On the second day of my Inipis, I began pitching in to help with the fire for the ceremony. I worked with a man named Richard, who I just assumed to be Native American. He was certainly weathered and dark enough. He grunted a lot and gave me little by way of direction. Before we started he told me that in the old ways, a boy desiring to become a major part of the sacred ceremonies would first have to tend fire for seven years for the people. In silence. Anything he learned would be picked up by observation. And then he shut up, and told me to, too. And that is, for the most part, how I was taught, by careful observation and mimicking all the things that Richard did until I got a sense of not only the nuts and bolts of firetending, but the relationship with fire and ceremony and Spirit that he embodied. It wasn't until a week later that I learned that Richard, in fact, was a fifty-year-old Jew from Brooklyn who had been setting Altar for the Chips for the last year on their road trips. After my fourth Inipi, I asked for permission to move onto the property of the sponsor to help wherever I could. Given the okay, I dropped everything and did so. Slowly, I got to know the family a little better and after a couple of weeks of tending fire, was invited into the Yuwipi Ceremonies. There was a ceremony each night for the next two weeks, beginning with an Inipi at dusk and then ending with a "feast" at around midnight after the ceremony. Spirit literally, physically touched people. People were transformed. People were told that they should prepare for death. People were told that they had to change their lives. People were instructed where to find specific herbs, and how they were to be prepared and taken to effect healing. My experience was that Godfrey, bound tight and completely in a blanket and laid down on a bed of sage in the pitch blackness at the beginning of the ceremony, did not do the telling, touching, or instructing. There were other things there that did the work. He just called them in. Amidst the cacophony of dashing lights in the dark, voices from nowhere in the silence, and the circles of sometimes desperate prayer focused on the greatest good, some people were healed. Some were given blessings and left to go on with their deaths. Not that they were passed by, but because it became both painfully and ecstatically evident to themselves that they didn't want to live anymore. To a one, though, each of the people involved had nowhere else to go but to these ceremonies, as "Western" medicine had exhausted all of its options with them. Naturally. After all, they were seeing a Medicine Man! Cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, Immune Disorders including AIDS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome were all dealt with, and each outcome was different. I have personally known people who, given up for lost with the above mentioned afflictions, were renewed at least to the point of defying their death sentences (and Ouch! the numbers of people that were so advised by the best of medical "professionals" was incredible!) No one left those ceremonies without being deeply affected. Some people left in terror. Let's face it, when was the last time you went to see a doctor and were thrust into a light-tight room filled with a cacaphony of guterral and ancient sounds driven by drumbeat, and then found yourself touched by what could only be called little hands? Some people, as long as they understood that it was not the disease they were changing, but their lives, left whole. What I grasped was that in the ancient ways it was found that if things were done in a certain way, certain things would happen. Over years and years--perhaps millennia--of trial and error, visions and personal instructions by Spirit and Nature, it was found that the right combination of preparation, songs, intent, and action would beckon Spirit to appear, advise, and affect; time could be dissolved and the miraculous would be attainable. There are also Spirit allies called Tunkasilas (Tunka-shilas; Grandfathers), some of whom take physical form as what many cultures identify as "little people" who "doctor" the individuals. The Yuwipi calls them in to do what the Creator asks of them to do; heal. What I witnessed was four individuals, Unci (Grandmother), Charles, Phillip (who, a paraplegic from a car accident, sat in a wheelchair), and Godfrey, the Yuwipi Man, working the space of the ceremony room, speaking to each other, sometimes in Lakota, sometimes in English, cobbling together different parts of the ceremony during their preparations, sometimes instructing, "no, NO the rattle goes over THERE," "spread the sand from Wahinheya (the Mole) from right to left, not left to right," "that song goes like This," all in precise detail with no guidebook or directions to follow but the memory of the way things had been taught them by their ancestors. And all throughout, what became more and more evident to me was that there was a consistency of intent amongst them, an approach that transmuted into the feeling that, indeed, they became, through the process of preparation and delivery, of one mind, one heart--all in service to the spirit of the individual needing help. This was the gift that they passed on to me by their example, and I embraced it. But there was more: what I was a part of with them felt so very, very from a completely, and ancient, way of being. At first this was just a feeling, but as time unfolded, I learned just how it was grounded in fact. Next: A living legacy. |
