THE POEM

I can’t quite say what it was,

but my ear opened

There was a quiet roar

more felt than heard

It emerged from out

amongst the older wilder places

Yes, my ear opened

And I new I had to go

To cross the threshold

between the dusty road of the village

and the realms of the gods

To meet the twin I left behind

There amongst cedars and river

Beneath the swooshing of raven wings

Away from all the noise that is me

There she stood

wild, weeping, sharp-clawed

carrying the grief and resentment

of her abandonment emblemed

on a banner of a

torn animal hide

Carrying the truth

I was too afraid to

bear in the sunlit world.

Skin-shifting,

Paws holding feathered wings

We talked and sung and river plunged

her and I

Knelt to the circle of stones

and smeared our faces with ash

Tossed our measuring rod

into the Dark Below

Then the forest path

walked me back to where

the paved road returns

The home I left

was no longer there

All the things on

bookshelves and drawers

belonged to a stranger

of who I had been

I open my medicine pouch

Offer smoke back to the sea

“WE are here.” I say

And my medicine replies

“And so it begins.”

Skla-Na~

I’m in my weathered round house, a canvas hut at the feet of old cedars and firs towering above... where creek waters lullaby just below. A circle of twelve candles blaze at their appointed altar and I’m sitting here in the middle getting steeped in their prayers.

Something on the periphery of my vision catches my eye but it disappears before I can get a lock on it. It left its scent however and I get the feeling I’m meant to trail it. That’s an old practice... that it’s what’s just on the periphery of our seeing that is probing us into the hidden currents shaping us... ready to find voice and reveal itself.

A screech owl just landed on the branch outside my hut. I miss the cooing of the Great Horn Owls, but I’ll take whatever contact is offering itself.

There’s a remembering here... how we are inside a vastly sentient current that is ever responding to us and to the inherent blueprint we each are here to uniquely live.

Perhaps you’re one of the privileged few too who have the experience we are walking through a Waking-Dream. There are no chance encounters... your body’s symptoms, the sudden obstacles or unexpected openings... the people who fill your daily life.. how the land and it’s feathered or furred inhabitants reveal themselves to you.

Old man Mckinley used to come down to the very edge of his property each night... right where the tired barbwire fence barely clung to the bristled splintering fence post marking the boundary between his land and the forest. He’d call out into the dusk... into the dimming time. Sometimes he played his flute and leave an offering of loose leaf pipe tobacco for the fairies.

That’s what we call sacred etiquette... Reciprocity... an inner posture of how we receive, give, and be part of a greater relational field. Few remember these days.

Somewhere along the way a Hawthorne root tripped me and I fell off the path I was walking. I got up, brushed off my pants, and looked around. The path had vanished. Since then I’ve had the sense the path is walking me.

We’ve all felt it haven’t we? The presence and influence of invisible elemental currents at work beneath the movements of our walking? The ink is still fresh on the page from poets across time giving voice to a hidden sentience guiding our stepping. Have you ever spoke into that sentience... laid out some holy offerings for it?

I was strolling through a grove of oak trees growing out of the rolling cliffside hills above the Columbia river the other day. The wind gods are a constant presence here... bending, twisting, shaping the trees and yet, each tree has found its own shape. The old knowledge was that it’s the image held inside the acorn that instructed the wind currents in their work.

Few today remember they too are born with an image inscribed inside their bones... directing the currents shaping them. Something has been lost... that remembering of living in a continual, conversational dialogue with the river beneath the river. We’ve become illiterate to the soul’s native sight.

We’re being invited back in. Don’t go back to sleep... don’t go back to sleep.

Some of us are walking back out into the land to remember this older literacy... rekindling an intimacy with this vastly sentient living current dreaming us.

We’re remembering a sacred etiquette that invites our inner posture to be “of” this greater relational field we’re but part of and there’s so much beauty it in.

This post is a meandering.... I’m not trying to get to any point... but there are invitations woven within it and if you feel inspired, comment below what it spoke within you.

It’s often this silent ancient presence that finally breaks the roaring momentum of your mind grasping at anything to occupy itself... the silence becomes louder than the noise of your life for once. Shatters you back into presence.

And then... the void... a great abyss of grief, anxieties, unspoken fears burbles up... and if you let it all move through you... you may experience a beauty that reclaims you... that utterly destroys any trace of unworthiness.

Why would anyone choose to fast in solitude amongst the abrasiveness of wind and dirt and crawling things?

Let me reply with another question... What weight are you carrying that is asking to be laid upon the earthen altar, so that something else in you might finally be lived? What would that offer you?

These wilderness vigils are ancient rites... a time when the grinding of your ambitions and your griefs settle into the ground of something far deeper.

There’s an old human memory here. Across many traditions, people have gone beyond the familiar world to fast, pray, grieve... big questions get asked. A way to let one way of being die before another has found its name. Out here we turn our ear downward to the Great Below into the spaces just beyond where green shoots originate.

There’s a growing current of people rushing to ayahuasca ceremonies.. legalized mushroom vigils... DMT... and a vast menu of experiential encounters. I’m not knocking them, they have a valuable place and I even recommend them. But there’s a danger here in always seeking the next experience to get you there.

The question is “what happens when nothing is there to take you somewhere else?“

What if what you seek is far more accessible but requires you to do the stepping through the threshold into yourself... yourself?

Have you ever seen a sun dial? Sun and shadow marking time, measuring our passage through life. But then night arrives and we enter the timeless.

Out here on Vision Quest, there are no clocks, no notifications binging, no schedules to keep you in the currents of your doing. No screens. No books. You enter the timeless... the liminal time. Just you, your drum, your prayers, for four days and nights. Your senses slowly and often painfully begin withdrawaling from the addiction of occupying themselves and now... becoming present again to what’s right here in front of you... find connection.

It takes courage to do that and you might already be shrinking away if you’re still here with me... still reading.

I encountered a couple on a trail during this last vision quest. They were speeding along when I popped out of the bushes near where I left the Vision Quester and startled them. Barefoot, half naked, feraled-eyed... they stopped and the man asked “Is there a vista coming up?” I was confused. We’re inside an ancient forest of old growth trees with a thick canopy above and lush understory amongst us. I replied, “You’re in it.”

He looked around and laughed. He then asked if there’s any other hikes him and his wife should do while in the area. I thought about it and said, “You know, this here is my favorite. I recommend taking one of the small paths and sit by the river awhile.” He smiled again and said “oh... let the city fall off me?” I replied “Let the forest redream you.” Him and his wife loved that and said “Oh! We’re going to remember that quote!” and then they sped off again.

We have a word in my lineage: “Sukni”... it means “Out ahead of your spirit or your spirit trailing behind you.”

When I’m tending to a fire, or harvesting water from the river for tea ceremony, or walking the old forest trail, there’s a quality of presence that arrives and holds me. A remembering occurs that need not words but is deeply felt.

These wilderness vigils are a kind of recalibration. We enter ancestor time that slows and speeds up in relation to our attentiveness... to our ripeness to lay down the weight of our armor... enter a vulnerability... a receptivity...

In the world of screens and productivity funnels, there’s a bit too much emphasis on psychological hacking. But when we come out here where the old bones of the mountain is our guide, we move from the psyche occupying your mind to the psyche of cedar, river, banana slug, dusk and dawn.

We break free from the hologram and enter The Dreaming... where life is a sentient current dreaming us amongst a greater Dreaming we’re merely part of. And in that, you re-encounter the living thread that is yours alone to live.

