More Than Allies

Love with Medicine on Her Birthday

“Somebody downstairs getting married today.”
— voice heard before waking circa first light on summer solstice, 2021

“But it is certain that, in order to pass from a given state to its opposite, though it be from evil to good, from grief to joy, from fatigue to repose, the soul of a man must suffer; in this hour of birth of a new destiny all the springs of his being are strained almost to breaking – even as at the approach of summer the sky is covered with dark clouds, and the earth, all a-tremble, seems about to be annihilated by the tempest.”
— George Sand, from her novel “Mauprat” (1837)

“Go then to the crossroads and invite everyone you find to the bride-feast.”
— Matthew 22:9
 

Summertime is sacred for sun-lovers, but life ain’t easy for most inhabitants of earth. Mankind has broken the balance that enables us to enjoy the shine together. As the climate unravels, so do our spirits and nerves.

On solstice a friend who seeks healing through indigenous ceremonies shared a somber message on social media. “Hard Heavy Day…Loss, frustration, confusion.” His text kept tapping at my heart as I provisioned visitors with books in my store on the coast of Oregon.

An introductory note:  this heart was raised by long-haul lovebirds who’ve helped generations of people navigate loss. For over a century my kin have assisted with funeral ceremonies in Appalachia, where I grew up. My parents showed me how homegrown loving-kindness expands the circle of fellowship, like twining roots and storylines in a jungle community.

Global loss results when humans abandon our mutual care for each other and creation as a whole. Calls for cross-cultural repairs ring loud when vast areas dry up and burn under domes of heat, even as storms and floods devastate other regions. Sharing small gifts is all many of us can do to undertake these repairs, circulating ideas and talents and resources in gratitude for the great gift of being alive.

Spirit nudged me in this direction when I picked up the land-line at my bookshop to share words with my burdened friend. Native Alaskan, he was raised where summer is an especially luminous time of year. His upbringing included ceremonies that are fastened to creation with long-standing protocol. Word has it, as a boy, he was the fastest smudger in the territories. We first crossed paths when he was headed along the coast to meet Rick Bartow, the native Oregonian of Wiyot descent who made strange and beautiful art that transcends orthodoxy.

My friend spoke about miscommunication and stalled progress, a familiar source of letdown. He’s helping bring indigenous ceremonies to the Northwest from the center of our continent. Labors of this kind are bound to be challenging. There’s so many ways for words to throw folks off track. People argue over who owns the track, who’s the chief engineer, who’s blood-kin and who’s bleeding, who’s paid and who’s not. Human relations are tricky when shaped by thousands of years under the old-boy influences of empire.

He had a busy schedule for July, traveling to ceremonies in four states, the final one in South Dakota. To prepare he was gathering eagle feathers and western red cedar. I offered to help with the cedar and asked if he needed anything more.

“A good woman,” he said.

In my hillbilly youth I would have chuckled at that utterance, not thinking about it any more than I thought about the word “hillbilly.” Since then life’s ups and downs have made me more mindful, thanks to the mutual care of fellow sun-circlers who give a damn.

Dude wasn’t talking about getting laid. He meant life partnership, because he added “you and Jennifer are leaders on that path.”

So it happened on solstice that medicine and marriage started to dance inside the curing barn of my heart. These themes stepped forward in synch, enjoining me to muse on their connectivity. They invited me onto a dirt floor charged with prayers for balance.

Jennifer is the fulcrum of my life’s whirl. She’s the right amount of masculine to complement my feminine, and visa-versa. Our dance allies forces that magnetize our personal lives and weave through the community. We reel with a synergy that exceeds the hum of our parts. Often it’s gobs of fun.

Her embodied soul emerged in conjunction with the annual period of peak solar exposure. Strangely, this makes her a “moonchild” according to astrological lore. Some star-gazers refer to her native season as “the gate of birth,” which also strikes me as strange, because days start to get shorter after the summer solstice. Nevertheless, it fits with Jennifer’s calling as a midwife.

I was born on the opposite side of the year, when light is scarce because of the earth’s tilt, yet the sun is actually closest in terms of physical distance. My Alaskan friend was also born in winter, a son of the midnight sun. Maybe that’s partly why he and I like to hunt for ideas that hibernate under the surface of society. We can be dead shots in the dark, but sometimes disagree on what we’re aiming for.

