Ghost Supper

We started this week off with a wander in a new area, with the goal of familiarizing ourselves with the landscape and resident organisms. Voles were present in plenty, their little feet already having worn long, deep runways in the grass.

Coyote scat greeted us at the road in, but above the entrance road bobcats seemed to reign as the common small predator. We named the owner of this scat and scrape Pointy Butt Paul, to go with his feline neighbor on the Blue House Farm side, Big Butt Bob. Every scat of his contained quite a bit of rabbit fur and bone shards, and was long, ropy and pointy like a coyote scat. But each sat firmly in the V of a bobcat-like scrape, each was coated in a slimy shellac-like layer, and each emanated noxious rotten meat and sour milk stink.


On the plateu of the high lands, we encountered more vole sign and wondered aloud where the badgers were to take advantage of this vole proliferation. We found this big dig quite soon after.


Note the deep scrape marks on the inside walls of the tunnel.


Continuing over the plateu, we found this small, chunky scat composed of what looked like Jerusalem Cricket parts.


Further along, nearer the fire road, we found many little circular digs in the grass. Nearby we found a Jerusalem cricket, and later another.


On our way back we found a downed Monterey Pine and experimented with peeling the bark to make containers. We tried the bark on the trunk first, using our knives to cut down and peel the bark, but found that the craggy parts cracked and the knife kept slipping to pierce the inner bark. We decided that that slab would be food, rather than craft material. We revised our strategy, and tried with the smaller, younger, less craggy branches. We used a lopped-off branchlet with a wedge-shaped end to separate the bark from the limb. It worked beautifully, and we returned to camp with our bark slabs in hand.




That evening we celebrated our first night of Ghost Supper. Like many traditional holidays celebrated at this time of year (Samhain, Dia de los Muertos, and others), Ghost Supper is an ancestor honoring ceremony that invites one's dead relatives to mingle and socialize for one night. Based on an Ottawa tradition, this ceremony employs an all-night sacred fire and copious amounts of food. The fire represents a portal to the ancestors, and is intended to be opened (lit) at dusk, and closed (cooled and out completely) by dawn. The hosts make food for all comers, serving their ancestor's favorite dishes and greeting guests as if the guests were the host's departed relatives. All food must be given away, eaten, or burned as an offering to the fire and the ancestors, and the fire must be cold and out entirely by sunrise the next day.

The instructors feasted us and hosted us at their fire in fine form on Tuesday night. We ate and drank and told stories of our ancestors, of ghosts, and of the season. The fire burned long into the night, and was just cold as the sun crested the Eastern ridge.

After our morning bird sit, we devoted the entire next day to preparing for our turn at hosting a Ghost Supper. We had much organizing to do, and just enough time to do it.

Traditionally, men gather the firewood, light the fire, and tend it. Women carry the water, cook the food, serve food and drink, and beautify the site. I had my own conflicts with this system, but I was willing to give it a try to see what hidden teachings might be passed on in this way of doing things.

I wore my Firekeeper tee shirt as a sort of consolation prize, and to symbolically show my dead grandparents, who I'd be serving their favorite apple pie and cheddar cheese, what I'd been up to lately. Our clan discussed the fire, and determined that at least some of us wanted to keep it going all night. Then when we called for fire tenders, only three people raised their hands. I thought that this couldn't possibly be enough to get us through the night, so I raised my hand and said that I'd be willing to tend fire if we needed another hand.

When the sun dipped low and it was time to light our fire, all others with fire kits were absent. I had my elderberry and cedar hand drill on hand, so another woman, myself, and a man all cooperated to spin up a coal and light the teepee that the men hand made.

The final flurry of preparation came, and I was the only fire tender without final prep to do. I tended fire until we all gathered again to greet our first guests. I asked the other fire tenders if any of them would like to take over, but none of them felt called. They said they would like to take over when I tired. We launched into our serving and stories, and I tended fire while the guests sat and ate and talked.

