I have walked the Red Road path since the age of 19. Well, maybe it’s more accurate to say that I’ve meandered on and off of it. It has called me. Pulled me. Hit me over the head with a 2×4. I’ve tried to walk away from it many, many times. And I kept getting pulled back. So eventually I gave up trying to walk away and just gave myself over to it. And it has been the most wonderful gift to my life.
My first sweat lodge, at the age of 19, woke something up inside me. It activated a remembering, a seemingly cellular memory of Who I Am as a precious child of the universe. A switch was flipped and I was suddenly hungry, ravenous in fact, to merge with God – to know my own holiness. It was this yearning that I gave myself over to, and ceremony consistently proved to be the quickest, most direct path to quenching that thirst for the sacred.
I went to every ceremony I could. While the rest of my peers were following the scripted path, getting their degrees and establishing their careers, I dropped out of college, seeking out elders and studying ceremony instead. In some ways it didn’t matter the kind of ceremony, and in others it mattered a lot. I wasn’t drinking Ayahuasca every weekend or following a Road man around from tipi to tipi. I wanted to keep my wits about me, and, while I have a great respect for all medicines that are being anchored by the ancient lineages that have carried them through the generations, getting drunk on medicine didn’t appeal to me at that time. I had partied enough in my high school and early college years that sobriety and clear-headedness were much more appealing to me in the beginning.
I was drawn to fire.
At every ceremony I attended, there was fire at the center. And someone had to tend that fire, to take care of it, to feed it so that it could feed and take care of the ceremony and the people in it. I was pulled, like a moth, to the flame.
My first fire teacher had been the chief of the Lakota nation’s Sundance fire chief for 16 years. I met him at a gathering of the International Council of the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, where he was keeping fire for 5 days and nights for a gathering of 300 people with only 1 other person to help him. I saw the need and I offered my novice services to support it.
I will never forget the night he initiated me into the fire. He taught me so much about the being that is fire and the fire that lives in the heart of humankind. So many beautiful, wise teachings. But he was human too. And male. Women tending these kinds of fires wasn’t very traditional. In many cultures, the fire is tended by the men, and the women take care of the water. But that fire called me, and he could see it. So he taught me.
Pretty early in the course of my work with him, I became pregnant with my first daughter, Sunna. Even while pregnant, he would still invite me to help him at whatever ceremony he was tending fire for. While pregnant I was Wakan – holy – 2 beings in 1 body. And then she was born. And he dropped me like a hot potato.
“There’s your sacred fire now,” he told me. I was stunned. This ceremonial fire, this taking care of the heartbeat of the people – this was all I wanted to do with my life. But the road had been closed.
It took me years of grief, resistance and struggle to come to terms with what he meant when he told me that my child was my sacred fire. My second daughter, born when my eldest was 8, is almost 6 and I am still just beginning to understand what this really means. I am working to understand it before it is too late, and my children are grown and no longer need tending.
Finding a teacher in Nana Wilma – a Mayan grandmother and spiritual healer from Guatemala, who worked with fire and was also a mother – helped tremendously with easing the pain of being cast away from the fire by my first teacher. But apprenticing at the altar of motherhood has been one of the deepest ceremonial journeys of all. While harsh when it landed, my first teacher was right about that.
With ceremonial fire, there is a clear beginning and ending to your service. Ranging anywhere from just a few hours to 4, 5, 7, 10 days – you are connected to that fire that whole time. Your sole job is to keep it alive and beautifully thriving, with as much love and tenderness and care as you can have with a wild being that can seriously injure you. You are on the clock 24-7 for the duration of the ceremony. You eat by the fire – sometimes even sleep by it. It grabs you – you don’t want to leave its side.
With motherhood, you are on the clock 24-7 but there is no clear end to the ceremony. No breaks. No reprieve. Hopefully you have some help – a partner, family members, community. Without that, it can break you. Sometimes you want to run away.
With firekeeping, you are honored and thanked and respected for your service. The elders and community members sometimes give you gifts and offerings of gratitude. But with motherhood? Thanks can be rare and hard to come by. Ego death is a built-in part of the gig.
With Luna, my second child, I took this teaching – of my child as a sacred fire – seriously from the moment of her conception. I have done my best to tend to her with as much reverence as I would a sacred fire. Some years I have done better with that assignment than others.
Recently, this apprenticeship to the altar of motherhood has taken on a tone that has surprised me. Maybe I’ve just entered another level of it. In many ways I feel like I am nearing the end of this level of my training. In a little over a year she will be 7. Everything changes at 7. And I won’t be having anymore children. This is my last year to truly study with this altar at this intensive level.
As I step into this realization, I’m recognizing that I don’t crave ceremonial experiences in the same way that I used to. Ceremony can be rough. It pushes you to your physical, mental and emotional limits. Since apprenticing at the altar of motherhood, I no longer feel the need to put myself through that. Maybe I will again someday. But right now, I am tested – mentally, emotionally and physically – all the time, by motherhood.
My sacred fire has become the hearth fire I use to cook my family’s food. Tending to the needs of the body and soul of my child has become the most paramount and primary sacred work. This is not to mention recovering my body from the demands of growing life, which for whatever reason seems to have been much more difficult for me than I see it is for some women. Many times over the past 6 years, this has meant not participating in ceremonies in the same way I used to – or at all. I am no longer grieving this as I have in the past, but leaning into it.
That hearth fire that feeds the people – that feeds the children – is just as sacred as the ceremonial fire at the center. It is the fire that never goes out. The grandmas know this. And I am only just beginning to learn.