For example, he shakes his head when I mention Capricorn or any of the other signs that came here to this hemisphere like migrant hillbillies. Apparently for him they’re foreign bunk, and he’s probably right on occasion. Maybe any sign can become problematic when it eats up too much headspace. Yet to my ken they’re also pointers in wisdom’s terrain, like mossy rocks that lead to water in the next holler.

Human nature thirsts for knowledge. It interests me that Jennifer’s native season of sunshine coincides with the sole birth-sign ruled by the moon. Rites involving the moon have long been scapegoated by sorts who’d rather burn a witch than marry one. But both sun and moon are sacred in my book, like every heavenly body and all genders and both earthly hemispheres. Every part of creation is my relative, which makes me a witch according to other books, some of which can be purchased at my store.

This spreading sacredness has inspired diverse ceremonies. Many have become captive to empire’s hierarchies. Resistance to cross-cultural exchange is therefore understandable, given this conquest, though it can also impede the flow of gifts and weaken the spirit of teamwork.

Appalachia’s people are typecast as being especially wary of outside influences, even as we’ve traded most of our nature-based ways for national chain commerce. Yet farmers almanac calendars still circulate throughout the region, marked with signs advising when to plant and harvest, plus holidays often derived from rites tied to natural rhythms and cycling of the seasons.

Many privileged hillbillies now equate holidays with trips to heavily-trafficked tourist spots. When they visit the Oregon coast I welcome them with book recommendations and also fret about a future packed with high-rise condos.

Beneath the everyday traffic live dreams of real getaways, gateways beyond business as usual. Words can crack through mundane routines like weeds through pavement. This prospect was opened by another solstice conversation.

On the same day that I spoke with my Alaskan friend I also met Mike Lee, a Blackfeet ceremonial elder who lives in Washington State. Uncle Mike brightened up a key term in life’s lexicon. He taught me something about wakan, a Lakota word often translated as “sacred” or “holy.” He explained that wakan means “more than.”

“If a campfire is wakan,” Mike said, “it’s more than a campfire. People should treat it with care. Sitting around such a fire we don’t throw trash in there to burn.”

Those sentences have washed over me for many tides, tumbling the shells of this writing. Memories glisten in significance when a word from outside my language helps me view them anew.

One time I encountered wakan while performing a routine task I’d often heard about, growing up in a funeral family. Professionals often call this “making a removal.” It involves going to a home to pick up a dead body and moving that sacred vessel for the purpose of ceremonial disposition. Here’s what happened once upon a place in time that anchors my being.

On a busy day I was asked to help pick up the body of a 98-year-old woman from the home where she had lived with her 99-year-old husband of nearly eight decades.

I’d been around funerals all my life but am not a licensed funeral director and I had never removed a body from a home. When we arrived in our dark suits I became very self-conscious. The gravity of our task rolled over me in a way that was more than intimate. My licensed companion assured me with confidence that he understood the protocol. All I had to do was follow his lead.

The bereaved husband was a lifelong preacher in the Holiness Church. We were met outside the modest apartment by a dozen grieving women in full-length skirts and hair kept long, in keeping with their faith. I followed my co-worker, yet for some reason he hesitated to engage. After waiting an awkward spell one of the daughters approached me, saying I needed to tell her father that we were there to pick up her mother’s body. She informed me that her dad was completely blind and almost totally deaf. I would need to speak very loudly in order for him to hear.

Human beings do what’s necessary in such moments, humble creatures without pedigree, equipped with little more than prayer. If I let myself, I still convulse with tears every time I revisit this memory.

She led me into a room packed with family and the Holy Ghost, then gestured toward an old man seated in the pit of raw grief. I hunkered down beside him and yelled the first words that came though my heart. I told him I was Jimmy Dobson’s grandson, because I reckoned he knew my late papaw who helped local folks with funerals since 1919. I choked back sobs, pushing on to holler that I understood the miracle of marriage. I pledged to provide the same care I would want if Jennifer’s body were being removed from our home.

