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?

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.

Forgiveness and Evaluations

Before launching into my recap of this week’s class, I’d like to give some background to the events. This entry centers on a custom called Mihi Kala, a description of which follows. Also note, I managed to kill two sets of camera batteries in a row, one right after the other for no apparent reason, so I could not use my camera for this class and this entry will be text only.

Mihi Kala is a custom from Hawaii that centers on the asking and granting of forgiveness. It’s said before the thanksgiving for the evening meal, like a precursor to Grace. The intent of Mihi Kala is to relieve people of the dross of the day and thus to make space for thanksgiving for the gifts of the day. It is a simple process of speaking aloud the harms one has dealt others, the mistakes one has made, any actions one regrets or feels badly about, and of asking for forgiveness for those things. Once others grant forgiveness, it’s important that one also states forgiveness of oneself. This ritual helps bring everyone into presence with each other (and themselves), and what remains in a person after forgiveness is granted is genuine, peaceful thankfulness. Mihi Kala, if practiced honestly, brings the bothersome and painful mental stuff accumulated through everyday life out into the open and releases it with words of forgiveness, clearing the way for a genuine feeling of thankfulness to shine through one’s life.

In Native Eyes, we learned this custom after our buckskin day and crab feast. The seven of us gathered in the yurt and spoke in turn of our regrets and trespasses thus far in the course, and each in turn received forgiveness from the group and from themselves. As everyone said their piece, the spark of hot migraine pain that had been smoldering all day rekindled behind my right eye. When everyone else had spoken and it came to be my turn, I found couldn’t speak. A full-blast migraine blazed in my forehead and my throat tightened up, allowing no more than a squeak to escape. Swamped with pain, frustration, anger, and grief, I just sat in the circle and cried.

We ended the evening without my having said a word. I curled in my sleeping bag under the redwood tree for a long time, feeling the cool night brush by my face, waiting for sleep to bring an escape from the nauseating pain, and from the frustration at not being able to speak from my heart.

In the intervening week, my thoughts on Mihi Kala gestated and finally coalesced into a letter, which I sent out to the Native Eyes crew. Here is an excerpt of my Mihi Kala email:

… I find it very hard to own my flaws, and in asking for forgiveness I've got to state plainly that I do things wrong sometimes, and that I don't live up to my ideals. I think my rational mind panicked and hid at that, and all the more so at speaking from my heart about my own experience.

Please forgive me for acting pridefully, and for trying to look like I do things right all the time. I know this is a strong, entrenched flaw in my personality, and I don't think that just by identifying it I've released it. But I am working on it.

Please forgive me for being less observant and careful than I could be. I think despite my intentions I'm very callous, self-centered and ignorant at times, and I'm sorry for that. I feel like a clumsy toddler in a very subtle, complex and elegant world, but I know I have the potential to be just as subtle, complex and elegant. Forgive me for stumbling around in my self-centered focus and kicking up a bird plow sometimes, and for forgetting to be thankful or ask permission before taking something that I think I need. I have, of course, grown up in urban America, a culture that we all know promotes self-centered callousness. I'm working my way toward a dignified and present adulthood from an artificially lengthened clumsy adolescence, but I'm definitely not grown up yet.

I'd like to ask Mikko especially for forgiveness, as well. I feel a familial closeness with you, and I have a tendency to get annoyed with family. Please forgive me for having a shorter temper with you than I have with others. I love you like a brother. I think perhaps I tend to have less patience with loved ones because I believe I can stop trying to prove myself worthy, and allow myself to have flaws like a bad temper. Regardless of the origin of my behavior, though, I don't like snapping at you Mikko. Please forgive me for being snappish and having a short temper, and for being prickly and distant at times. As with the previous issues, it's something I'm working on.

When I came back to Native Eyes the next week, all of my classmates except for Mikko had read and responded to my letter. I felt lighter having heard forgiveness from them, and I was touched that they empathized, but things also felt unfinished. I had not yet stated aloud forgiveness for myself, and I hadn’t heard anything about Mihi Kala from Mikko.

On Wednesday morning we had an awesome and enlightening bird sit, which I’ll detail later on. After mapping, Native Eyes broke from RDNA and piled into cars to go tracking in the Bolinas mudflats.

Except we weren’t just tracking. The staff had decided to pop-quiz us with a mock Cybertracker evaluation. The format was similar to the Alien Test in the beginning of the year, in that we toured a series of stations answering specific questions about the tracks at each one. We turned in our answers at each station, and were not permitted to discuss or comment on the station until everyone had turned in their answers.

It was fun at first, taking the time to examine tracks in as great a depth as I wanted and challenging my intellect with questions that danced beyond the edge of my understanding. But my weekly headache had resurfaced and with each wrong answer (and about half of them were wrong) I was getting tenser. I hunched my shoulders and curled my ribcage over the ball of fury growing in my belly.

We moved out to another station. When we passed a clump of tall grass the resident Marsh Wren started giving us hell, buzzing his little head off in our direction. I’m sure everyone else heard the little loudmouth rattling on about my bad mood, but at that point I was so off-balance over the test that I didn’t care what kind of bird alarms I set off. I was furious with the world for not providing me with the information to ace this test as I should, and furious with the Native Eyes staff for giving the test and smoking out all my ignorance and lack of skill. Mostly I was furious with myself for being so damn wrong.

Finally I realized that I had to relieve the pressure or I wouldn’t be able to participate in the activity. I decided that I simply wouldn’t turn in my answers, but I’d write them down and otherwise participate normally. I’d get the advantage of learning from the answers without having to expose my ignorance to the world. True, the stated reason for this test was not to evaluate us, per se, but to find our edges so that our instructors could teach us more effectively. But I still resented showing my ignorance.

When I decided to refrain from sharing my answers, I unexpectedly felt the pressure to be right lifted off. I straightened up, my belly relaxed, and began to breathe more deeply again. The wren quieted down, too. And at the end of the testing session I felt light and confident enough to turn in my answers anyway, even though I knew many of them to be wrong.

It helped that I got the last four questions right. But mainly I had desperately needed a respite from the parents-and-public-school-borne pressure to give right answers. I didn’t know how to stop applying that pressure to myself while still participating in the evaluation. After I removed myself from the evaluative context of the activity, though, I could engage on my own terms and I found that I could decide to let myself be wrong. At the end I found that I could judge my success not according to how many questions I answered right, but on whether I chose to move past old and damaging patterns of thought and begin to create new more effective patterns. Granted I fall into old patterns more often than not, but since I’m the only one evaluating myself using these criteria, I can decide to appreciate what progress I do make, rather than think badly about myself for the times I fall back into old patterns. Or I can choose to think badly about myself, as I often do. It’s my decision, not my teacher’s or my parent’s or my boss’s. And the wren, along with his passerine compatriots, will tell me with certainty whether I’ve released those old habits or not.

The following Friday, after class had been over for more than a day, Mikko and I were up predawn and getting ready for our internship with the Riekes Center. Mikko was sitting on my couch reading email as I packed up a lunch. He closed the laptop, walked up silently, and ninja-hugged me from behind, saying, “I love you too, and I forgive you.” I’d forgotten about the Mihi Kala email but now the remainder of a weight I hadn’t known I was carrying lifted, and I breathed easier.

The next morning I woke up with a single phrase resounding in my mind: “Thank you.”