A white buffalo calf was rare, and Native Americans saw it as a prophecy. A time of cleansing was to begin, they believed, and peace and harmony would follow.

On that same day in Old Fort, N.C., Chief Two Trees, chief knowledge keeper for the Bear Clan of the Cherokee Nation, had passed on the clan pipes signifying his position as tribal healer to his daughter, Darlene Wind Trees.

The 2,000-year-old pipes had been given to him by his grandmother, Eyes of Fire, and had been passed down through the tribe for generations before.

Two Trees taught his daughter the tribal medicine ways.She stayed by his side, listening and learning, as he suggested herbal remedies for the people who traveled from all over seeking healing.

When Two Trees died the following spring, it was left to Darlene Wind Trees to continue his legacy.

But help was to arrive from the South.

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Elizabeth Poole had been born and raised in Concord, the oldest of two children born to a paramedic and a church pianist. She graduated from Central Cabarrus High School in 1980 and continued her education at a university in Kansas City, where she earned a degree in substance abuse counseling.

Her first job after graduation was working with skid row alcoholics at the Kansas City Community Center. After three years, Poole returned to North Carolina to work for an inpatient treatment center in Charlotte, where she counseled people with substance abuse and emotional problems.

She loved her job, and she was good at what she did. But something was missing.

She accepted a job in Phoenix over the telephone and headed west. “I just felt called,” she says. “I felt like there was something there for me to learn, something there for me to heal within myself as well.”

It was in the West, she says, that her spiritual journey led her to a Native American way of life.

Poole, whose great-grandmother was a Cherokee, met a Lakota Sioux woman who taught her about Native American spirituality. She went with her to ceremonies and learned about rituals to seek spiritual guidance, such as sweat lodges and vision quests.

“She taught me a lot about myself,” Poole says. “She taught me how to look behind the mask and personas to find the real me, who I really, really am.”

After a year counseling kids in gangs, Poole started her own treatment center specializing in helping women overcome sexual abuse, childhood trauma and eating disorders.

“It was just real holistic in treatment,” she says, “looking at mind, body and spirit.”

Poole loved the West, but after a few years, she felt compelled to return to her hometown. “I can’t explain it,” she says. “It was a spiritual calling to come home.”

Not sure what she was supposed to do, Poole moved back to Concord and accepted a job as a group home manager for adolescent girls in Iredell County.

She had only been there a few months when she read about Chief Two Trees’ death in the newspaper.

“That’s why I was called here,” she thought to herself.

She resigned from her job and headed to Old Fort.

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There, she met Darlene Wind Trees and assisted with Two Trees’ spirit keep, a Native American ritual to help release the spirit of the deceased to the other side.

Wind Trees invited Poole to stay and learn the Native American medicine ways her father had taught her.

Under Wind Trees, she learned about herbs and the sacred manner in which Native Americans gathered them and prayed and meditated over them while preparing the remedies that Two Trees had shared with the sick.

For a year, Poole studied on the mountain.

When Wind Trees was satisfied with her student and Poole had made a spiritual commitment to become a healer in the Bear Clan, they planned an initiation ceremony for her.

“She said to me, ‘Your life is no longer your own,’” Poole says. “You take the knowledge and use it and pass it on.”

As part of the initiation ceremony, Wind Trees gave Poole her Native American name. It had come to her in a dream.

Butterflies go through a transformation, Wind Trees told Poole, and that’s what she saw her doing in her work, helping people to transform their lives. And because she did it with such joy, the name came to her as “Singing Butterfly.”

In 1996, Elizabeth Poole returned to Concord as Liz Singing Butterfly.

“I just felt like I needed to keep the legacy alive,” she says, “all the work that Two Trees had done, and to open a store and pass on in his honor this knowledge.”

After that, everything fell into place.

Singing Butterfly opened her shop, The Healing Connection, in June 1997 in a yellow brick building in downtown Concord where Buffalo Street forks with McGill.

“I couldn’t have planned it better,” she says. “We’re on Buffalo, and buffalo in Native America is about abundance, prayer. There was no plan, it just came.”

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Chief Two Trees had quite a reputation in the area. “He was such a great healer that people respected anybody who worked with him or his daughter,” Singing Butterfly says. “They were both very gifted.”

As word got out that Singing Butterfly had studied with Darlene Wind Trees, people began coming to her with health concerns. And when Wind Trees moved out West, she referred some of her father’s clients with whom she had continued working to Singing Butterfly.