After pausing, he gave a small nod. Then the funeral director and his unlicensed companion went into an adjacent bedroom. By God’s grace, and a nudge from that wise loving sister, we were able to carry the wakan forward.

Of course everybody I interacted with on that day was sacred, like everyone I’ve met in my life and all the people who’ve ever existed, plus each quantum of the creation we’re all part. Yet that little exchange in one family’s apartment embodies sacredness in a way that expands my consciousness, now in memory even more than it did before I learned a new word to describe it. 

Uncle Mike and I did not speak about our families during that initial conversation. We talked about tobacco. I was blessed to speak with Mike, in fact, because a Métis friend had passed along a gift of tobacco I’d carried to the Northwest from Appalachia. I asked a grower for several cured hands, with the stated purpose of sharing them with folks who would appreciate their medicine. I wanted to nurture my roots while heartening ties with the people of Jennifer’s birth-region.

Giving continues my education, advance my personal growth. I’ve often given books to visitors at the store, titles they might not have purchased or could not afford. This seasons the conversations by which I’ve come to understand that tobacco originated in this hemisphere to accompany prayers and strengthen bonds among people. I was grateful when Mike gave me a tobacco story to illustrate the meaning of wakan.

“Once when I was at a gathering,” said Mike, “someone made me a gift of tobacco from a cigarette. He pinched off the filter so what was left was mostly leaf. I put it in a tin can and stored it in my camper, which was broken into soon afterward. The thief took all my valuables, including some expensive gear, but that part wasn’t a big deal to me. I figured whoever stole the gear might need it more than I did. What was deeply concerning to me was that tobacco, because it was more than tobacco. It was wakan. Treating it with disrespect could create great harm to someone. I spent a lot of time praying for that thief.”

The story prompted reflection on my formative encounters with tobacco. I thought about how the plant was integral to the culture of my upbringing, how as a kid I hunted arrowheads in Appalachia’s newly-plowed tobacco patches, later marveling at the verdant plants and watching in awe as men climbed up high in the barns to hang hard stalks full of big pungent leaves.

Around the age of six I sampled my first tobacco product. Candy cigarettes were marketed back then, and I enjoyed them like a sugar-daddy wannabe. Figuring the adult version was even better, I stuck one in my mouth and the contents fell apart. The taste of cool wasn’t nearly what I’d imagined, to say the least.

That foul flavor must have returned to mind a couple of years later when I witnessed a neighbor’s dad teach his kid to smoke. The old man’s tone was aggressive, dominating. I kept quiet on the fringe of a passel of boys who gathered to witness the father-son ritual, there in a backyard lined with broken cinder blocks. I didn’t want the man to speak rough to me because he thought I was a sissy (which I definitely was, according to other boys). After a few coughs junior passed his macho exam and presumably moved on to the next test of Marlboro manhood.

It wasn’t until middle school that I learned how exciting said tests can be, when I took my first tangy dip of Skoal. A buddy shared his fresh can while we were camping at my grandparents’ farm. It tasted loads better than that crumbled cigarette. Soon I was high, then threw up. A few hours later I tried again and was thrilled to get a less nauseous buzz.

That was around the same time of life I overcame my nervousness and asked a girl to “go with me.” By that point in social history guys in my neighborhood had dropped the word “steady” from the proposal. She was not just any girl either, but an exquisite specimen I’d become entranced with years earlier, when she read the words “fizzes and bubbles” out loud in front of our whole third-grade class in the course of introducing a science experiment.

I felt exalted when she said “yes” as we walked to the Pizza Hut after that football game, like I’d summited a mountain. But as the evening progressed I realized I did not have a freaking clue as to where exactly I was going with my monumental new girlfriend. All the rumors I’d heard just made my palms sweat more under the table of the multi-national franchise.

I graduated from Skoal to Copenhagen upon entering Dobyns-Bennett High School. It felt solidly cool spitting with confident jocks outside the lunchroom, swapping jokes while marking territory. We were proud D-B “Indians,” scouting for social prowess in a manner we identified with our robustly-feathered mascot. I figured I was learning all I needed to know about sports and girls, two interwoven subjects in the rug of pop custom.