Others took over while I visited other fires, but late into the night most people wanted to snooze or chill, and I was enjoying tending fire. Orion rose in the East, announcing the early hours of the morning. The half moon set in the West, and in the deepening darkness Orion's bow shone in a sparkling arc. I tended and waited for my clan member who had wanted to tend fire into dawn. As I waited I stared at the coals and began to see a vortex spiraling down into the earth. I fed the ancestor's food to the fire, and saw it go up in spirals of smoke to Orion and the shooting stars that peppered the night.

Finally, I decided that I'd stayed up long enough. My clan member wasn't coming back. I let the fire die down to a coal bed, got up to fetch my sleeping gear, and nearly stepped in my pie. I'd forgotten to burn all the food.

Another clan member woke up to help me stoke the fire again and burn the food. We finally managed to burn it all, but the fire was now big and blazing, and my stamina had run out. I passed the fire stick to my clanmate and fell into heavy sleep.

I woke up well after dawn, next to a still red-hot and smoldering pile of mostly-burnt wood, and felt pretty disappointed in myself for not fulfilling the tradition. But I figure that for most of the night the ancestors got a first-rate comedic performance, so it wasn't all bad.

The experience has left me with many questions, and put a sharper edge on one of my sacred questions that RDNA has thus far been honing to keenness. My question, though not entirely articulated in words, has to do with novel practices and traditions, and when one is appropriate over the other. In this ceremony, we chose to alter the tradition and bring in the novel practice of fluidity in roles. Would it have gone more smoothly, with more labor shared more equally, if we had abided by the Ottawa traditional gender roles? Would the fire tenders have been more organized, and would the fire have been put to bed at the right time? Would I have been able to see the twin spirals in the fire? Would I have experienced the on-point in-the-moment awareness brought about by seriving others with vital light and heat that I experienced as a fire tender, had I kept myself to the traditional female role?

Mind of Mentoring and Village Builders Training

The new year of Native Eyes kicked off with a Tweeker – a two-week training retreat, the intensity of which may tweak participants out by the final day. The first week, entitled Mind of Mentoring and Nature Connection, was awash in flip charts and lecture. The second week, entitled Village Builder’s Training, was much less structured.

The first week appealed greatly to my analytical, logistics-preoccupied mind. We sat in lecture most of the day, watching various people draw various versions of a circle with eight radiating lines, and writing various words about these diagrams. We hung the charts together on the wall. Toward the end of the week a visitor remarked that it looked like we were designing the Death Star. The name stuck – I still can’t help but think of Darth Vader when I look at those diagrams. But I did learn a great deal about the ideas and structure behind this 8-Shields approach to mentoring and culture building.

We had a free weekend between the two weeks, in which some of the other Native Eyes crew, some Cultural Mentors, and some other attendees got some unstructured time together. We went to the beach and skinny-dipped in the chill ocean at sunset, played tag, sang songs and told stories. We hiked around the woods near Santa Cruz, found beautiful manzanita and huckleberries to eat, climbed trees, and goaded complete strangers into running around like kids with us. Though the people we met on the trail started out intimidated by the mere thought of eating wild berries, they finished the day with tongues nearly and purple as ours, grinning, climbing trees, throwing stones, hiding, seeking, and chasing each other like 8-year olds.

We launched into the second week still exhausted from the previous one, and it showed. The Acorn (our support team who managed and executed the event) still had bags under their eyes. This week had been planned as an exercise in village culture, rather than an educational program with lectures and flip charts. I think that varying interpretations of what that meant, along with the evident fatigue in the leadership group, and the ambitious project we had set for ourselves, made this week much rockier than the previous one.

Essentially, we took 60 or so humans from Western urbanized, individualistic, capitalist and technologically-dependant cultures and attempted to create a communal earth-based village culture using consensus, peaceful action, and positive words, within one week. We fell into many pitfalls. We also built beautiful, supportive, and regenerative relationships among our temporary village, which will continue to build independent of that retreat. On this week, we lit the embers of many future village fires.

Meet WAS

This week Wilderness Awareness School (WAS), our sister school up in Washington, came to visit. They outnumbered us 2 to 1, and were quite a scent to behold fresh from a weeklong plus van expedition all over California. They had some strange customs, such as tying shoes while hanging their butts over benches, but we practice many of the same cultural points in our programs and in general we felt a solid kinship between our two groups.