And you don’t have to wait to go on an extended vigil…. walk into the forest, a park, your backyard. Let the conversation with the living earth begin with your willingness to be in silence… become present with what’s right here.

This isn’t just a forest for me, but who’ve I come to know as family.. as sacred kin... of who I’ve come to know their many names and characters of being… of those who I’ve come to be known by... an intimacy of belonging rarely offered.

It was an overwhelming weight to process all at once... Sacred Kin burning, camp gone, having to hold space for the Vision Quester already meeting her inner thresholds of preparing to fast in wilderness, for myself, to re-orient and make new plans...

But neither of us were ready to abandon the forest... We entered another area to drum and pray WITH the land as roaring engines of aircrafts cut through the canopy above us urgent to extinguish the fire. I asked the soul of the land if we should stay or go... Before the question could fully settle into the soil, Rangers came... “they’re evacuating the entire area.”

So Vision Quest began with an uninvited god at the gate. Before the fasting, before entering the liminal trance of drumming and prayer, before either of us could cross the threshold we had prepared months for, the old gods of ceremonial rites properly disoriented us… as is their way!

Yet, the old ways have taught me that a guide carries invitations from more than one wilderness. With raw, unshielded hearts, we reluctantly turned away from the smoke and began our long drive toward another grove of ancient trees and cleansing rivers that had already begun to hold us from afar.

Please pray for all the forest and lands and people both human and plant and animal alike. Our prayers are the holy waters that alerts the land we are here with you.

Somewhere along the road I became more faithful to the wounds than to the medicine.

Tomorrow begins a big week... I’m walking a courageous soul out into the old woods to fast and journey for three days and three nights. When you sit in place amongst the raw elemental intelligences of the wild, it changes you... changes how you remember your belonging... with self, with others, with the vast animate Mystery dreaming all of this through us.

Standing here on the other side of tending this fire these many years, I’m finding it’s inviting me into a new conversation. There’s something here I sense many modern folk have forgotten, and that’s this kind of work, any sacred work, isn’t something we do or perform, it’s a conversation we enter into with the spirits of the Medicine itself. Every ritual, every meditation, every story and song has its own sentience... has a particular way it wants to be greeted and entered into.

Before any teaching can arrive, there must be a fire. Before any fire, there must be a willingness to kneel at the circle of stones and listen to ash.

And this season of listening is asking me to shift my relationship from pushing my medicine into the wounded cracks of the world to have a fidelity to the medicine itself. In other words, to shift from focusing on the wounds... to the vision of what a healed world looks like, and tending to what helps life remember itself. Somewhere along the road of these past ravaged years I got swept up in the noise, lost sight of where this sacred work is meant to take us.

Then one morning it became painfully simple... I realized I’d become more faithful to the wounds than to the medicine.

And when we can only see what’s eating the world, we inevitably become its dinner companions... part of the snake eating its own tail.

And the hard bristled threshold it’s asking me to cross is a willingness to be seen by the world. I’ve had great love with being an edge dweller... hidden from the self-devouring society. There’s safety in being an edge dweller. I can hide behind a holy veil where I can pretend my fear to be seen, fear of failure, fear of success isn’t touching me. But it doesn’t truly honor the medicine... doesn’t honor my teachers, and elders who’ve so generously walked me into the fire, the silence, the hinterlands of my being and back again.

Each morning I kindle the small fire, kneel at the altar that holds the photos of my teachers and I say “I give thanks for all you lived, that I may live, so others may live.” They had so generously modeled how our medicine isn’t the holy acts we perform, it’s in how we live.

And this is landing in a new way for me... I’m sensing a fiercer kind of accountability with how I’m in relationship with my medicine... that my medicine isn’t limited by my fear to be seen and criticized but an expression of how I honor those who’ve came before me.

So tomorrow, as I walk this courageous soul out into the woods... I also recognize this shift in me... that I am not carrying my medicine... but it is the living current walking me... and each day is a fidelity to listen to how I may honor it this day, this moment. To keep sight of what a healed world may look like. That I may live, so others may live. And this is the oldest form of reciprocity.

Skla-Na!

Thank you for reading! May you be blessed that others are in turn blessed!

Here’s the thing... the Earth never stops speaking its story. We walk across landscapes of profound memory. We’ve forgotten to that we are walking through a village of ancient elders. The land needs its story told and the people need the story to be of the Earth... to remember how to be fully human. We’re part of its Story. It’s only that us humans have stopped listening.

But every now and then, if we are receptive, the land decides to break through our modern slumber.

For me, that breakthrough happened in a place I lovingly call SklaNania, an emerald sanctuary of surviving old-growth forest tucked along the glacial waters of the Clackamas River in Oregon. I had gone out into those old woods for a vigil, to sleep beneath the stars at the feet of the Old Standing People, right where the volcanic veins of the Cascade Mountains meet rushing river waters.

I’ve been slowly... intentionally... earning relationship with these lands for over a year now. This was my first official overnight vigil of the year and I knew there would be an initiatory descent. That’s how these relationships go. If I had merely gone out to camp with friends for a good time, then nothing would likely have happened. But I came out with the intent to make contact, and as the old fairytales and stories tell us, that usually requires an ordeal.

To be honest, I thought I had already experienced it. I got washed down river twice while trying to cross it, got forced to crawl through thick vine maple only to ascend a steep incline, breaking my favorite walking staff etc, etc.. What I didn’t know, was that the land would initiate me using the most mundane, terrifying modern crisis imaginable: it was going to steal my car keys.

Meeting The Anima Suktara (Feminine Soul of the Earth)

As I slept there in the sheer darkness, with only the canopy of stars giving siloheutte shape to the old trees at whose feet I rested my head, I heard the life around me... moving through bushes, up trees, cracking of twigs...

When I woke, I went to the small table to grab my car keys and hike out to gather breakfast supplies from my bear canister, when I saw my keys were gone. I’m sure that’s where I put them! Did they fall out of my pocket while I was bushwhacking or jumping from log to log?

If you have ever been deep in the backcountry, 50+ miles from cell reception, you know the immediate, cold spike of panic that follows. The calculations begin racing through your mind: How many miles to hike out to a road? How many hours to hitchhike to a town? Who can I find to drive an hour into the wilderness with my spare set on the fourth of July while I bake in the intense mountain heat? In an instant, my modern anchor was severed. I was no longer a polite visitor observing nature; I was trapped in it.

But I remained calm. Being a rites of passage guide over the past 20 years gave me mythic framing. Initiation is afoot. So I began to retrace my steps through the thick duff and mossy floors around my camp. That was when my eyes were pulled toward a fifteen-foot silver ghost of a tree amongst the forest interior just beside my camp. It was a dead snag... a western hemlock completely frozen in time. But I have never seen a tree grow this way.

It was her shape that caught me, a mythic asymmetry. One of her weathered branches seemed to reach out toward me, ending with splintered twigs that looked exactly like fingers. Her opposite branch bent at a perfect elbow, 90 degrees, extending upward as if connecting to Skyworld above the ancient Standing One’s canopy.

It was as if she was frozen in the precise asana (posture) of the archetypal image the Hierophant... the ancient high priestess who bridges the worlds, channeling celestial blessings down into the soil.

Her head was a massive, scarred burl, crowned with an array of thin writhing branches like the hair of Medusa. She had two white eyes that were out of alignment, one low, another high and slightly to the side. In mythology and fairytale interpretation, an entity with asymmetrical or misaligned eyes signifies someone who sees into two worlds at once... one eye fixed on Chronos (the linear time of the human world) and one eye fixed on Kairos (the eternal time of the gods). It made her presence feel even more distinct and alive.

