skeletonized body, and with this disclosure, this imperative: I have not summoned these beings to awareness but rather, they have summoned me.