Uncle Mike helped to un-knot that memory with a truth about real Indians that beams poetic hindsight into my male conditioning. He told me the bells adorning traditional Jingle Dress dancers were at one time crafted from the metal lids of discarded snuff cans. Those women are so poised and graceful, they make it look easy. Yet Mike said their dresses can weigh up to 70 pounds.

Tobacco is one of four chief plant medicines for this continent, along with sage, sweetgrass, and cedar. In my youth it was also the principal source of cash for most small subsistence farmers, the hand up to a consumer economy. Alongside humans and sugar, tobacco was one of the first of God’s gifts to be commodified in this hemisphere. Since then the plant’s true agency has been buried like a discarded body in one of those old femicidal ballads.

I finally met the real agency of tobacco right after college, although the experience defies concrete description, sort of like a Rick Bartow painting. In fact I did not begin to think about it until many decades later, after I started writing this essay. Some happenings I pass through without gazing at them too closely at the time, thinking I might get swept up in a wave of awe and become immobilized.

I was conducting biological fieldwork in St. Lucia, an island country in the West Indies. Alone for the first time outside the United States, I felt an urge to look for chewing tobacco, probably as a way to re-root myself in familiarity. The search began with two laughing guides who I’d just met on the street, male and female youths who kept joking about my quest, which felt lost in the translation between hillbilly english and island patois. Perhaps they misunderstood and were laughing because they thought I was looking for ganga, which I wasn’t at that moment. At any rate, these guides led me through a maze of corrugated tin huts, ultimately to the home of a vibrant-looking fellow with dreads who I’d never seen during my many wanderings in the town. He wasn’t the least bit comic about my search. Recalling his countenance I think of someone who one might seek for sober counsel.

“Is this what you want,” he calmly asked, gesturing toward a plant growing beside his dwelling. The size of a small tree, it was one of the most gorgeous plants I’d ever seen. I was immediately drawn to the big leaves, but don’t remember touching it. I told him I would never ask to take anything away from that plant, and left my search with nothing more than this memory that grows larger in my heart every time I edit these paragraphs.

Many moons ago I stopped using any commercial tobacco products. Several decades back my kin also quit growing the big leaf for money, except for one year as an experiment in organic farming for American Spirit. Tobacco is not something I think about in terms of dipping or chewing or smoking, either as producer or consumer. Now I’m grateful to be getting reacquainted with the plant as waken.

Jennifer grounds me in such homecomings. Her love for plants has rubbed off, much like the herbal salve she calls “green goop” (made with comfrey, calendula, plantain, and other allies). This green love accompanied our family move to the Pacific Northwest, where I’ve met the chief plant medicine of her birth-region. Cedar.

Life changed for good one Oregon morning when I went into our home watershed to gather cedar for a salmon celebration. The trees gave me a song that I sang years later when Jennifer and I carried cedar to Wounded Knee, asked by my Alaskan friend to deliver it to a Lakota ceremonial elder who reminded me of my papaw when he smiled. The elder told us this gift from the trees is a medicine gathering song, saying he’d travelled in the country where it originated. This is how gifts get stronger as they move around.

And so I sang the gathering song while scouting forests and roadways, looking for ceremonial cedar to give my friend in need. I hugged the trees and ran my hands along their bark, admiring their beauty and fragrance. I offered tobacco. I asked around.

Some folks cut cedar for ceremony, but the trees taught me their greenery must fall on its own. Such offerings are easier to encounter in winter, when strong winds blow along the coast. Also the timing must be right so that the green hasn’t turned brown by the time we cross paths. This happens fast during days of record hot temperatures, when many evergreens are scorched while still standing. This fills me with grief.

In pursuit of healing, the relationship between time and finding merits a note of reflection. Medicine often comes too slowly to meet an immediate need, at least in my experience. But later light suddenly shines to reveal the source of the problem, aiding long-term efforts, often in unexpected poetic ways.

Driving home from the bookshop I prepared to stop and gather cedar at a place suggested by family and friends. My search had yet to yield anything I could pass along, though I was in a good space, keeping my senses open. In the car I started debating with myself about whether I should listen to some tunes. I asked myself if that would be a productive part of my search. Self said sure, why not.

I turned the radio on. The classic rock station had cued up Boston, a band I especially liked while navigating puberty. I smiled and shook my head at the serendipity of an anthem I’d long since relegated to a bygone era of sweaty hands.