To the uninitiated eye, or to a passing tourist, she might have looked ugly, monstrous, or unholy. In her classic work on fairytales, the depth psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz noted that the Anima... the feminine soul-image of nature... often appears to us in terrifying or distorted forms when we are estranged from her. If we approach the wild unconscious with fear or indifference, it mirrors our fear back to us as a monster.

But looking at her, I felt a profound, aching beauty. I remembered an older understanding... A tree with a “felt presence” is often a repository of a specific dreaming story, a physical knot where the story of the earth becomes visible.

I didn’t turn away. I stepped forward, spoke eloquent speech to her, praising her shape and her sovereign presence, and prostrated my brow to her roots. I named her Songtree.

In that moment, I felt a distinct wave of surprise ripple through her frozen form. For decades, humans had looked at her with fear or treated her as a dead piece of timber. My words were a tiny act of disenchantment... not changing her shape like in the fairy tales, (princess kissing a frog or a hero kissing an old wart-faced hag where they then transformed into a prince or princess) but redeeming her long isolation, restoring the holy role of her being.

In our modern world, we’ve forgotten so much... forgotten such Sacred Beings still exist. Every culture before our modern amnesiac world, no matter your heritage, had their own names. From the Old Norse speaking of the Landvattir (Land Spirits) to the indigenous lineages of these very mountains, knew that the earth is alive. They knew these forested volcanic mountains that surround our towns and cities are palatial worlds inside of which whole tribes of plant people, animal people, lineages of deities, dance, dream and work to contribute to the greater Story we’re all part of. The forest are villages of animal tribes and speaking trees... weather gods who shape, nurture, and test land and people.

And then in that moment, as I stood before Songtree, a larger, ancient story began to sprout in my awareness. This tree was standing on the edge of an old battlefield.

This forest is tucked away, surrounded by lands that had been clearcut, scarred, and extracted. Animals and Land Spirits alike were forced to flee their ancient lands... their villages and communities.

A vision entered me and I saw, a few generations ago, a darkness infiltrated the human heart. It is what the Algonquian peoples call the Wetiko psychosis... a spiritual disease of insatiable greed that turns the living world into dead objects to be devoured. The dark spirits didn’t need to fight the forest directly; they simply whispered into the ears of humans, stealing their hearts, turning human hands into axes and saws. They clear-cut the surrounding ranges, leaving behind a scarred, bleeding landscape.

Songtree had witnessed it all. She was the Genius Loci... the spirit of that canyon. When the destruction came, she didn’t flee. She poured her remaining, fierce life-force into this single, dramatic shape and let her biological life go, leaving behind a permanent, silver antenna. She became a monument of the transition, holding the boundary line at the exact coordinate where the human immune system finally woke up. For SklaNania Forest is a holy place because the spell was broken here; humans who remembered the sacredness of the old forest fought the timber companies and miraculously won.

Songtree is still standing, holding her hand high, keeping the dark gods at bay... waiting for a people who can hear the earth song again.

And all this story flashed through me in but a few seconds. Tears flooded my eyes and again, I brought my brow down to the her roots... deep bow.

The Trickster’s Trial

I brought my gaze back down to my immediate, missing-key predicament. I looked up at the burl-head of Songtree. I prayed. “Great goddess of the woods, maiden of the forest, soul representation of this land... please, help me find my keys.”

No audible voice answered, but a sudden, sharp intuition dropped into my chest: Look for tracks.

I immediately walked back to the tiny camp table where I remembered setting the keys. I dropped to my knees, adopting the eyes of a tracker. Sure enough, in the fragrant duff at the base of the table, there was a tiny indentation. A landing mark. Then a hop. Then a faint, dragging line through the duff where a heavy metal ring had been hauled across the earth.

To the modern mind, a chipmunk is just a rodent, a minor nuisance. But to the indigenous soul, animals are the curious forms taken by the gods when they want to catch a glimpse of human behavior. And more than anything, the small animals are the local Tricksters. In traditional lineages, the Trickster loves to steal from you, to mock you, and to mess with your things... because that is how the land says, “We see you. You are remembered. You are one of us now.”

I followed the microscopic trail 10 feet away, straight into the hollow root base of an old cedar tree.

There, glittering in the shadows, were my keys. The leather strap was chewed, and the intricate native beadwork I had cherished was gnawed away, sacrificed as a tax to the local residents. But they were there.

The Liturgy of Remembrance

I didn’t find my keys because I performed a mechanical search; I found them because I entered into an earned relationship with place. I stopped acting like a consumer of the wilderness and allowed myself to be initiated by a chipmunk and guided by not a dead hemlock, but the maiden of the woods who is both maiden and crone, soul of the land and of timber and bark.

When we look all around us today, we see the land scarred by logging, housing developments and mismanagement. But the message I got from Songtree is if we shift our gaze and see the holy beauty that still lives within the land, that just like the old fairytales, if we bless instead of turn away, the land and the lineages of deities therein may resume their true form.

Songtree remains standing out there in the bottomland of the Clackamas, one hand raised to the sky, one hand extended to the earth, waiting for the rest of the us to remember ourselves home.

Yesterday, a spell began to be broken. Today, we carry it onward to restore remembrance.

Please comment below... what passed through you in this reading? What stood out to you in its telling?

What if who you are, why you’re here and what you’re here to contribute to the greater living thread of life is far more elemental?

If you’ve ever slept outside beneath a grand canopy of stars shimmering so bright you refuse to close your eyes, or if you’ve paddled out into moonlit waters, or have entered a landscape that seemed to hold you, deepen your breath, offered you contact... then you have likely felt how we’re but part of something far greater than our small lives... and in that, perhaps you too have wondered, “How are we part of it all?”

There’s a health in that... experiencing our smallness amongst a greater order of life.

And then we pack up our tent, trek down the mountain, pack our car and return to the fragmented currents of our daily living with the unspoken, unsigned but bound agreement to resume a momentum that re-spells us back into an amnesia from what we had just restored contact with. For many, that return after such an experience feels harsh, disjointed... an underlying unspoken grief latent within our bones quivers.

And no, the grief we encounter is not just because of the return to Monday. Something in us recognizes that, out there, we touched a way of belonging that our ordinary lives rarely know how to sustain.

Don’t worry, this isn’t about romanticizing living closer to nature, re-wilding ourselves, or a nostalgia of living in some idealistic society.

I want to offer something more substantial you can chew on. An older but more immediately relevant orientation.

When I was younger, I carried the same question that follow so many of us: Am I on the right path?

Outwardly, I looked like someone who had found a meaningful path. Inwardly I doubted nearly every step. I had left behind the life I had thought I was suppose to build because something deeper kept calling me toward the desert. I couldn’t explain it. I only knew I felt more dishonest ignoring that call than shaping myself to how family or community pressed me.

During those years, I was guiding wilderness rites of passage for youth and adults out amongst the Utah deserts. It was then I met a Hopi elder named Ben.

Ben rarely taught through explanations. He trusted the land to do that. he simply walked me into the desert and little by little showed me how to listen, what to pay attention to, how to become part of the conversations already happening between the land and everything else.

One afternoon, after we had wandered for nearly an hour across the high desert of Utah, he stopped beside an gnarly old juniper tree. As we took shade there, he rested his hand upon the shaggy bark and said “She is called Grandmother of the High Desert.”

She has learned how to ask for almost nothing while giving almost everything. Her blue berries feed the cedar waxwings traveling south in winter... feeds the fox carrying dusk in their coats, coyotes yipping across red mesas... they carry seeds of her children away in their bellies and scatter them across canyons.

