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I went on a biblical journey that centered around the Tin Shed. When I bought the 100 Men Hall, there was a work shed on the property, and I applied and received a permit to remodel it into a Musician’s Cottage with the help of grants from the Heritage Area and Coast Electric Round Up. The idea was to encourage musicians to come stay here, to soak up the ancestors’ vibe, and to relax into their music.

It was a chaotic time for me. I was in a Battle Royale about a sticky situation that was not getting resolved with my son. I was trying to fulfill a vision for the Hall to be more magical than venue. In the midst of all of this, my niece, Michelle decided to come for a visit, and we decided to do a 24-hour Vision Quest at my friend James’ bioreserve in the Kiln.

We arrived there with tent, sleeping bags, her instant coffee maker, and a desire to both rid of ourselves of the miasma we were living in. We gathered in the group teepee, we meditated alone, we focused on nature, we built a fire, we gathered to eat, we talked, we gathered to learn, and we left feeling as if we had had a spiritual (miasma) cleansing.

I returned to the uphill battle of a City Council that opposed a residential permit for the Tin Shed. In other words, no one could sleep in there. This was led first by my councilman – to say this surprised me is an understatement – but in this town, most everyone was in allegiance to some petty power that to this day escapes me. To give you an example of one of the arguments against letting musicians sleep at this century old African American landmark: “If we let the 100 Men Hall allow musicians to spend the night in the Tin Shed, next thing you know Burger King on Highway 90 will want to house its employees.”

The city wanted the Tin Shed, which is 450 sf structure to be 750 sf, so I called Mississippi State University to see if there was a Sam Mockbee-type architectural professor who might be interested in taking on this task as a student-led project. Several phone calls later, I met Chris Hunter who was interested in this project from the get go because he was documenting historical Black churches in Mississippi.

Chris traveled here to see the Tin Shed. He met with my architect friends here at Unabridged Architecture, he spoke to Gary Knoblock, the councilman at large, one of the two councilmen to show up when I invited them to come see the project for themselves. My councilman did show up albeit with no fresh material. At the end of his stay, Chris recognized what I was up against; yet, he said the project was too small for them to be a student-led semester project.

As I was driving him back to his car, he said, “Rachel, you are going to be okay.”

For reasons I still don’t understand, he repeated this to me nothing less than ten times before we got to his car, saying my name, “Rachel,” pausing, then saying emphatically “you are going to be okay.”

Months later, it was going on nearly two years into the struggle to get the Tin Shed permitted, to get the Battle Royale to go away, to get my life in the direction it needed to be in, and I decided to do a longer Vision Quest with my friend, James. So I signed up for a five-day quest he was hosting.

I was joined by a few others, none of whom I knew, and we were each assigned our own secluded spot in the woods. The bioreserve is on 23 acres bordered by a deep cavern and creek, and it is heavily wooded. My spot consisted of a blue tarp tied on two ends with rope to a tree and staked on two ends to the ground. There was a makeshift table and a burn spot. At the time, I had picked up smoking again, having given it up for good only to find myself in the midst of hurricanes and I get hurricane nerves, bad, so I had picked up a pack of cigarettes.

The group did a lot of gathering, a lot of exercises together, a lot of learning together, a lot of meditating, and we also had a lot of alone time in our secluded spots. For one 24-hour period, we fasted, and I sat in my spot, alone, in my chair, tending my fire and whittling prayer sticks. As I scraped the soft wood skin from the sticks with my knife, I repeated over and over again, Rachel, you are going to be okay.

I didn’t conjure those words, they came to me as a prayer, as a meditation, as an obsession and rumination. I would smoke, add wood to the fire, drink water, whittle, then lie down on my sleeping bag thinking those words. We were asked to meditate on our totem, on what animal called to us. James is nearly half Native American so most of his teachings derive from that lineage. And although I had grown up all my life believing I had an affinity with elephants, a stint I took to an elephant reserve years ago had made me reconsider this notion. Elephants are huge creatures. They love each other, and they are not paying that much attention to us. While I was at the elephant reserve, a woman who was also there was always fussing over the elephants, and kept kissing the wiry tough haunch of one of them. This irritated me to no end.

As I lay on the sleeping bag in the woods, fire crackling, I closed my eyes in one of those half sleeps that come from fasting, being alone out in the woods, and I saw a bald eagle circling over head. It was my imagination, I think. But how appropriate that a bald eagle called to me as my totem. Later on the quest, James saw a bald eagle fly over the tree tops. He said it was rare to see them out there. He said the eagle flies high in the sky and observes everything that is going on from a distance.

It’s a meditation – a totem – I could fly above the fray. The bald eagle is such a fascinating creature – it is known to have carried the heaviest load of any bird alive. I can relate. There are several myths about bald eagles, including they have the ability to rip out their feathers and rejuvenate themselves. Part Phoenix, Part Predator.

Rachel, you are going to be okay, has become my mantra. Adam would probably have me consider: Rachel you ARE okay. And that is fine too. I am okay. The Tin Shed exists as it should. My Battle Royale is a distant memory. I don’t smoke nasty cigarettes, hurricane or no hurricane. On my screen saver is a Buddha with “every thing’s gonna be ok” and this is true.

Amen. Asé. So mote it be.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 16th, 2025 at 8:10 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.