one year ago, i attended a sweatlodge ceremony. it was a deeply transformative, deeply spiritual experience that served as a bookend to many years of trauma. this is not to say that i consider trauma and stress to be over for me, rather, that this ceremony marked a transition place, a liminal space of changing and becoming, of being born anew.
there’s still things that i cannot accurately describe about my experience in the lodge. words escape me when i try to articulate my experience.
one enters the lodge stripped bare. no jewelry. no performance. no makeup. no glasses. wearing only simple cotton clothing. i wore only a simple black cotton shift and my cotton panties.
laying amongst cedar boughs, blind, stripped down from the performance, holding a towel over my face, i felt my spirit speaking and finally, that voice cut through the noise and i was able to listen.
the rest is a blur that i cannot speak on, until i forced myself up and to my knees and to crawl my way out of that sacred hole, filthy and blind, half crazed, tears and snot streaming down my face and i crawled back into the world, with sage in my lungs and sweetgrass on my breath.
i cried hysterically until a mentor was able to guide me to the creek to lay down tobacco and pray and throw myself face down into the water with my braid floating on the surface behind me.
i became something else that day, someone else. i drove home exhausted and the next day everything was lighter, like someone had taken a sheet of gauze away from my vision.
i began the difficult work of apologizing to people for the times i had not walked with them and been present in the way i would have liked to be. i also began the difficult work of accepting not only my own forgiveness but the forgiveness of others.
i gained my voice back and began a slash burn of the toxicity that had pervaded my life like ivy crawling up old lattice work.
i came to know my responsibility to my ancestors and my people and this land, and the heart work that i am called to do.
i was able to let go.
i was able to realize that many of my own fetters, my shackles, were self made and with that knowledge, i put them down.
i have not worn makeup since sweatlodge.
i no longer shave my legs.
i no longer apologize for my body or my womanhood.
i might have entered that sacred hole as a maiden but i left as a matriarch.
and i will never stop.
i am filled with so much gratitude and love that my wild heart seems like it may burst.
and i will never go back.
you are all my relations.
and i am so privileged to know you and this world and to love and be loved inside of it.
hospital vespers 