- Iroquois Prayer

BORROWED IMAGERY
Yona - 30 September 2002

One of the variations of the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy says, “ The total amount of matter and energy available in the universe is fixed.” I learned that in school, maybe high school chemistry class, maybe before that, and I didn’t have a clue what it meant. This is a theological statement; or at least I recognize this as a theological principle. I don’t know anything about physics and next to nothing about chemistry, but the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy teaches me about walking a path through the universe. It’s a major dilemma which most of us impale ourselves on, and we do it most often in the stillness of the morning around three a.m. or so when everyone else is wisely asleep and there’s not a thing on TV worth watching though we click at it with the remote waiting for a solution to the problem of sleeplessness.

Then we give up on the TV and go back to bed and we try to sleep... and we don’t. We think and sometimes the thinking devolves into a pity party for one. I used to lie in bed with the covers over my head terrified to fall asleep and terrified Christopher Lee was tapping at my window with his long perfectly manicured index finger. There are new vampires, and I have learned to feed them my sense of loss of possibilities. Some mornings, I think about or how short life is, or about how unfair my life seems, because just as I have begun to understand how to live I find myself running out of energy. On those mornings life feels too heavy to bear.

My hair has turned white and brittle despite the finest conditioner. I can’t see with my glasses, and I can’t see when I take them off. I wanted so much when I was young, and no matter what my life brought me I have never had enough. Those nights seem to be the common inheritance of the baby boomer census, and more than that, those lost opportunities are all we have ever had... or at least it feels that way at three a.m. Solomon called it ‘futility’ and ‘vanity.’ Even though he didn’t have the advantage of a digital remote and five hundred channels of late night nothing, I’m pretty sure that Solomon arrayed in his silks and wool shawl as light as gossamer knew about those long nights. I have felt like I was alone on those nights. That I have played black jack with an eternal watcher and lost.

I believed the ante was my soul, my hopes, my dreams, and my tomorrows which I was rapidly running out of; but I was wrong.

I believed once if I had enough stuff, enough books in piles to climb up, enough toys, enough trophy lovers, enough of whatever passes for success, the toys, the framed diplomas, the white picket fence, trophy sex, a place on the school board, well, then, I’d be able to sleep the sleep of the just. I chased it. Hunted for it. Worked out for it. Drank to anesthetize the want. What a way to beat myself senseless... what a senseless way to beat myself up. Senseless and pointless. Hopeless and helpless. It’s about coming to terms with the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy which states: “ The total amount of matter and energy available in the universe is fixed.”

I was standing in the church parking lot up on twenty eighth north with William, and, like we more or less regularly do, William and I were talking about our place in this place, and our relationship to our Higher Power, and to each other. Now, William and I have had this conversation before. We might have and probably did rehearse absolutely the same words last time around. It was a sunny Florida early summer morning. The sun beat on us, but it wasn’t so late in the day that it was too hot, and the heat felt good. People had lined up to get into the food pantry.

William said, ‘Ya know, all we are is borrowed spirit borrowing molecules, and trying life on for size’ I liked the imagery of that. Imagery always catches me first. If I can make a picture or a symbol of something that I can see with my inside eye, the one that lives inside the four bony walls of my skull, I can sometimes get the point. I saw a picture of light, light with feelings, and hope, and eternity dressing itself in molecules and atoms like a missionary barrel London Fog raincoat that doesn’t quite fit. That eternal borrowed light poured out through the button holes and ran out at the sleeve cuffs.

Energy. I got it. I am borrowed, loaned energy trying on eternal molecules to see if they fit. I am the molecules of experience, but only for a little while. We are made of water, and chemicals, and electricity. As is the entirety of creation. That borrowed spirit is part of the energy of creation, the energy that made the experience of creation and sustains that creation and is creating itself. That energy is the Creator the builder the maker the designer of eternity and I am that energy borrowing from itself.

I saw the borrowed atoms of iron and carbon and oxygen and hydrogen that my borrowed spirit had dressed itself up in this time. We are iron from the stars and those iron atoms have been cars pressed on a conveyer belt on Detroit and they have been buried in the Mesabi range and have hidden in melted hematite. We are carbon and the carbon was sequoias and dawn trees and diatoms and Sally Hemmings and men and women walking through a short grass prairie before time began and salamanders and spores of penicillin and it was borrowed every time and it was repaid at interest.

We are water and the water is two parts hydrogen one part oxygen and three fourths of this water planet we live on and are part of. The oxygen and hydrogen and the iron have combined and recombined themselves and become rust and became water and salt and more water, salt water where life turned back flips at one of creation’s time outs. The iron rusted and the hematite was streaked with streaks of ferrous oxide and that iron from the stars is my blood.

We are borrowed atoms. We are borrowed molecules. None of it’s mine. I am energy experiencing energy, borrowing energy, and giving energy away. If power is a characterization of spirit, then spirit is something like electricity. That electricity experiences itself as circles of atomic power binding molecules together and building matter from spirit. If that’s right, then we are nothing but circles of orbiting electrical impulses and grids of spirit. The Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy teaches us that whatever energy or matter is there is just as much of it now as there ever was. There is neither more Matter or more Energy now than there ever will be.