Even her roots refuse to think only of themselves. They clasp the thin desert skin, holding the parch land together that other plants may survive, contribute their own gifts.

We walked on and every so often, another introduction. He shared “Beneath the shrubs run invisible treaties. Fungal threads stitching root to root in invisible relationships, exchanging water, minerals, warning, memory.

The ants pray by moving seeds. The lizards keep the old agreements with keeping the insects at bay. Vultures carry death back into life without applause.

The desert possesses no spectators... meaning, every being belongs to the work. Everything carries a gift whose shape is only made sense when offered to the whole.

We continued on and after some time of walking in silence, he paused and looked at me. He said, “We humans, are just two-legged plants.”

His words sank into me like rain finding roots I didn’t know were waiting.

He shared “We’re each born into a place just as the juniper is born into this mesa. Born into a time, a land, a family, a season of the Earth’s breathing. We’re all part of the soil of Her Dreaming.”

Then he touched his chest and said “Every one of us carries a medicine. Our medicine reveals our act of participation... the hidden way the Greater Dreaming intended you to feed the village of life.”

“Find that”, he said, “what your medicine is... name it... and you’ll stop asking what’s the right path. You will know how to belong.”

So I’ll ask the original question...

What if who you are, why you’re here and what you’re here to contribute to the greater living thread of life is far more elemental?

What if your life isn’t asking you to become something more or extraordinary? What if it’s simply asking you to discover the particular way Life longs to participate through you?

The text read:

“A traumatized brain is stuck in scarcity. Traumatized people tend to spend more time avoiding pain than living out their purpose. And I think that’s tragic.”

These kinds of sanitized, well-meaning phrases ignite a fierce fire in me. Beneath the veneer of “mental health awareness,” this framing is a form of modern spell-casting. It is a linguistic binding that unconsciously locks a human being into a flat, sterile story... one that suffocates the original, wild image the soul is called to grow into.

Let’s step out of the clinic, sit by the fire, and unpack the three ways this spell operates and how we can break it.

1. The Reductive Prison of the “Meat Computer”

When an psychologist/influencer utilizes the phrase “a traumatized brain,” they perform a swift, dangerous act of subtraction. They reduce the vast, mysterious constellation of human suffering into the faulty wiring of a meat computer. In doing so, they subtly whisper that you are permanently broken.

Isn’t it fascinating how modern psychology readily acknowledges that emotional pain can physically alter the brain, yet they completely fail to remind you that the organic, breathing body can just as easily be re-sculpted by beauty, ritual, community, and the deep medicine of time?

When we attach our deepest life wounds strictly to neurobiology or physical chemistry, we strip a human being of their true biography. We transform a sacred life story into a medical defect. Once you begin to identify as a biological malfunction, that identity dictates how you move through the world. You stop listening to your life experiences for guidance; instead, you read your history as a pathology report.

Our wounds are not defects in the machinery; they are the dark, fertile soil of our story. In alchemy, the raw matter must undergo the nigredo ~ the blackness, the rotting, the burning ~ before it can ever turn to gold. Your suffering is not a short circuit; it is the heat required for your becoming.

2. The Scar Clan and the Wisdom of the Weathered

The second spell this statement casts is the lie that having trauma means you are inherently flawed. It treats the innate behaviors, hyper-vigilance, and heightened sensitivities of a survivor as software glitches, completely blind to the fact that these are the raw materials of genius.

No human escapes this life unscathed. As Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés beautifully writes, “We are all members of the Scar Clan.” If you have loved, you know the gravity of loss. If you have dared to dream, you have met the cold wind of failure.

Standardized psychology wants us to believe the ultimate goal of life is a smooth, painless, optimized existence. They want a human life to look like a predictable corporate production line. But the soul does not belong to a factory; it belongs to nature. Nature shapes its most breathtaking landscapes through violent erosion, tectonic shifting, and torrential weather. The coastline, the canyon, and the jagged mountain peak are all “traumatized” landscapes... and they are magnificent because of it.

Both Indigenous and Eastern traditions recognize that we are born whole, but not fully formed. We enter this world with a unique blueprint hidden inside us... what James Hillman called the “Acorn Theory.” Inside the acorn is the archetypal image of the oak tree. The acorn doesn’t grow into an oak by staying safe in a sterile drawer; it grows by being buried in the dark, cracked open by the frost, and forced to push through rocks.

What if your hyper-sensitivities are not flaws to be medicated away? This is not to discredit the medications that help us find balance or heal… but rather a shift of what and how we’re focusing. What if they are your daimon (your inner calling) informing you, weathering you, and cultivating a rare perspective that your community desperately needs? And also, maybe it’s not something you need to share openly but simply how you uniquely walk the world. Every plant in the forest is contributing medicine but we most often don’t know what it is… but we may honor each plant all the same.

3. Turning the Wound into Medicine

The statement concludes with its heaviest blow: “Traumatized people tend to spend more time avoiding pain than living out their purpose. And I think that’s tragic.”

This reveals a profound ignorance of how human destiny actually operates. It implies that your “purpose” is a shiny, pristine trophy waiting for you at the end of a clean path, completely detached from the grit of your lived experience. It tells you to bypass your pain, push past your grief, and keep marching.

But history tells a completely different story. True purpose is almost never found in a straight line; it is born directly out of the ashes of our collapses.

Consider the law of Compensation. When the soul feels diminished or wounded in one arena, it fiercely cultivates a hidden genius in another:

• The Gift of the Perceived Smallness: Consider a child who grows up small, weak, or bullied. In the clinical framework, they are just a victim of environmental stress. But in the theater of the soul, that exact smallness forces them to develop hidden aptitudes... an unbreakable internal discipline, an razor-sharp wit, or a profound mastery of strategy. The wound of being small creates a giant of character.

• The Gift of the Wounded Healer: Consider the child who grows up walk on the eggshells of an unpredictable, chaotic, or unsafe household. They develop a hyper-vigilant nervous system. The clinic calls this a disorder. But over time, that exact hyper-awareness can be cultivated into an uncanny, brilliant strength of perception. They can read the subtle energetic shifts in a room, feel the unspoken grief in another human being, and notice the invisible currents of their time. They become the masterful writer, the intuitive healer, or the visionary leader who sees what everyone else misses. Their wound became their radar.

And yes, not everyone recognizes their gifts. Not everyone finds the “medicine” within their trauma or feel called to share it. Many DO focus on avoiding pain but the subtle shift here is that instead of not living their life purpose, we may recognize they’ve been conditioned not to see it. AND, THAT’S why I’m writing this article.

In our tradition, we understand that every individual walks a unique, sentient path called the Suk’Waya. This path is alive. It intentionally brings us into contact with the exact trials, disruptions, and unexpected turnings required to crack open our outer shell and awaken our Qwa’Sha—our specific “medicine.” Your medicine consists of the exact gifts, heightened perceptions, and holy obsessions you are called to contribute back to the world.

Notice the shift in language: it is not about what you are here to achieve for yourself to fulfill a heroic ego. It is about what you are here to contribute to the collective web.

Your purpose doesn’t have to be a loud, global act of heroism. It is often found close-in: in the quiet presence you hold for another, the specific way you inhabit the day, and the deep empathy you offer to the village because you yourself have stood in the dark.

Starving for a World that Welcomes the Outlier

When psychologist/influencers lament that people are trapped in a “scarcity mindset,” they are looking into the wrong mirror. A scarcity mindset is not an individual brain malfunction. It is a completely rational, deeply sensitive response to living in a spiritually bankrupt culture.

