Sitting in the Fire with You, My Heart Sings

Dear Mosom, I never knew I wanted to be adopted until it happened. You’ve expanded my understanding of what it means to be family and what it means to be human.

Late September 1952, you were born and I’m not at all sure of the name you were given. I know you now as Mosom, Grandfather. I met you first, five years ago, as simply, Joe. Your social media tells me your name is Ernie Ratfat and at some point recently you told me you’d like to change your name to, “Dalglee”, a word of your mother-tongue meaning, “Dancer”.

This is how I know you. When I watch your eyes I see a dancer - shiny, sparkling, moving here and there with delight, entertaining, and performing incredible acrobatics of trust and faith. Sometimes when I look though, the dancer in your eyes is very tired and sore - he is suffering. Neither is wrong or right, good or bad, it’s all true and it’s all okay.

We can be many things all at once.

I heard recently that the universe only ever says, “Yes”, and never, “No”. “No” is a human invention of resistance. "No" shows us when we are getting away from ourselves, getting away from center, away from the place we know how to ride the ever-present "Yes" current of ease and grace in any situation.

The dancer knows it’s all rhythm and flow. Yes, there’s structure and positioning, counts, and a necessity for physical balance, but the dancer knows the nature of infinity too - an ongoing “yes” current that connects all things infinitely.

All my relations.

Infinity is what brought us together this lifetime to be family. Me and you.

Aho.

At the same time, our finite human self endures a lot over the years of being alive on Earth in the illusion of separation from the bliss of infinite connection. Humans have mostly insisted on differences and from there, atrocities occur. It’s a painful road we travel to come again and again closer and closer to the felt sense of understanding that we’re all just Great Spirit experimenting with itself, feeling and sensing itself in every possible way. I see the truth of this when I’m in the tipi watching the fire, watching people, watching you. I see it’s all just reflections between us. I see how intimately we are working together, even when we’re not.

In that ceaseless playing with itself, Great Spirit has been willing to experience the full spectrum of human success and human suffering.

You tell me that you liked your life on the trap lines with your family. You got to spend a lot of time alone, quiet, in nature. You spoke Dené at home and you played with your siblings and your mother made you mittens.

Age six, they took you.

They took your siblings too but it was different there. You didn’t get to play with them. You didn’t get to speak your language. If you spoke your language you weren’t allowed to go to movie night or whatever “fun” they had in store for you at the residential school.

Those nuns were nasty.

You’ve told me this many times with not much additional detail. It makes sense to me that most of the memories are locked away. I don’t remember much from my early years either. The body and mind accomplish such incredible feats particularly in the name of survival. At the same time, you know, without knowing, what you went through, what you survived.

A lot of people are really attached to their stories. Some people even get feisty like their story is better or worse than someone else’s. I can never quite believe that. Maybe that’s why I like you so much because I feel like we’re both really into being equals in spite of any details.

Some people get really angry about cultural appropriation. I've deeply longed for the way you choose to share. I intensely respect the way you don’t ever say, “This is mine, get yourself own” (except perhaps about ice cream). I think freedom from oppression requires your kind of attitude. Your presence naturally commands respect because you respect others, you welcome them, and you really know how to hold space.

I remember the first night I met you, it was when Ignacio brought me to the ceremony. It was my first ceremony. I had never felt, "Yes," before when anyone invited me. Turns out it was a ceremony for you. At some point in the night, it was Ignacio’s turn to sing and, in his giant voice beside me, he offered songs of his own selection in that great Basque Country accent. The road-man wasn’t pleased and interrupted, scolding him, saying, “I’ve told you before, nephew, sing the traditional songs!”

The upset bellowed through us all.

You came across the circle towards us and motioned for me to go sit in your spot at the front between the Aunties. I did. One of them handed me a gorgeous feather fan (you are an excellent craftsman). I sat with them and watched you slide into my seat and start to beat the drum beside Ignacio.

“Sing your song,” you said to him.

I felt all the honor and acceptance of the universe cleanse us in the choice you made. You were the special one that night there to be adored and acknowledged in the ways of the Native American Church, but you’re the kind of guy that likes it best when everyone is genuinely joyful and you'll walk right into the fire to support us getting there.

The sorrow and shame was grounded, recycled, let go.

You’re an elder and I respect you in that way. I want to be quiet so you can show me. I want to listen so well I hear the subtleties of your dance and take endless inspiration from it, but I probably like you best because you know how to be equals. This is something I craved my whole life from people of all ages, all backgrounds, all walks of life. You know how to share sorrow and glory in a way no one gets left behind.

We’re all just walking each other home.

Ram Dass said that, and you, my dear grandfather, embody it.

It rattles me fiercely, Mosom, to hear what you’re going through now to be acknowledged. Acknowledgment is such an essential aspect of liberation.

Even though I deeply believe it is our own personal individual acknowledgment we most need and crave in terms of healing, we are also always in it together and external recognition can certainly assist especially when we’ve been trained not to see (or be) ourselves.

My dear Mosom, I like that you were willing to say to me that you’re pissed off. I never heard you say anything like this before. I have never known you to have any anger in your voice and I give you a lot of credit for that, but maybe you haven’t heard that side of me either, yet it exists.