We have always been, not recombined just as we are, but eternal, and always changing, always in transition. There is no more and no less energy now than there ever has been. There is no more matter now, and there never will be any. There is no death. There is change. There is no failure. There is experience. There is no alienation. We are all related.

We are all borrowing molecules and taking our power out to experience its self. We are one thing, one creation in search of moving on. I can take that one step or maybe two along if you want me to. I believe the consequences of this are simple, and they are everything. We are all one thing. We are related to basalt erratics, twisting palm trees, sounding whales, and extinct, fossilized australopithecines. We are spirit. We are energy. We are the same energy that whispered ‘Boo !’ at the Big Bang, and none other.

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1. We are, therefore, eternal, and experiencing life this time around in this time and in this body and learning lessons and teaching ourselves exactly what we wanted to learn.
2. There is no death. There is only change, transition, and re-creation for the next rehearsal.
3. There is a design and a designer. There is a pattern, and that pattern is a Circle. It is a path, a way of being alive. It is a way of learning. It is life.
4. It is energy circling itself, and that energy can neither be made, nor can it be destroyed. We are the energy. We are not men or women, male or female, young or old, mineral, vegetable or animal. We are spirit seeing creation in a new birthday suit.

That realization gives me hope.

I was sitting in a chair in a circle of people looking west over the Gulf of Mexico. One of the voices in the circle talked about how we are destroying our nest. I used to believe that people were a mistake, almost a destructive virus killing creation. We aren’t. We are children learning to play, but we have not understood the consequences of the games we are playing. There has been horrible destruction, and the Amazon might well join the Sahara desert as a primer in greed. Alaska is soaked in lost barrels of oil. Florida’s children are lost by the social workers hired to shepherd them, and sex and drugs have been hard lessons for my generation to understand... but, I thought about the blocks of concrete that Tyrone Boulevard is built of. Life, and water, and litter has collected in the cracks between the concrete blocks. Lines of grass are growing in the concrete on Tyrone Boulevard. Creation is energy, and concrete blocks can not contain energy.

I’ll make an illogical jump of faith based on those lines of grass that play in the traffic on Tyrone. I believe that when we water our hearts with the gift of passing ourselves on to the next generations and to our Mother, herself, the grass of hope will set roots in our hearts - and those roots will replace fear, and the powerlessness engendered by the delusion that life was a cheap scam. We were wrong. We missed the point. Anyways, I did.

Life is good.

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First, there are other ways to do this ceremony. Different people and cultures might vary the order in which these things are done. They might change the herbs which are burned. This ceremony is sometimes called centering, but other people call it smudging. In effect this is an attempt at lifting the present out of the common run of time and giving it to the living Circle. It is a way to sacrifice, to focus, and to give ourselves and the moment we are in over to Creator. This is the way I have done it. This is part of my path, and now I am sharing my path with you.

First the ingredients: The container – I use an abalone shell a sister gave me in my ceremonial work. It is just an abalone shell. What makes it special is the fact that she gave it to me. The one nearest my heart uses a clam shell she found at Jungle Prada. Jungle Prada is part of an ancient mound complex. Shells found there were thrown into a midden. Houses were built on those middens, and generations of the old people lived there. Some of the shells were made into tools. Some were just after dinner trash. Still, since these shells were so closely connected to these ancestors, using a shell from there seems very right to me.

Ceramic bowls, pottery (especially gift bowls) can all be used. There are no right containers for the ceremony. I have found that metal bowls heat up too quickly and become painful to hold. Pain is not an element of this process, so, I don’t use metal bowls. Whichever container you use is made right by using it in the ceremony.

Sand - I line my shell with clean white sand from the Gulf beaches. Up north I used sand I dug out of the street construction next to my house. Again it’s not where you find the sand but how you use it that counts. I use sand in the shell as a base to burn herbs on. The sand insulates the container. I’ve had shells crack into pieces, especially during long ceremonies, when many people were passing the container. That can be unpleasant.

Herbs - I usually use a combination of cedar and western sage during my centering ceremonies. I know people who add copal which has a beautiful aroma. I have also used dried juniper needles. Juniper has a heavy, dusky odor which I enjoy. Traditionally the old people used both cedar and sage in their ceremonies. So, that’s pretty close I guess. I have used other dried herbs at times. Some were invigorating. Others didn’t do a thing for me. Dried flowers, even kitchen seasonings can be used.

I know folks who sprinkle corn meal on the burning herbs once they’ve grown hot enough to burn the cornmeal rapidly. It’s pretty typical in most agricultural cultures such as those here in the southeast. The cornmeal can be seen as a sacrifice of the food people depend on to the ultimate source of that food. It shows reliance on the Creator as the source of everything we depend on.

To repeat: Again it’s not what you burn but your intentions when you do the ceremony that counts. Just for practical purposes, however, it’s important to maintain your herbs in as dry an environment as you can. They will burn easier this way and keep longer.