It is a felt, inner recognition that our hyper-individualistic society has failed to provide a container where our trauma-informed, uniquely gifted selves have a home. Read that again.

What if people are not stuck in scarcity; they are starving for a world that has a place for their unique distortion. In intact village cultures, the wildly sensitive, the deeply wounded, and the visionary dreamers were never exiled to a sterile, lonely room with a diagnostic label and a pill. They were held in ritual. They were wrapped in community containers where their scars were recognized as credentials. The village knew that the person who had been broken by the underworld was the only one who held the map to guide others through it.

It’s time to break the spell of the reductionist biomechanical clinics. You are not a damaged brain to be fixed. You are a weathered soul, carrying a rare and necessary medicine.

A Parting Question for you:

What is one sensitivity or “wound” in your life that you have been told is a flaw, but when viewed through the eyes of your now elder self, looking back on your life, might actually be the birthplace of your medicine?

A FINAL NOTE

None of this is meant to dismiss the profound help many people receive through therapy, neuroscience, medication, or clinical care. The brain matters. The body matters. Skilled healers matter. Nor is trauma something to romanticize; suffering guarantees no gift, and no one owes the world wisdom simply because they have been wounded. My concern is only with stories that reduce a person to their diagnosis or nervous system alone. I believe we are larger than our injuries and more mysterious than any single framework can explain. Healing may come through medicine, through myth, through community, through grace or, most often, through some alchemy of them all.

IF YOU SEEK MENTORSHIP…. please reach out and contect via www.TreeOfTotems.com

And if you happen to connect with them you’ll find it’s not because of burnout or a loss of purpose, but something far more substantial... something far more important is occurring and it’s a good thing.

As someone who mentors esteemed thought leaders, healers, and community members weekly, I’ve been hearing a common thread of navigating a known archetypal threshold... A shedding of the wounded healer patterns and growing into not just a new depth of their Qwa’sha (Medicine) but how they’re now called to carry it... to share it.

There comes a point where the ego can no longer power the work. The old engines of the wounded healer dissolve: the need for recognition, urgency, identity, being needed, proving value, even “making impact.” And when those engines die, there is often a terrifying silence underneath them. One begins to ask: If I no longer need to be seen, no longer need to build, no longer need to save anyone… why continue at all?

This is a hard threshold to arrive at. It completely disorients you. Who are you without your identity as a healer, helper, guide, leader?

What value do you offer if you don’t continue?

And if you are willing to lean into that disorientation, be present in that tension between dissolution and formation, without having to rush it, new questions arrive that open you to new ways of being and carrying your Medicine.

What becomes available to you if you don’t need to push your medicine into the world?

What is calling to deepen and become fully embodied inside you?

What is solely just for you and not to share?

What “quality” of life will nourish me, feed what I love so what I love can continue to nourish me?”

As you can likely feel, this is not necessarily a loss of purpose. It may be purification... a ripening into your gifts. It’s a kind of rites of passage of being newly initiated into your Medicine.

The Reluctant Return

In mythic traditions, there is often a stage after initiation where the initiate becomes reluctant to return. Not so much because we’ve lost purpose, but rather we have touched a different order of being. The village suddenly appears noisy, repetitive, entranced. One sees how much speech is performance, how much “sharing” is unconscious hunger to be seen and validated. And we recognize how we too have been part of it. And so we feel the soul ask: Why descend again into the market? Why not simply live close to the fire and let that be enough?

That temptation toward disappearance is real. There’s a sacredness in that pull and there’s a danger.

But authentic Medicine People, those born with this calling to contribute to the world, we find there is an embedded instruction in us which is an ancient principle—carry the medicine back. We go into the forest, step away to become still and in that stillness we learn a new way of listening. We discover a new relationship with Self and our place in the world… with our medicine. And inevitably, we feel in our bones, the call to return and carry back the medicine newly gathered.

What’s happening now however is a key difference and it’s that the return is no longer evangelical. The ripened Initiate’s return no longer needs to convince, gather crowds, or constantly produce. The medicine call us us to return because “medicine” itself is relational. Wisdom that never enters reciprocity can become sterile. In many indigenous and initiatory traditions, medicine is proven not by private illumination, but by whether it restores life within the community.

Yet I think the “new instruction” we are feeling require a different orientation altogether.

For me, these past years have channeled my medicine to help people in time of crisis. These past years have had the ground fall out beneath so many... a great unravelling of people’s lives.

And yet, perhaps you too are feeling the influence of the Fire Horse, calling us to move from crisis, to an orientation of ripening, growing into ourselves, of not reacting to events, but stepping into them as initiation for what we may now revision and grow into.

Not:

“How do I escape breakdown?”

But:

• “How do I become deeply human?”

• “How do I inhabit myself as is?”

• “How do I enter reciprocity with life?”

• “How do I mature into my gifts, responsibility, creativity, and belonging?”

This is an entirely different mythic orientation.

The first is the archetype of the Wounded Healer.
The second is closer to the Gardener, the Elder, or the Initiator.

And the ripened Initiator does not share primarily because people are broken.

They share because human beings require mirrors of possibility.

Because without visible examples of mature participation in life, cultures regress into adolescence.

Because people need embodied evidence that another way of being is possible.

Because initiation cannot occur through information alone... it requires relationship with someone who has walked further into reality.

And so, we’re called to not just carry our medicine but to craft our own structures that honor it, protect it, and invites people in.

One of my favorite quotes is:
“We don’t drag the world kicking and screaming into a new reality but by simply doing our work secretly, reverently, beautifully, those with eyes to see and ears to hear will respond.”

And perhaps this is why the soul now resists “building” in the old sense. It does not want empire. It wants ecology. A living field where people can actually mature, heal, experience transformation.

In many wisdom traditions, the elder speaks less because their life itself becomes the teaching.

And yet, even then, the medicine must circulate. It’s not that the world deserves endless access to you or because you owe performance or because you need to re-enforce your identity.

Rather we recognize that what healed and ripened within you isn’t fully yours to keep... that you are part of the Earth’s dreaming and like any other plant, your expression of life is part of the greater ecology of the web of life.

So I’m curious, what did this article offer you? Where did you find yourself most resonating within it?

I have been thinking about edges lately. You know the kind, when you stand there with your breath caught, knowing that once you step forward, nothing will be the same.

I’ve known a few of those thresholds in my life: leaving home with more questions than answers, stepping into the first sweat lodge, even picking up the pen when the stories inside me would no longer stay quiet. Each time, the air at the edge felt sharp, alive, full of fear and wonder all tangled together.

Do you remember the story of the Ordinary Girl? Our grandmothers used to tell it when the nights grew long. She lived at the edge of the great forest. The villagers warned her not to enter… too dangerous, you won’t come back. But when the wind shifted, she would hear a song drifting out from the trees, calling her by a name she had half-forgotten.

One day, she pushed through the thorns. They tore her skin, left blood on her legs, but just beyond she found moss soft as a cradle, and blue star-flowers opening in the light. And there, waiting in that clearing, was the Radiant Woman… her own self returned, strong and beautiful in a way she had never believed possible.

Crossing an edge always costs us something, my friend. A little blood. A little tearing. But there is always a gift on the other side… a face, a strength, a song waiting to be remembered.

So I wonder about you tonight:
What edge are you standing at now?
And what song is calling you through the thorns?

I will keep this question close until we sit together again around the fire.