We greeted each other with songs in the evening. We sang WAS into the garden, and greeted them with hugs befitting old friends.

We began the day with a wander in the morning. I took my burden basket, the one I’d made in one of the early NE classes, because I intended to gather firewood for a solo fire meditation later that evening. We found lots of cool things on the wander.



What is this plant?



Check out this wasp!






Whose hole is this? It was approximately 9 or 10 inches wide and 7 or 8 inches tall at maximum. The throw mound was huge. (Now with knee prints! A WAS-er had stuck his head in just before I got there.) The tunnel curved back to the right a short way, opening up into a round chamber. I wonder if it’s occupied, and where the digger is now.



These digs were just west of the big one, approximately 6 feet near. They were also large.



I returned to camp early, laden with firewood that I’d gathered on the way.



A nifty trick: if you need short sticks but all you have is long ones and no tools, wedge them in the crotch of a tree and push. A little sweat, and they snap quite nicely. Remember to thank the tree.



That afternoon, Native Eyes worked hard to prepare for our fires. We set up tarps, split wood, gathered kindling and tinder, and worked communally on lighting our central fire.

Finally, as dusk faded to dark, we separated to our individual fires, to spend the evening in personal meditation.

Native Eyes and the Art of Mentoring

I’ve just come back from the Art of Mentoring, held at Commonweal Garden in Bolinas, California. It was quite an experience. I’ve tried to write my experience coherently, but it was such an intense one (the class was an intensive, after all) that I find I need to write it as a semi-fiction, to step back a step and inhabit a different point of view in order to communicate my impressions. What follows, then, is a travelogue from the point of view of a Western explorer visiting an exotic culture, one so different that they are named as a new species of humans.

Homo funis and the Ars Rector festival

I’ve returned from a different land. There are people there, but of an entirely different species than those I live alongside at home. The people are remarkable in their behavior, being social and independent at once, compassionate and welcoming, as well as stalwart in their maintenance of boundaries and rules. They are different enough to warrant a new specific epithet, and have come to be known by some as Homo funis. The land, too, is uncommon in its contradiction and cohesion, being a managed wilderness, wild nature worked like a tool but possessing diversity, complexity and resilience not seen in civilized life, and is sometimes called by the name Ortus Bonus Communis, or simply Ortus. This journal chronicles my contact with this people on this land.

First, some background: I initially encountered rumors of these people years ago, while at school. At that time the rumors were few and garbled, so I continued on my way and filed the information away for later. But as our body of data on Homo funis grew, these people seemed increasingly like a worthwhile subject of inquiry. My explorations then brought me to Africa, where I witnessed both broken and vibrantly vital cultures. The people there inhabit both at once. They do so with deep compassion and readiness to help, held forth from a simple and matter-of-fact understanding: life is hard, but people help each other so that life is possible. The children of villagers, who grew up hunting and farming with their elders, especially exemplify this understanding. When I returned home I vowed to learn my land as well as they knew theirs and to seek out and live from that same understanding in my own culture.

I remembered the rumors of Homo funis and their land, and set off in search of them, for if the rumors were true, those people would posess a similar understanding to the one I encountered in Africa. After much wandering and exploration, I met another explorer in my own country, and we decided to pool our efforts. We met travelers from Ortus, and learned from them for a time. We encountered more of the stories and practices of Homo funis, and through them began to learn more about our land. We joined others on similar journeys and learned from them, and more people saw what we were doing and some came to practice with us. Finally my companion and I received an invitation to join the people of Ortus on their land and learn from them more directly. The meeting place was only a day’s ride away, so we were eager to embark. We packed our saddlebags with three day’s rations and set out riding high in our saddles, ready to chronicle our discoveries and bring them back to our civilized community.

