On this day (May 18th) Mount St Helens (Loowit to many of the Native people in the area) erupted in 1980. I remember that day well it was a Sunday (morning) and I was in high school and my mother woke me to say "She has finally erupted". I quickly went to the backyard and saw a huge nuclear bomb-like plume surrounded by lightning. That event is carved in my mind .. sublime ... the beauty and the destruction wrapped into one. As Robert Oppenheimer watched the first nuclear test remembered the quote about Lord Shiva from the Bagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of Worlds." As a teenager deeply into Goddess literature, Hinduism, Shamanism and Asatru and other worldviews I looked at Loowit thinking of the Goddess Kali with a garland of severed heads and a skirt of dismembered limbs dancing on the "corpse" of Shiva. From destruction comes creation for from fire consuming wood comes ashes and from flood water comes new fertile soil.

This event is now part of Cascadian mythology as much as Bigfoot, Japanese paper balloon bombs, DB Cooper, the CCC and every Coyote and Raven story. This is where the border-realms of real and imagination transcends you and I the individual and move us into a collective realm of being.