At the edge with you,
Your old friend,
Chivito

One day,

my masks began

to fall off

one by one,

like dead leaves

releasing from a tree,

exposing the gnarled

inner bark

of my

heart.
.

It was as if the masks

had no more use for me

and that I

no longer cared to hide.

This is who I am

and I will let

whatever that

"who" is,

be

beautiful

and

holy

in its

own

right.
.
.

Skla-Na my friends,

For those of us in the second half of life, we've been invited in to the Storyteller's Lodge... a place of remembering. We've entered a sacred time when we begin to slow down enough that the "Medicine" and gifts of our life can catch up to us.

At least for some of us. Not everyone is willing to slow down and receive. Many keep trying to out run what you and I will come to know as our gifts.

In the second half of life, something stirs inside us. Have you felt it? You may even say something awakens inside us... a shedding of old skins, stories, and identities begin to occur.

We begin to ask questions and reflect on the path that has gotten us here.

How did we get here?

Where is here?

What can we truly live from here on?

These questions don't just casually arrive. They find you when you've become ripe enough to receive them. When these questions finally catch up to us, there are signs and symptoms we begin to experience. There's a sweet shift from chasing the momentum of living... to a felt sense of wanting to deepen into life. We long to replace velocity with a life of connection, meaning, and relationship. Have you felt this? For me, I've become less tolerant of any superficial layers of life and crave authenticity and depth. What about you?

In these many years of stewarding rites of passage, I've witnessed it's this season of life when our masks and personas begin to fall away and we find our true face... we remember our original songline we came here to live before the world made us forget.

In our Sklanawaya lineage, it's shared the mask is not a disguise, but a spirit who walks with us. For a time, we wear it. We honor its power. Then when we cross into a new stage of life... we give the mask back to the fire. Only then does the face beneath show itself. The face that was there before the world told us who to be.

Our lineage calls this journey Soul Retrieval. A ritual of inviting the life we've lived to share the stories we're only now ripe enough to receive.

There's a door that opens at this time of year. If we're listening, we can already begin to hear the stories calling us just beyond its threshold. The Old Ones say, "We're being invited into the storytellers lodge." Others call it the Lodge of Memory. We enter a kind of "Ancestor Time" where as we sit by the fire and tell our stories... we release our masks, we heal, we remember.

So I ask you friend,

What mask is loosening its grip on you now?

What in you is ready to emerge and be fully lived?

As Autumn Equinox approaches, we enter the coming within time. A season of soul work, healing and becoming. May you feel the warmth of the fire and good friends to sit with you... to catch your stories as you catch theirs’.

And if ever you want some guidance,

Know I am here in my humble hut, tending the fire and brewing hot water for some tea. You're place is ready for you.

Skla-Na

Chivito

NOTE: This reflection is a companion piece to my series Letters from the Threshold: mythic letters written in the voice of an elder to an old friend, carried across the fire. You can find it here → [When Our Masks Fall Off]

It has been awhile... since the horse moon when we did our vision quest the year before. Do you remember those wild mustangs as they charged us in the dimming time. That wild thunder of hooves still rattles in my bones. It remains as one of my favorite totem encounters. To see them so majestic, standing in their power amongst that untamed desert of Utah. I carry that medicine with me today.

Now autumn approaches. I feel more than hear her whispers... song-speaking of the coming within time. Can you feel her too? Calling us into the next descent of the hoop cycle?

Yesterday I was trailing bear through the old forest on Wy'east. The trees are preparing to let go again. The sweet decadent smell of their leaves filled the thin mountain air. For me, it carries an underlying feeling of death and loss, but the kind of death that gives life. I sat there as I felt my own skins shedding, the ones I thought I once needed. There’s been a lot of shedding this year and so… lots of emerging.

It's a humbling thing as we get older, to witness what we've been carrying all this time just drop like the cotton wood shed their leaves. So much we've carried that wasn't ours. Masks we didn't even know we were wearing to protect ourselves. I look back on my younger self with such compassion and admiration now.

Do you remember how our people say the mask is not a disguise, but a spirit who walks with us? For a time, we wear it. We honor its power. Then we give it back to the fire. Only then does the face beneath show itself. The face that was there before the world told us who to be.

I wonder about you, my friend. How is Autumn speaking in your lodge? Have you welcomed her at the hearth, or are you keeping her outside, knocking? She is patient, but she does not leave.

I imagine we all reach a day when the old story is too heavy. When the old skin no longer fits, no matter how tightly we try to stitch it. Remember how Elder Ben would say, once you become ripe enough, the masks begin to fall away?

We'll be sitting in your lodge around the fire in a few weeks for the Fall Equinox. Drumming and singing our prayers to honor the next stage of the hoop cycle. And I'll ask you now: What mask will you be releasing to the fire? What face waits beneath the ash, ready to meet the wind? I will bring my own mask and I will speak its story before the fire.

I look forward to our hearts gathering again.

In the meantime,

I sit here with you at the threshold.

Your old friend,

Chivito

The voice you hear in these Letters comes from my lineage, Sklanawaya... a stream born of Indigenous elders, my Babas, and the land herself. It is a voice I have been entrusted to carry through years of mentorship, rites of passage, and guidance from those who remembered how to listen. These Letters are what I call non-fictional fiction: drawn from real correspondences, lived thresholds, and the many circles I have guided through Life Review, Soul Retrieval, and Vision Quest.

I am a thousand and more miles from home

Alone..

In a desert stretching

In all directions

Farther than I can see

.

No sound But my labored

breathing

Open sky

Scorched earth

Sand burns

feet through

sandals

.

I walk

From dawn…

to dusk

3 days...

3 nights

Belly pressed to spine

searching

for something

to gnaw on

.

An old juniper tree

offers me shade…

A breeze

through its leaves

amplifies the silence

all around 

me

It carries voices…

Ancestors 

speaking…

.

I think I'll rest here

awhile

.

And Listen…

.

Yes,

to remember

.

how to

listen…

.

again

~ Chivito Cowa

Pic from Wilderness Rites of Passage

It's in this hinge-time between night and dawn when things have a way of becoming sentient, a way for the ancestors to embody form and speak with us... to take on a personality of their own and lean in to be part of the conversation. It's why I wake in these liminal hours when the veil frays.

I have a group out amongst the bush right now, navigating their Rites of Passage. Yesterday we gathered to share stories before heading back out. The mountains are already beginning to see a swathe of color as Autumn approaches. The air feels thinner in the lungs. The coming within time is near and I'm curious what this next year's descent will offer each of us.

One participant shared a recognition... "There's no prayers without a puke bucket!" She told a story of facilitating her last plant medicine ceremony and how she had to clean out puke buckets that didn't get properly tended to. "They don't tell you that's as part of the job description." she said... cleaning puke buckets, unclogging toilets, cleaning up after people.

You know that's when you've stepped from from performative spirituality with all the feathers and bling and begin to embody the work. It's all glamour until you have to clean out the puke bucket and as we can see, not everyone is up to the task. Let me stamp my Spiritual Experience Passport and find the next experience to stamp off.

But when you spend enough time out in the bush, doing the real inner work, navigating your thresholds, finding your hidden strengths you didn't know you had, you find a deeper maturity. You hold space not just for others, but for the medicine itself. And I don't mean plant medicine specifically, even the plants are just a vehicle for the Bigger Medicine that's coming through. It's in this embodied maturity when things get interesting. That's when the "medicine" becomes sentient to you. A relationship deepens. You get invited into the conversations with the Medicine you weren't ripe enough to be part of before.

