The medicine walk: hiking up the canyon and the ceremony of fire

I have been writing about the medicine walk I went on in the Eureka Valley in California, east of the Sierra Mountains. So far I’ve described the process of mirroring for intention. The intention I formed was “I am mother and father to myself. I have the strength and take the time to care for my hurt self.” Now I’m going to tell you the story of what happened when I went on the medicine walk.

I set out shortly after dawn, with the intention of staying out until dusk, and fasting from food, human company, and built structures. So this medicine walk was like a mini vision fast. I had a sense of the supportive presence of Ruth and Larry in base camp, and all the fasters hidden away in the hills and canyons around the camp. I decided to hike up a canyon where I knew no other fasters were staying.

Walking up the canyon, I created a beautiful threshold crossing once I was out of sight of base camp. I made two cairns of stones to walk between, marked with vials of sparkly red glass beads. I was worried about not being able to find the threshold when I returned, especially if it was dark, so I retraced my steps after I had crossed the threshold, and noted markers in the landscape to help me: creosote trees and the tip of the ridge. I also noticed that the threshold was slightly to the left of the centre of the wash.

I noticed I was walking into the east, and partly up the wash I came upon some bushes with beautiful yellow flowers. Flowers always seem like such a precious gift in the desert. This dry wash must collect enough rain once or twice a year to allow these flowers to grow and bloom here. Further up the canyon I saw three yellow stones on the ground. Another sign of the east. I picked one up and tasted it, wondering if it was sulfur. It tasted salty like the desert and had tiny crystals in it. I gave Reiki to the earth to thank the land for this gift.

At the top of the canyon was an amazing place with tiger- and leopard-patterned stone walls, in orange and yellow and black. There were lots of little hidey-holes for rodents. I noticed two crazy webs that could be the work of black widow spiders. Very sticky, with strands in three dimensions rather than the flat, neatly patterned two-dimensional web that most spiders make. I found a place in the shade to keep the water I’d brought for the day. Then I looked around for a good place to do my first ceremony, working with anger.

I found a gravelly place in the wash that was quite flat, and dug a hole in the gravel using a larger stone. I set up four coloured direction stones around me, and the strands of coloured beads for each direction that I carry in my medicine bear-pouch, Graham, whom I claimed and named in a trip to the desert several years ago. Maybe I’ll tell you that story one day. I meditated for a while, turning so that I spent some of the time facing in each of the four directions, sensing how the energies felt in each direction.

I’d brought a letter that I’d received from a friend right before the trip, in which she had said many hurtful things about me and my anger. What timing! This was someone I’d known for twenty years, and had shared the deepest parts of myself with. I had felt very hurt and upset by her letter, as well as angry. So I began speaking to this woman, telling her how I felt about the letter, and the hurt I felt that she didn’t know me after all these years. I told her the hurt I felt that she didn’t care about me. I told her all the things I’ve felt frustrated and hateful and angry towards her about.

When I’d been talking about the letter with Ruth and Larry I’d wondered whether I should read it again during the ceremony. Ruth asked me “Would you read this letter to your inner child?” What a brilliant question. Of course I wouldn’t read a hurtful letter to a young child, and I wouldn’t dream of re-hurting the child by repeating something hurtful. So this guidance helped me learn something, and I knew I didn’t want to read the letter again. So when I’d said everything that’s been unsaid, including my caring about my friend over these years, and holding space for her, I said I was giving her back the shit she’d put on me.

Then I used the element of fire to burn the four or five pages of the letter, along with some sweet grass and a tiny bit of cedar and sage from my medicine pouch. Once the letter had burned to ash, I repeated my intention, thanked the spirits of the land, and covered the hole with gravel.

I felt satisfied with the beauty and simplicity of the ceremony, and connected with myself and the land around me. It seemed that this ceremony to deal with my anger was a significant step in changing my behaviour. It also seemed like a celebration of the aliveness and life energy that the anger brings. I wasn’t denying the anger or suppressing it. Rather, I expressed it in a way that did not hurt myself or anyone else. In this way, I claimed the strength of the red. Beginning with the red beads that I used to mark the threshold, and culminating in the anger ceremony, this part of the medicine walk was my ceremony of the south.

My intention was to do a ceremony in each of the four directions, moving around the wheel as the day went on. This way I would be invoking the energy of each of the directions to help me claim my intention. I’ll tell you what happened next…