I looked out this morning and the sun was gone
Turned on some music to start my day
I lost myself in a familiar song
I closed my eyes and I slipped away

And the guitar chords and chorus opened a memory. I was back at the Skate Inn, gangly legs on wheels. A girl who’d just broken up with me was gliding backwards across the floor, holding hands with the coach’s kid who dubbed me “queer-bait.” I wasn’t all that crazy about her, anyway, but as I watched the new couple float around the arena I felt dispossessed of all social standing.

The memory kept going. I recalled rolling alone by the rink’s cafeteria tables, trying not to look like the world’s foremost loser. At that low awkward moment someone called my name. It was that other girl, the “fizzes and bubbles” one I had indeed been wild about, the first one I had asked to go with me. My body still remembers how it felt, hunkered in a corner of my room at home, trembling while speaking with her over the long curly cord of the land-line.

“It’s just not working,” she said, and my heart shattered. But instead of asking what “working” meant, I played it cool, saying I’d suspected from the start she would break up with me at some point to go back to the older guy she’d been dating before, that all-knowing ninth grader, implying that she went with me just to make him jealous. We’d barely spoken since that phone call, and I was startled when she reached out at the Skate Inn.

“I want to sign your annual,” she said. I nodded, then skated along without saying more. Later she penned a few words, letting me know that she went with me for no other reason than because she wanted to, that the brief time we spent sharing lockers was enjoyable, and that she hoped we could move on to being good friends.

Jennifer and I grinned when our kids found that scribble in a closet, recorded for posterity in the 1976-1977 “Warrior Warbook” with a cringey cartoon Indian on the cover. Adolescent dramas seem like absurdist theater now, easily dismissed as the by-products of our first surge of hormones.

Yet formative crushes point to something sacred that precedes puberty, something easily missed when society trains our senses on gendered stereotypes and conquest. I was grateful to remember that gesture of formative female friendship, on the way to gather cedar for a real Indian friend who works hard to revive ceremonies and says he needs a good woman, thinking about an elder’s wakan story, listening to “More Than A Feeling,” praying and singing a medicine gathering song given by beings who lived in this country long before the arrival of two-legged critters (romantic or otherwise).

Reckon we’re on a homeward journey, learning from neighbors and predecessors and creation as a whole. Openness to inner balance boosts resilience with others, equilibrates our capacity for collaboration. Will we come around to embrace our shared survival?
 

I pulled off the highway near a patch of older growth forest. I offered Appalachian tobacco. I criss-crossed a maze of logs covering uneven ground, balancing through deep underbrush. I gently tugged on evergreen limbs poking up out of the vegetation. All were connected to rooted saplings, so I left them alone. In the dappled light I sang for medicine.

A fresh-fallen limb drew my attention to the foot of a beautiful grandmother. I went to her and kept singing as I gathered armloads of Northwest green. We came together, she and I, more than allies in a timeless country.

Soon afterward a bundle of carefully-worked and sorted cedar moved into the hands of my friend. Then I gathered and processed these words for two years, praying for writing to help smudge the bridge between genders and regions, parts and whole.

The other day I checked in with my Alaskan buddy. Still a bachelor bear, he laughed when I reminded him of his request for a life partner. “It’s complicated,” he explained.

Indeed, life twists in complex convolutions made by human interactions. Our imperfections can rip through social routines like a storm of venomous photons. That’s how it felt one morning at breakfast, when Jennifer and I argued over something I can’t remember, and my heart ached all day. Yet love shone over everything, and by moonrise we sat across from each other, working medicine, listening to music as mounds of bark and leaves grew on the table.

Traditional scripts keep people from swerving off track and sometimes stop us from driving into chaos. They can also block fresh meaning from stirring souls, restrict the flow of gifts, even delay our awakening to wakan. Marriage has the potential to go beyond domestic orders and explore a wild holy balance. Through grace we make a path by going deeper into teamwork, equal partners in a dance combining old ways with fluid revelation. 

The next steps for healing on this empire-ravaged planet are a mystery. How does love follow and lead, give and receive?

Listen, Jennifer says. Medicine knows.