One of the barebones of the ceremony to which we align and were brought into as budding guides is that there are no rules to ceremony–-no rights and no wrongs. In the larger world, we are swimming in social, cultural, and marketing bulls*** attempting to curtail our wildness to fit into some ideal, some linear and rigid cubicle of acceptable. The thing is, however, that we Homo sapiens are wild animals of the jungle, who can run, climb, and feel deeply. To outlaw our intrinsic capacity for complexity and tremendous emotional range, and to presuppose an allegiance to the nation-state and not the life world — as Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) so eloquently articulated–-is to divorce our bodies from their true roots as living animals on a wild earth and our souls the opportunity to expand into the vastness of the lifeworld in full. Add on the additional layer of time and the associated psycho-social complexities of living within a manufactured, highly stratified, and hierarchical abstraction, and it is no wonder there is so much embodied dissatisfaction with the pressures of modernity. Such normative trends are often caustic to the soul as what becomes internalized is a transactional understanding of belonging, morality, and epistemology.
In his beautiful book on grief, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller (2015) shared a heart-opening story from his first days of post-licensure mentorship as a Jungian Psychologist. As he told it, after they sat down together, his mentor "reached to his left, placed his hand on a large rock lying on a table, and said, 'This is my clock. I operate at geologic speed. And if you are going to work with the soul, you need to learn this rhythm, because this is how the soul moves.' Then he pointed to a small clock also sitting there and added, 'It hates this. '"(p. 60). This really speaks to me still here years after I first read it, for many reasons, not the least of which is the complete restructuring of the objective-based, goal-centric reality of modernity which states loudly at us that we need to fix whatever is wrong. But what if we can't? What if our emotions are too wild, unruly, loud, ugly, devastating? What then?
To this I say, in letters here as I would in body on the land, everything belongs. The earth loves to be sung, too, won't take offense if you need to scream and yell and try to pick up that bus-sized boulder over there. And if you just need to weep without your process being interrupted, without your tears being fixed, well there is (geological) time for that too.
In a book of essays published posthumously, Lopez (2022) wrote of coming home to the central project of his life, which was to write and articulate about the love he felt for the earth. His call echoes like a beacon to me, especially on those days like today when I feel so much grief for the humans and more-than-humans ripped from the landscape by wildfires: "…in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?" (p. 122). Lopez is not delimiting belonging; he is calling forth true feeling.
Alas, what do time, modernity, and the burning world have to do with ceremony? In short, everything. In middling, this is the true context of our beautiful planet today and the reality of the pressures that we are internalizing as norms, consciously or not. Climate change is not something out there a few decades off; it is here and asking us each deeply to consider what feelings, ideas, concepts, and bodies we sanction and what do we not.
In ceremony, we make two agreements and vows with one another: no harm to self or other and a promise to return. We do this because we know that to go on the land, to be in ceremony, to call forward the emotions that need feeling in order to liberate our energies and mark the necessary transitions of who each of us is at that time, that is only the first part of the work. The real work (incorporation) is to bring it home, to our communities, to our people, to our burning world.
As we say, "from threshold to threshold is yours," and then we tend the gateway while each person goes onto the land. It is not the guides who initiate, who enable the transformations, who support the marking of what is so; it is the land. It is the wild, fecund, brilliant, and completely confusing lifeworld which supports our every breath, our every movement, who is the ocean our blood resembles.
In the (human) world at large, we are swimming in models of connection based on transactions and requirements. But we are also swimming in an invisible atmosphere teeming with life, with depth, with communicative potentials, with post-morality pathologies of vivid belonging writ large in the myriad species interconnecting ongoingly.
To be clear, I am not saying that the linear, human-centric mode is wrong or even maligned, for such a worldview has given us great wonders like MRI machines, airplanes, smartphones, and the interconnected computing network we call the web and is a part of sacred human intellect. But as with so much, there are tradeoffs. Some of what has been lost is our innate, intrinsic, and deeply grounded belonging to life, to the more-than-human ecosystems, to the magic of being.
This is not a novel concept and can easily be traced back to the early existentialists like Kierkegaard and to essential phenomenological thinkers like Merleau-Ponty in the mid-1900s. As a burgeoning researcher, I most align to this thread of philosophy; as a wilderness guide and participant, I am drawn deeply into this conversation from an experiential and transpersonal perspective.
As an animal, this is what I feel.
On the land and in ceremony, so much of what we as guides do is simply help open and hold the doorway. Who is called to that doorway, when, and why, we cannot know. But no matter what, no matter when, and no matter the circumstances of existence, inside and out, belonging and connection are essential aspects of the life culture Earth has created and continues to recreate daily. In that, there are no qualifications, certifications, or special blessings to get in, for you, like me, were born here.
Welcome home.
References
Lopez, B. (2022). Embrace fearlessly the burning world: Essays. Random House.
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
Weller, F. (2015). The wild edge of sorrow: Rituals of renewal and the sacred work of grief. North Atlantic Books.
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