Fan – A fan made out of feathers, or a single large feather like a pelican feather or a goose feather can be particularly useful when you’re smudging yourself or someone else or even when an object is being ritually cleaned. The draft created by the feathers can be made to direct the smoke where it needs to go.

The ceremony – this ceremony can be done inside and often is, but it is good to do it outside too. Once the herbs are mixed and set in the container they have to be lit. Note: most of these herbs don’t burn with a clear flame. They smolder and create smoke. Lighting these herbs takes patience. I like to use wooden kitchen matches, but usually end up with book matches. Some folks use lighters. I like the wooden matches because they feel right. But getting the herbs burning is the point. Using the “right” matches isn’t. It takes patience to light the herbs. Pressing the match or the lighter to the base of the herbs & holding it there works best for me. Just don’t get anxious. They will light, though it may take several tries.

Once a little bit of the herb is hot enough to start glowing it will begin to smoke. This is the most critical point in the whole process. Blow into the herbs and try to direct the heat into the little pile of herbs. If you get it right the smoke will begin rolling out of the herbs and you’ll hear it hissing. Make sure it’s going good then it’s time to do what we’re here for – the ceremony.

With the smoke rolling out of the container I face the east first. Other people face west, some even face north. All their traditions are right for them. This works for me. But you’re free to do this the way it feels right. I face east, and I offer the smoke to that direction. Usually I hold the shell or container eastward. Then I make three circular passes with the shell and let the smoke rise. East is where the sun rises. The totem spirit of the east is the eagle. The ancestors taught us that Eagle is able to see things away off. According to the old people – Eagle flies closest to the sky, closest to heaven. So, first I pray to the Creator to be able to see things outside myself as Eagle does. I pray for vision.

Then I turn sun-wise and face the south. Beware: don’t get all caught up in these directions. There are many traditional ways to turn and how not to turn as well. But the only right way is the way that feels right to you. Make your own traditions. South is the place of endless possibilities. It’s the land of new growth and innocence. So, when I offer the smoke to the south I think of the spirit creatures that personify that direction. Some tribes held that Coyote was the guardian of the south. Others believed Frog was the spirit of the south. I have heard, and for me it sounds right, that Mouse is the spirit of the south. Mouse is able to teach us to be innocent in whatever we do. Honesty and being open to Creator’s spirit are all part of this direction for me. So, when I face the south I pray for innocence and honesty. I pray to be open to the wind of Creator’s spirit, and that I might be able to let it blow through me and use me as an instrument of the Circle’s peace.

Then I continue to turn sun-wise, and I face the west. I offer the smoke to that direction. Again I make three circular passes with the shell and let the smoke rise. The west is where the sun goes to rest. The totem spirit of the west is the black bear. We were taught by the ones who were here before us that Bear is able to see hidden things deep down inside the earth. Bear is able to enter into hidden worlds and to return with the truth. So, I pray to the Creator to be able to see things deep down inside myself as Bear does. I pray for self-discovery and understanding. I also pray to learn to love myself.

Now, I turn to the north and I offer the burning herbs in that direction. I have come to understand that a shaggy, white bull buffalo is the guardian spirit of the north. Buffalo is the heart of wisdom, knowledge, and the insight won by passing hard tests and enduring. Wisdom comes with endurance and learning the lessons the Creator puts in front of us. So when I offer the smoke to the north I think about the spirit of Buffalo, and ask for endurance, and strength, and wisdom. I ask to be able to learn what I have to learn to become a human being. I ask to use what I have learned, so I might continue to learn.

Then I turn to our Mother the Earth. I kneel and I offer three passes of the herb smoke to the Earth itself. We are of the earth. We return to the earth, and we begin again from the earth. I pray for new beginnings, and I ask to remember my dependence on the Circle of Creation that begins with Mother Earth. This is the direction of beginning.

Then I look up and I face our Grandfather the sky. I stretch up to the sky and offer the smoke to the heavens, and I long to fly like the birds of the air. I pray for the spirit of the stars and the universe to fill me with brightness.

Those are the six directions.

Then I use the feather (or the feather fan or my open hand) to direct the smoke toward myself. I brush the smoke over my head and down my arms and my legs and finally toward my heart. I ask Creator to fill me and to give me direction.

This is centering.

If another person is doing the ceremony with you they can fan the smoke over you at this point; or, if you choose, you can use the feather to drag the smoke over them, and then give them the container so they can brush the smoke over you. It’s wonderful and unifying to do this as a couple. Different people experience this different ways. Again, your own experience is the only judge of what is right.

Note: through all these steps it’s necessary to continue blowing into the burning herbs. Left to their own devices they’ll usually stop burning. Sometimes, you may have to add more crushed herbs to what you started with. That’s no big thing, just make sure they catch fire too and begin to smoke. When you’ve finished you can set the container down and let it burn down while you do whatever comes next: meditating, reading, writing, making love, looking at the birds flying in the back yard. You’ll be in a good place to do all those things.

Life is good.