The first meeting would be brief, only two nights and a day. We rode along the coast through thick fog, up the faces of mountains and down again over their drizzle-slick flanks. We arrived at Ortus Bonus Communis, and there were greeted as friends. We camped for the night and made plans for our time with the Homo funis. We were told that we would be able to participate as part of the scout society at the upcoming festival and to seek out one of the elders. The name of the festival is untranslatable into our culture but I have chosen to identify it here as Ars Rector. We returned to civilized land two days after, and made preparations.

We had received word of highwaymen on the coastal route and so rode to Ortus over the mountain instead. After a grueling mountain passage, we arrived in the mid-evening and all was raucous chaos. The village held many times the inhabitants that it had previously, most of whom appeared to be visitors like ourselves, come to celebrate the Ars Rector. My traveling companion and I were soon absorbed into separate Clans and Societies and were given new names, with the elder who we had met previously still nowhere to be found. We made camp and, feeling uncertain and still very bewildered, gathered around the fire.

The first few days it seemed that most of the visitors, including myself, felt a general apprehension and reluctance. None of us knew exactly what would happen here at the Arts Rector, only that we liked what we had heard of the Homo funis culture and came to learn more. Our first lesson came as the greeting custom of Thanksgiving and uniting our minds as one for the festival, a beautiful litany of things in creation with greetings and thanks for each part, and a final statement of unity of mind. Many of us loved the words, but still felt uncertain about our presence there.

Our second lesson came as an introduction to another of the tools of Homo funis culture, moieties. Each of us had been invited into a Society and a Clan. Each Society had a specific role to play, and each Clan had at least one representative from each Society. The Clans became the basic unit of the people for the duration of the festival, and functioned smoothly with different Society members performing different functions for their Clan. My Society held as its responsibilities greeting, welcoming, and warning, among other things. Each Clan also had one or more experienced Homo funis people, to help guide the newcomers in the Ars Rector. Though everyone participated in the activities of the festival, it was clear that some were more knowledgeable than others in these practices. Those who were more experienced took positions of leadership and guided the newcomers.

As the week progressed, most of our number let go of their trepidation and fully integrated into festival life. There was singing, storytelling, many impromptu childlike games, organized gaming, and feasting. Their finest cooks collaborated to give us the best food any human palette has yet encountered, much of it from their own lands but some imported from other villages as well. We were given permission to wander the land and explore beyond the village gates, and some of us adopted special places on the landscape where we felt particularly able to hear the rhythm of the land, and touch its spirit. We wandered to these alone in the morning or at dusk, and kept watch over the landscape. We also gathered frequently to hear the Elders speak, and they told stories and spoke deeply on the Homo funis culture. We stayed up late into the night around the fire, singing and telling jokes and stories. We rose early to listen to the land, and engaged in solemn ceremony. We laughed and cried together throughout the day.

Many of the participants came to love the village and the Homo funis people during our stay, but we all knew that the festival would come to an end, which saddened many. The greeting custom of giving thanks and bringing our minds together has another side to it, though, created to ease parting. This part of the custom consist of participants stating that they are now separating their minds. I have participated in other cultural gatherings of similar intensity, but never have I encountered as effective a mechanism to ease the inevitable parting.

Though the Homo funis claimed that the Ars Rector was an example of their culture in action, it was far more intense than everyday village life for these people. The Ars Rector is, more accurately, an initiation into Homo funis traditions and culture. The festival does not present their culture as it is lived on a day-to-day basis, rather serves as an intensive introduction to culture that creates new behavior in participants.

My traveling companion and I left late on the last day, having packed our supplies and readied our steeds. We made the journey over the mountain in time to see the sun set over the ocean, dipping quietly into a sea of summer fog that sat beyond the shining ribbon of water. The fog sat on the edge of the world with the presence of a Pleistocene glacier, gray and heavy on the horizon, waiting for the sun to sink before advancing to envelope the world. As we rode, we passed this landscape that now seemed to take on an intense animate presence, and at times we talked animatedly but at other times we rode in silence. As the light bled from the Western sky and the darkness enveloped the East, we mounted the bridge to the City. Creat golden girders and steel cables sliced between the coast and ourselves, and to the South we saw the glitter of countless lights piled up in concrete towers. We entered the City once again.