We stood in the darkened night, moon conjoined with planet over the vast snowfield as the snowy mountain looked upon us from the far vista. Only six days had passed, yet something deep had stirred, opened, taken root— a remembering of the quiet, the sacred, the spruce and pine calling forward presence, mystery, grace, magic. The empty Aspens howled in the cool wind, a collective voice of one of the largest contiguous forests of aspen in the world, a connected web reaching deep into central Colorado.
"May I open to the wild, vast, and brilliant intelligence that surrounds us all the time"– I spoke my intention into the night, the edge of the closing threshold, held by my human and more-than-human community. Others shared too. One by one, when we were truly ready to carry the gifts back from the land and enact our incorporation ceremonies, we stepped in and through the pine-bough threshold. In the middle of the circle, we met, hugged, sang a song to the earth, and then ventured onward via snowmachine to the snow-laden cars and communities awaiting our returns.
What does it truly mean to enact our gifts? As rite of passage ceremonies have taught us and as the land has intimated us, to incorporate is to bring into the body, to bring our gifts back to our people. Van Gennep (1960), Turner (2017), Campbell (2004), and other European and European American anthropologists of the early to mid-1900s found that rites of passage typically have three phases: severance, where we begin to let go of all that has brought us to the threshold; threshold, the liminal space of the actual ceremony; and incorporation, the return where we bring our gifts home and the real work of it.
On the final day of our bare-boned ceremonies, we share commitments with one another, one or two actions we will take in the next two weeks that will enact something essential from our ceremony and thus bridge our time from the ceremony to our home community. A barebones intention of the tradition to which we align is that everything belongs–-the profane and the sacred, the mundane and the extraordinary. As such, there are no rules to ceremony, no dogmas, no rights and no wrongs. We only ask and vow to do no harm to self or other. And so, each person's time on the land and in ceremony is unique, an emergent and collaborative creation with the more-than-human world and the idiosyncrasies of their soul, The incorporation commitments are, therefore, just as unique.
Alas, I sit now in a temperature-controlled office, myriad lights illuminating the room via an electrical grid that is powered most closely by a coal, though we subsidize solar and wind on the other side of the state. My toes are warm, and I am lightly dressed –- a far cry from just a few days ago in the wood-fired heated cabin at 11,000 feet and the energy-conscious living in a solar, off-grid system. To dance in the paradox of both this world and the wild earth just out beyond our ideas of right doing and wrongdoing (Rumi), that is the call of the initiated adult.
It is here that I reorganize myself for the profound privilege and opportunity to take the seat of a wilderness rite of passage guide as I do the administrative work, the logistical planning, and the outreach to those desirous of sacred time on the land. You might ask why I chose to take this seat, or as one elder asked me during a guide training, "What is the wound that makes you choose this work?" And I could tell you, share openly of healing and unpacking the struggles which served to open my heart and heal the great divides caused by a callous and violent world. But that would be too many words for this new year's blog, though a deeply important thread which I will return to.
In any case, hello, and welcome to my 2025 incorporation practice. My intention is to write a blog a week, something reminiscence of my near-decade of graduate study (weekly class posts) but which I have never done outside of that scaffolded context. As I begin to find my voice here, in this new medium, I would love to hear your comments, insights, questions, and feedback. I aim to make this a collaborative space of discovery. Please feel free to send along comments and the like, or even just to say hello. Perhaps you are curious about something and want to unpack it; please drop me a line.
My unofficial goal is to launch these each Friday morning, with a principal caveat that many months we may be in the field guiding and that goal will be untenable (as is the late arrival of this opening act). In this, as the great seasonal majesty of Earth shows again and again, I will need to be adaptable.
And so, we begin. May the beauty of this wild earth touch you all, every day, even if just for a single moment.
In kindness, tbird
questions, comments, and anything else: drop me a line at info@alchemyofprana.com
References
Campbell, J. (2004). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1949)
Gennep, A. V. (1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1908)
Turner, V. (2017). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Routledge. (Original work published 1969)
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