We are here to feel it all.

I think we are here to learn to use our bodies and to learn to stop judging feelings, to learn to just let them feelings pass through, to learn this is something we deeply know how to do. We come here, we get traumatized, one way or another, and we are each responsible for healing ourselves.

Still, it’s infuriatingly ass-backward to me that you would have to fill out a form detailing your trauma in order to get any trauma support when filling out the form so obviously requires trauma support. I feel the heat move through me. Triggered. Pissed off. Resistant.

Reconciliation seems so far away.

Then again, your presence always reminds me it just matters that we have peace with ourselves. That’s our contribution.

You tell me that your dad hit the bottle pretty hard sometimes and that you spent a while trying on those shoes too. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you, but so did I. At some point, a social worker gave me a workbook called “distress intolerance”. It’s kind of funny (in the cosmic-joke / trickster universe / Great-Spirit-always-playing-with-itself kind of way), that after having to be so incredibly distress-tolerant as children in environments absent of true healthy sovereignty or security, we become distress intolerant and reach for substances that blur the hard edges of our storylines. All part of the healing path if we allow it to be.

Even though I’m curious about our individual stories, our relationship and activities together show me that we don’t really need to know the details of the traumas stuck under our skin. What really matters is that we have access to joy and that we steady ourselves with gratitude to feel the pain and let it move. I feel us encouraging that in each other. That skill is so natural to us. It’s the grand equalizer.

That’s why once upon a time someone in power trained us to forget.

I grew up feeling fear all the time and never exactly knowing why. I was always trying to guess what bad thing was coming because I could feel all the stuck energy looming around in the world. All the unfelt feelings. All the trauma. All it wants is to move, to be released, to free our bodies from its wrath, but most of us are adamant about keeping it at bay rather than facing it head-on and letting it go.

I have a lot of favorite things about you, but your humble way of asking for help is my favorite favorite. You approach with pure desire and availability instead of expectation. We don’t have to do it alone. We are here to bounce off each other, hold space, breathe, and pray together.

We are here to remember.

We remember how simple it is in all the complexity. We remember our design as self-healing organisms and a highly interdependent species.

I remember in grade three seeing the newspaper and learning that people were getting beheaded in Saudi Arabia and also that there were some rapist dudes who had been released from prison and hadn’t checked in for parole. Those things consumed me as a little person who didn’t know how to feel safe in a landscape of codependent toxicity.

As a kid, you went to school surrounded by adults who were actually doing those kinds of things that I was afraid of because I read about it in a newspaper.

I like it when you tell me about the quiet times of being alone during your youth. I feel so close to you. I can relate. When I would sing to nature, I felt secure, but most of my life was about being pulled away from that and learning to shut down in order to get by.

One day they had to cut down the big trees in my yard because apparently, they were threatening the hydro wires. I’d have preferred to give up Tv & electric lights at night. I was told when the hack job was done that I could go back outside to play.

“Why did you cut down all the little trees too?” I cried back into the house with anguish.

“Might as well.” They told me. “They were only going to grow to interfere later on.”

Most of us people don’t remember how to be in the moment.

We see and say things like it’s the trees interfering with the wires. We predict pain because we’ve got so much of it stuck in our systems and we find convenient things to blame it on that give us a sense of control.

I feel so much more patient than the person I was before I met you. I’m grateful for how much you’ve taught me that even though there are places and ways that we gather that rely on details, rules, certain ways of doing things, none of it matters that much compared to how much it matters that you just show up wherever you are.

I’m grateful you come to my house and I fluster around and you remind me you’re just arriving to be with me, not to check if my dishes are done or floors swept, laundry away, any special food to make for dinner. It doesn’t matter, you tell me, you just came to see me smile. I like the way all the details can just melt in the warmth of our choosing to be company, choosing to be equals, choosing to live in love.

Dear Mosom. Thankyou for inviting me into your life.

I’d been asked along to a few peyote ceremonies during my years on Salt Spring, but it never felt like a yes until suddenly it did. I knew nothing about anything to do with the Red Road or what I was arriving to that evening.

I had my skirt on. My hair was pretty short. I didn’t have a baby yet. I hovered around the house, nervous, wanting to do things right, wanting to hurry up and get through the night, engaging little blips of conversation here and there.

You were fancy - called me over and asked me if I know how to iron a shirt.

I said yes and got to it on a little fold-out board between us.

"You do this for your grandfathers?" you asked.

"Don’t got any," I replied.

What followed was just one simple breath and then you declared,

"Okay. I am your grandfather now."

And I was like,

"Okay. Cool."

A man’s voice from the chair in the corner beside the lamp said, “He really means it. He’s going to pray for you every day. You’re his family now.”

Our interactions were strained at the beginning. I was so serious and when I would try to be fun, it would just be worse. I used to feel a lot of anger with the folks around me who wouldn’t take things seriously. I felt the weight of the world and the full responsibility for getting it back on track. Being that rigid with so much expectation of myself and others didn’t help anyone. I only ever wanted to help.

You helped me.

Your openness shows me things I can’t put into words very well.