I sense for many people, as the Sun gives way for Mother Night's cloak to wrap around us and pull us close in to the hearth fires, that we're all being invited to enter a deeper place within us... an invitation to embody our medicine, beauty, and songline that we're here to live in the world. Meaning... this coming season of shadows is going to be a rich feast of stories, conversations and becoming. More fire light and feasting, less shadows.

I'm sure you already feel it too... a new maturity or medicine growing inside, taking shape and beauty. We bloomed into it this summer and now, we begin the journey of deepening and integrating.

The dawn is beginning to crack across the horizon now. I can hear singing from some of the participants greeting the day. "This Day has gifts for you! Will you open your hearts to receive them?"

Coyotes are joining their singing in the distance. Blessing received.

And you... as you feel into your own hing-time, what gifts are waiting at the edge of your dawn?

What medicine inside you is ready to grow deeper roots, embody its song?

This season will ask it of you.

And if you hunger for a place to remember... long for the conversations with others that stir your own mysteries inside you, know the fire here is lit and waiting. I'm here.

\

If you're unsure how to

carry this new Self into your life,

Go to a confluence of waters

where rivers or creeks meet

The Old Ones share,

there's a woman there,

a guardian spirit who

knows of seasons and change

If you sit there long enough

in the silence of

your own unknowing,

She will speak with you

In how the

light filters through old trees

and holds sheets of

stillness in cascading waters

And then revelation comes.

Sometimes,

perhaps the most definitive times,

our greatest clarity arrives

when we cease battering

our mind against

wanted answers

and merely listen

So if you feel the stirrings,

If you're unsure how

to carry this new Self

into your life

Go to the place where

you may fully arrive

and become present with

what's ready

to live

inside.

~ Chivito Cowa

Ben, a Hopi Elder who mentored for me said one day

"To follow the path of your songline is the highest austerity"

It is said we each come into the world with a song and that you are that song.

But the truth is, following your songline isn’t easy... it requires a genuine listening that many have forgotten how to do. My time with Ben showed me that it's a kind of listening that invites us to slow to the pace of life yet intact where our listening is an act of receiving, not just taking as we're racing to what's next.

And in a world conditioned to desire a constant momentum, that's a hard ask for many. Yet the more velocity we have, the less we hear, the less we see... here life depletes us instead of feeds us.

Ben invited me to pilgrimage with him into the Colorado Rockies outside of Durango Colorado. We were in Page Arizona, hot red rocks and sage brush for miles and he longed for the cool wet rivers singing beneath aspens. This would normally be a 4 hour drive, but with Ben, it took seven hours. He would have us stop at specific power places as he called them, where the land had a special resonance. We walk out into it, introduce ourselves to the land, give offerings and then just sit there, receive it until we felt it enter us and become of us. It was a beautiful act, a kind of sacred obligation to receive and there was a felt experience how our receiving the land was also a way of giving our hearts to it. A kind of sacred reciprocity between us.

He said, "There are so many gifts being offered us every day, but few slow down enough to receive them and so they feel depleted by life instead of nourished by it."

The Old Ones ask us,” What does it look like to live in right relationship with your calling? What have you so abandoned within yourself you can seek relationship with again?”

For those who hear their songline... remembers its scent... there's a pull to return and drink from what the Brujeria call the River Beneath The River... the hidden current stewarding your life.

Living your soul’s path is not indulgent.. truth is, it is costly, and yet, non-negotiable. But it feeds you, awakens you, puts you on that edge of life where you feel alive and attuned to the path dreaming you into this day.

Trailing your songline is a kind of sacred labor in a world assaulted by distractions, injustice, and uncertainty. And yet, you living your songline is the very medicine the world needs.

Where do you go that slows you to the pace of what's intact inside you? A forest, a river, a mountain ledge view? What impact would it have to go there, speak into it and just sit there, receive it, carry it with you into your day?

As Ben said,

"To follow the path of your songline is the highest austerity"

And it is how you feed and be fed by the sacred that is your life.

Please share your reflections from this piece. What did it stir within you?

"Skla-Na! It is good to see you! I am happy to walk amongst you. Thank you for your spirit and presence. Thank you for receiving my heart as I receive yours."

I notice the elderberry bow and an old grisly bark cedar branch gesture... The dark soiled earth beneath me seems to stir.

This is felt and seen... not projections. I take notice.

In these moments I say "I see you.." And then I feel they become aware of me. So I say "I see you seeing me."

It's a felt endearing moment of recognition between us.

I remember a Hopi Elder named Ben who mentored me for a bit.. he said, "let your body gather language through my skin..." meaning, let my senses extend out, receive what nature is speaking.

I walk barefoot amongst the old standing ones (trees/ferns). The nakedness of my skin receiving the nakedness of the fecund forest floor. No barrier... skin to skin... soul-ear to earth-ear.

I arrive by the cascading waters of the Sandy River.... carrying fragments of snow from the mountain top of Wy'East (Mt Hood). River's are known as Earth Veins... they carry waters of stories and songs like the Heart's veins carry blood through the landscapes of our body.

Today, too many hurry to slake their thirst, mistaking intake for nourishment. To receive the river is another matter entirely: it asks us to wait at the bank like an open bowl, to let the cold syllables of glacier-water speak first, and only then lift them to the lips. In that moment of unguarded listening... skin tingling, heart slowed... the body remembers it is not a consumer but a conduit, a moving confluence of mountain, cloud, and vein. In this act, we allow ourselves to be filled, not by quantity, but by the quiet ceremony of welcome.

These mornings are a ritualized activism to remember our original belonging in a world bent on forgetting

Pic From This Morning’s Foraging amongst The Old Standing Ones.

.

Sadly, and no fault to our own, we've been conditioned to ignore that North... to fit into the contours of the paths and expectations given us

As the Old Ones share, we've fallen out of our story and so many are living blind to the deeper path their life is stewarding them through. They fail to realize life is trying to teach them something... wanting to shape you. While some may find a deeper meaning when life forcibly re-directs them, the truth is few see the greater map of what their path is threading together just for them. Do you know yours?

For most, life feels like a series of random events, obstacles, openings and closings.

Looking back on the path you've tread, how have your life events shaped you?

The Old Ones say, until you know where you came from... until you know the stories of your becoming... you don't have a ground to stand on. You remain blind to your True North and where it's calling you toward.

While I lived in India with my Babas, who were the last of their lineage that had been passed down through the oral tradition for thousands of years, they shared the ultimate goal isn't ascension above life, it's not to escape the chaos of the market place of life, but to become fully awake in the Story being lived through you.

This was first time I heard my life isn't just a story... it's a story being lived through me. Indigenous cultures call this being a "hollow bone" where Spirit is plays the flute of your songline... the one path you're here to live. In Eastern Traditions, is called being the non-doer... a vessel Spirit is experiencing life through our unique story.

The roots of my Baba's lineage were in Kashmir Saivism, which shares how to actually see the contours of your path in present time as you're living it. In today's modern world, we often adopt the skins and masks to perform the roles we've been told to play, but beneath these is the what Jung calls the Deep Self or Indigenous Societies refer to as our Original Self or Songline.

A beautiful perspective of Indigenous Knowledge is that they see all things in a state of movement... there are no Nouns, only verbs... only states of being and changing. It's not a static Tree we see, but a Tree "treeing". They recognize the profound process the tree is in and that it's in a constant state of change "treeing."