Many of the people who go to The Healing Connection are cancer patients, seeking Native American remedies as a last resort.

“It’s really kind of a shame that they come when the doctors have given up,” Singing Butterfly says.“They’ve tried everything and they’ve been given six months to live, and I have to work miracles.”

Some believe she has.

A South Carolina manhad to be helped into her shop, he was so sick, she says. Doctors in Atlanta had found cancer in his kidneys, stomach, colon, liver and lungs.

Singing Butterfly recommended the herbal remedy given by Two Trees to cancer patients. Among the ingredients areextracts of 12 different herbs, the bark of five different trees, roots of 12 different varieties of plants, essences of seven different flowers and essences of seven different gems.

Almost three years later, “it’s not spreading,” she says. “It’s healing, and the spots are gone.”

Former WBTV newscaster C.J. Underwood is a client of The Healing Connection. Underwood, who agreed to allow Singing Butterfly to use his personal testimony as part of her advertisements and publications, was diagnosed in June 1997 with colon cancer that had spread to his liver.

Chemotherapy treatment followed, but by 1999, the cancer had started to spread even more. In February of last year, Underwood met Singing Butterfly, who recommended a combination of herbs and vitamins.

“Since I started her program, the cancer has stopped spreading,” he wrote. “However, the most remarkable result is the energy I have had in the face of chemotherapy that is usually overwhelming, with many side effects.

“Instead, I’ve been able to do everything in life that I want since I started working with The Healing Connection.”

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When people come to her with health problems, Singing Butterfly looks at what is happening on the physical, emotional and spiritual realms.

“When you look at disease, the process, it’s three-fold,” she says. “It begins spiritually in the body and then it manifests emotionally and then if it’s not dealt with, it becomes physical.”

Oftentimes, Singing Butterfly says cancer is tied in with grief. “And with heart disease, it’s a lot about anger,” she says. “There are different things that you know intuitively that are tied in with the emotional and the physical.”

When one woman came to her with cancer in both lungs, Singing Butterfly suggested a regiment of herbs and healing affirmations.

“She began affirming,” she says. “She’d take the herbs and say, ‘This is healing my body.’ She’d say that every day and call it to her and claim it. After four months, it was completely gone.”

Part of her ability to help people with illness is her ability to do intuitive diagnoses. “I just know things,” she says. “I can read hearts. I see beyond the eyes to the spirit and soul of the person.”

Singing Butterfly does intuitive consultations to help determine a person’s herbal, vitamin or mineral needs. Though she doesn’t keep a quart jar out like Chief Two Trees did, she asks for a donation for consultations, most of which take about an hour.

Customers are sometimes surprised when Singing Butterfly is able to pinpoint their emotional issues, sometimes deep-rooted, as being connected with illnesses or health concerns.

“But I think they’re tickled,” she says. “They walk out with hope. I see the tears of the people. I see the laughter of the people. For me, that’s the reason we’re here.”

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Because of her intuitive abilities, Singing Butterfly is also able to help people find their paths in life. “I’m called a pathfinder sometimes,” she says.

What oftentimes happens, she says, is people get so stressed trying to keep up with their jobs and everything else they have to do that they get into a survival mode.

“Life is not about survival,” she says. “It’s about living our passion, living our service and why we were put here on this earth.”

People who live with chronic stress in their lives become depressed, she says, and develop adrenalin and immune system dysfunction.

The liver can also be connected to depression.“It is the seat of all the emotions, so if the liver’s not working right,” she says, “sometimes you get depression.”

The Herbal Connection has a Stress Support Formula, which is a combination of herbs and vitamins, that is good for depression, according to Singing Butterfly.

“It really takes you through the day,” she says. “You’re real focused and centered and don’t get stressed. So Ido that, and then perhaps St. John’s Wort. There’s ginkgo and Gotu Kola that’s really good for depression.”

The Healing Connection only carries vitamins made from whole food. “That’s where we’re supposed to get it from anyway,” Singing Butterfly says.

Two Trees’ formulas, which address such health issues as heart problems, obesity, gallstones and kidney stones, digestive problems, headaches, impotence, compromised immune systems, stress and tension, PMS and irregular menstrual cycles, are also sold there.

Wind Trees began bottling them after she found a manufacturer, Native Essence, which would preserve the sacredness and reverence Native Americans used in the preparation.