Fluency of giving and receiving. Trusting the balance. Being lighthearted without bypassing. Acceptance.

It’s not an unwillingness to be serious, it’s a presence with the heaviness in a vow to be kind. We can be kind to ourselves in choosing to have a light heart no matter what we’ve seen or been. We can choose that any moment of any day and choosing to humble ourselves enough to ask for help to heal is part of that way.

The next morning after we first sat in ceremony together, you asked me to take you to get ice cream. I like how often the little boy comes forward in you. It gives my inner child permission too. Back then, I still had my first car and it was on its very last legs. We had to ask people to push us across the parking lot so we could get going again. Life is hilarious.

To kneel in a circle on the earth and stare into a fire all night is intense.

I love intensity. I think that’s a part of my natural character, but also a part of getting spanked and screamed at a lot as a kid. Intensity feels like home, feels like family. I muted myself as much as I could. I became fearful. Fearful to be offensive. Fearful to be the offender. Fearful of my ignorance. I felt these fears very alive in me when I met you.

I didn’t want to be a dumb white girl.

White privilege has affected us all and I’ve known it’s one of my jobs this life to understand what that means on energetic levels where we can transcend the victim-perpetrator push-pull stories within ourselves and come out the other end. You can’t ever be one or the other, it’s always neither or both.

Equality wins.

When we insist on being a victim of something, we perpetrate our own freedom. It’s a confusing thing when there is such overt disgusting stuff that happens to us, but it’s the necessary path to the kind of compassion that eradicates the prisons of the past. We can’t keep them alive inside of us, holding on to the story, not if we want the narratives to shift.

Still, as if they found so many children killed in the institutes like the one you went to for so many years, but have to wonder if you were really abused there. Prioritizing verbal intellect, story, and fact over emotional intelligence is a reiteration of the abuse - explain yourself or suffer the consequences if you don’t convince me that you can blend in or bend to my ways. It’s a double-edged sword covered in Vaseline. There’s no way not to hurt yourself.

What I’ve learned over these years, between meeting you and having a baby, is that fearlessness is akin to innocence. We come in totally tender and our whole lives are about being some kind of traumatized and choosing to remember how to be tender anyways. We might feel fear, but we don’t hold onto it.

We’re not here to be scared of ourselves.

Just listen, and listen deeply.

How do I learn a peyote song? I ask you.

Your eyes go soft and a smirk comes across your face. You use your hand to motion plucking something out of the air.

I like it when we don’t use words.

You don’t have to know anything, you just have to be open to feelings passing through. This is how we learn the beautiful ways.

The thing I’m realizing, Mosom, is that nothing ever has to make sense. The expectation of logic is really just entanglement that serves as a prison for the spirit.

So when storytelling, we can let go of the linear timelines and just swirl around following the strands of sensation and something synchronous happens. Things make sense on many levels. We don’t ever have to remember all the details. I feel relieved about this.

I know maybe, probably, definitely, this is too many words for you. I like that we can be different and the same. I speak the way that feels natural to me because I trust the real message comes through the spaces between the words, and no one needs any academic education for that.

I’m learning to trust.

It was hard growing up being smothered with the instructions and opinions of people older than me who said I had to listen and respect. I found it hard to listen and respect when not listened to or respected.

You know.

I honor you with these words Mosom, as best I can. I let them move through me with respect that they are riding a wave of consciousness truly beyond my comprehension. I don't have to drain myself trying to manipulate everything to appear as something other than me exactly in the moment that is.

I can be honest.

My comprehension is limited, both in my humanity and by what trauma remains still stored in my body not yet released.

I think ceremony helps us expand our relationship with our inherent capacity to experience ourselves in the liberated state that is our authentic nature. Ceremony helps us be real. Being real requires all the layers of our being. Not just the ones the old Christian white people deemed important.

Feelings come first. People of the earth know this. Intuition leads intellect. It is intelligent to have a relaxed spacious mind.

Your laugh reminds me of this.

We are here to observe and be vessels for energy transmutation. We are here with bodies like lightning rods, to ground a lot of electric currents.

In history, our people, humans, have generally resisted. We’re all hurting because of this. When I see you hurting, Grandfather, I want the whole world to conspire for your ease and wellness. At the same time, I remember that any healing I can do heals you too. Likewise, I'm endlessly grateful for your efforts.

You came into my life just before my son arrived.

You are an angel of grace and mercy.

I like that you always want me to collect you more cedar. I like that I get to be part of ceremony this way even if I rarely make it there in person. I like the smell in my house and the way my hands are getting used to working with it. I like that I have so much hair always growing back on my head and how there’s always enough to offer some in exchange for the harvest. I like that you remind me it all balances. I like how innately you prompt me to be deeply grateful. I like how life feels in gratitude.

Even though meeting you once would have been enough to change my life forever, I’m so glad we’ve had these years of weaving an active relationship and learning where and how our styles meet to keep it lighthearted and sweet and circulating. I like that you call and surprise me, already on the ferry heading over.

I like the way you say, “I love you”, and I can feel how much you mean it - in a total absence of fear.

I like the way you aren’t afraid to love.

Thank you, Mosom, thank you.