This is seen as People too. In Indigenous knowledge, we are seen as two-legged plants... born into the ecology of place and time to contribute a specific medicine to the ecosystem. In other words, we are born into a time and place to contribute the Medicine we uniquely have to contribute and are yet ever in the process of growing into. In fact, it's our process of change that is the Medicine for as we evolve on our path, everyone and thing connected to us also changes. Our life is the Medicine.

Our tasks in this life, is to attune ourselves to our True North, to shift from merely being bumped around and influenced upon by life and become awake in the Story being lived through us.

This may sound poetic and mystical, but perhaps you're already sensing how this has real-world practicality as well as consequences if we stay asleep.

Modern therapy can offer balm, but it often stops short of initiation. It names the wound but rarely reveals the path that the wound is trying to open. Indigenous and Eastern "psychology" is about identify what is your True North... what plant are you in your eco-system... aligning you with the one path you're here to live and how all the trials, mishaps, behaviors etc are part of your journey of shaping you and helping you find the true skin you were born here to live.

Modern Therapy (while honoring it profound value) is in fact often another form of deflection because there is a wound in not following our North and a conditioning stamped into our psyche that it's not safe to do so. Fall in line... fit the mold... or there will be consequences.

So it's not so easy to just find our North and start living it. There's some wound tending... grief tending... and going through the process of feeling safe to honor your unique songline. But again, this is part of the medicine you carry... your journey (as a verb) of remembering and stepping into living.

Now it becomes a sweet endeavor... a journey home to yourself... a rediscovery of the beauty your life holds for you and if you've read this far means you have become ripe enough to hear the call. Now you just want to start learning what to look for, what to listen for... to learn how to see the contours of your path and identify your True North.

In other words, the sacred etiquette of your unique soul-code.

Somewhere, your star is still singing. The question is no longer whether you have a path, but whether you’re ready to walk it with your eyes open.

If you're curious, if you feel the call beckoning, explore here Your Personal Myth.

I'd love to hear your reflections

.

Salmon Woman: Returning The Bones

"Have you ever heard a crow cry out like that "Kaw Kaw Kaw..." three immediate barks? I asked my Grandmother's Mother.  

She replied "That's not how crow speaks... there's typically a pause before the third Kaw." 

We listened and heard crow again.  She said, "That's not crow, that's a man hiding as crow.”

She took from her elk skin satchel a slingshot and when Crow wasn't looking shot him.  When the stone hit him, he fell out of the crow’s skin and hit the ground.  He looked around and asked why she had shot him with the creek stone and knocked him out of his disguise.

She said "You were making sounds you did not understand and could be quite harmful.  You spoke Crow Speech in a cadence and rhythm that would anger the mountain spirit who would bring forth the storms and fires." 

My grandmother's mother was consistently emphatic with how to speak so that our words, cadence and rhythm were in a way that evoked what we were seeking relationship with.

She asked, "Who are you hiding from?" 

The man said "From Salmon Woman.  I had cast my net in the creek and caught four salmon.  But I could only eat three and so the last one died without further giving life. Now she is hunting me." 

The old woman asked, "Did you keep the bones?"

“I did,” he said.

My Grandmother's Mother said "You must go to the particular bend in the river where the salmon gather when the clouds clear after a fierce rain. You must carve river stones into the shape of four salmon while singing their hymn then give them as offerings along with the bones of their remains.  Not a single bone can be missing.  Gift them with cedar bark dust that you scrape from the underside of the bark with river stones.  Sing and fast for four days and four nights to show your sacrifice.  In this way, you give of your own life force to help the spirit of Salmon cross over.  Then Salmon Woman will leave you be and may even give you a boon."

I asked her who Salmon Woman was and my Grandmother's Mother said She is the woman who lives where the creek waters meet the river waters.  

I asked, "Is there a woman at the beginning of each creek?" 

"Yes,” she said.  They are the guardians of those waters and protect the salmon, trout, crawdads, and other beings who live in their waters.  One should always pay respect to her and ask permission of her before harvesting from her waters." 

My Grandmother's Mother then taught me a song to sing and how to beat a rhythm on my chest with an open palm where my heart lives.  When she felt I had woven it into my bones, she said "Good.  Carry this song in a good way. It's now of your medicine bundle."

Then I woke.

The next day I arrived at Uncles as he had instructed.  I told him about the new dream with my Grandmother's Mother and again he sat in silence a long time, smoking his pipe. 

 I wish I could smoke a pipe like Uncle. I fill my pipe with the customary plants, light it, and then I'm like a dying sea lion clumsily barking absurd sounds disturbing the silence. Uncle would say I make the ancestors run away because of my awful sounds.  I'm the most ungraceful pipe smoker there is and I'm grateful to know what is not mine and merely celebrate what is in others. 

After a long time in silence, Uncle spoke.

"A long long time ago, it was known all animals including birds, fish, and the four-legged could take off their skins.  When they did, they resembled human beings, they were two-legged. 

Before humans came to the earth, these other beings had special powers, songs, and their own culture. They came together at certain times of the year that held particular forms of power.  These were transition times such as the Equinox and Solstices and those moments between them.  They would take off their skins to feast, dance, and celebrate together.  Without their skins, they looked like humans, they were two-legged. Then they would put their skins back on and return to the instructions given to them by Creator. 

One time, a trickster spirit stole some of the skins while they were celebrating. When they returned to don their original skins, their skins weren't there.  Without their original skins, they lost much of their cultural memory along with their memory of the original instructions on how to be in the world in a good way.  They adopted an insatiable hunger and need to take what they could regardless of how it impacted others.

This is how some of the first two-legged (humans) came to be who took more than they needed.

In the beginning, however, they could still slip into the skins of other beings and take on their form. 

In your dream, it seems your Grandmother’s Mother was interacting with one of those.

Your Grandmother's Mother is sharing some ancient knowledge with you.  In her story, she is providing the hidden instructions of our ancestors with how to live in a good way and the consequences of not doing so. 

She's also sharing how to restore good relationship with the land, fish, waters, and mountains again.   She has gifted you a song and ritual. 

Go out into the lands and listen for the old tongues spoken through the primordial elements of wind and waters, mountains and fire.  Listen just beyond the edge of the ordinary where there's a felt mythic presence that may carry you into the unseen worlds in the dynamics of tribal memory.

Your Grandmother's Mother has also given you a clue to restore relationship... Listen for the hymns of the land or salmon people or elk people or raven people... whoever you are connecting with.  You have to come into a silence and speak your intention without words and those hymns, rituals, and remembrances may be re-gifted to you from the land itself. 

Then fast or show your way of giving of your own life force to feed the holy in nature with what you seek. 

Through this way, you may receive the forgotten knowledge and ancestral remembrances yet held in your bone memory ready to take up residency within you.

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A Knowing

Inside

You are

Not an

Accumulation

Of your 

Successes and failures

Nor of 

The things

That have 

Happened

To you

But are of

A greater dance

Of a mythic story

Being lived 

Through you

Where loss

Gifted you

Grief

That broke 

You open

To the love

You hold inside

A story with

How you’ve been

touched by the 

Felt presence 

In another’s eyes

By the cool shade 

of forest, 

The roaring energy 

Of a stormy sea, 

Of the way 

The sun felt 

After a storm

A story

Of how despite

It all

You 

Still love,

Hope,

Dream,

Step into

The day

And 

Are here

There is 

A Knowing

Inside

That

Your life 

Isn’t a 

measurement

Of things

That

Your life

Is of

A greater 

Dance from which 

You came

And to which 

You’ll return

Like a wave

Holding the light 

filtered

Through the canopy 

of clouds

Crashes back

Into the sea

Beauty making

It’s way

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