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Shortly after she opened The Healing Connection, Singing Butterfly began holding classes there.

It was at a class on women empowering themselves that Judy McDaniel of China Grove realized that the herbalistcould help her to fulfill her own spiritual calling. “I knew in my heart that we were supposed to meet,” she says.

McDaniel had known for some time that she was supposed to turn the 16 acres she had inherited from her parents into a spiritual retreat where people of all faiths could come together and worship in connection with the earth.

The land was part of the Catawba Trail through which the Catawba Native American tribe, which moved with the seasons, traveled. “You can feel the spirit of the land when you walk down in these woods,” McDaniel says.

She invited Singing Butterfly to have lunch at her farmhouse and see the land.

“It’s a sacred ground,” Singing Butterfly agreed. Together, they built a sweat lodge and medicine wheel for ceremonies and began holding retreats there in the spring and fall.

Participants in sweat lodges fast before going into a small shelter covered with blankets, where they pray around a pit of rocks heated by fire. Water is poured over the rocks to create steam, much like a sauna.

“It’s a purification ceremony is what it is,” Singing Butterfly says. “It purifies your body and your mind and your spirit. A lot of healing has been done in a lodge.”

Participants also sometimes see visions which help guide them in life, she says.

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Last year, Singing Butterfly felt called to open a second shop in Cornelius.“A lot of people were driving from Charlotte here,” she says.

Located at 21031 Catawba Avenue, The Healing Connection there is more of a holistic center, also offering massage therapy and other methods of alternative healing.

Ear candling, for example, is an old Chinese way of extracting excess wax from ears. This helps with allergies and sinus problems, according to Singing Butterfly.

“I have it done twice a year so I can think clearly,” she says.

Singing Butterfly has two trained staff members for each shop. “And I’m the Butterfly and flutter back and forth,” she says.

Though she hasn’t sought publicity, Singing Butterfly has been featured on Channel 3 and in several publications since she opened The Healing Connection.

“They just come, much like you,” she says. “In the beginning, Iused to get excited when people would do interviews. But it’s like when you called, I said, ‘Oh no.’

“But I thought, ‘OK, evidently, the people need to hear in Salisbury.’ ”

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Concord residents gave Singing Butterfly a warm welcome when she opened her shop. “I have been so accepted,” she says. “I work with judges and I work with newscasters and I work with the homeless.”

Sometimes, she says, first-time customers will come in and say, “I heard you were a little weird but that you’re really good, so I want to work with you.” Her grandfather was a well-known Baptist minister in Concord. He had a reverence for people of all faiths, she says, and was particularly interested in Native American spirituality.

As a little girl, Singing Butterfly would walk with him to a Native American graveyard, where they would pray and meditate.

Singing Butterfly shares her grandfather’s reverence for all faiths.

“I think that God is kind of like a wheel,” she says. “The middle is Creator, that’s God, and the different spokes are just all the different ways that we get to Creator like Native American, like Buddhism, like Christianity, like the 12 steps of AA, whatever it takes.”

None of them are right or wrong, according to Singing Butterfly. “They just are,” she says.

If the Baptists in Concord lived in India, for example, she says they would probably practice Buddhism. “In all beliefs, most of them,” she says, “there is a higher spirit, there is a God, bigger than we are.”

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Though raised a Protestant, Singing Butterfly says she now practices the Native American faith. “I think all that we have to do is just walk outside and we are in church,” she says.

Native Americans see the new millennium as a part of the cleansing that is happening to the earth and to mankind, according to Singing Butterfly.

“There is a lot of harm that is happening to the earth and to us, to the people,” she says. “The Native Americans believe we are all one spirit. There is nothing that separates you and me.”

Part of that belief is that people are also connected to the plants and the animals and that nothing is greater than the other.

“So what we do to this earth,” Singing Butterfly says, “we do to ourselves.What I do to you, I do to me. It hurts me. We’re interconnected. We are connected in one spirit.”

It is from that belief that Singing Butterfly came up with the name for her shops.

“We are a connection for healing,” she says. “It’s not about us. It’s about God. It’s not me doing any of this. We’re just like a connection to Spirit.”

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The Healing Connection in Concord and Cornelius is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday. To schedule a consultation with Liz Singing Butterfly, call the Concord shop at (704) 795-4862 or the Cornelius shop at (704) 987-1409.