On Eating Medicine By a Fire
By: Kajin Goh
Tags: Fire, Family, Ancestors, Death, Medicine

‘Do everything with Love’...

These were the last words I heard my mother say as her spirit was leaving her body, a minute before I received the call that she was gone.

I heard these words again as I sat up by a Fire this weekend.

Also, 'Honour Life'...

The week Gabriel drowned I was with friends in the South. We saw a fresh-born foal, a baby deer, still unsteady on its legs and trembling on the path. When we came to the sea I picked up a perfectly intact deer skull, no other bones around, where there had been none just the week before.

The top of a nearby tree cracked and fell moments later.

I carried the skull with some trepidation to a nearby waterfall, heavy with questions to myself and the Creator. Should I have let it be? Was I to bring it to an altar? Was the act of doing so a gesture of possession?

There was much in my mind and heart which wasn't still at the time. So much doubt, about the inner and the outer universe. There are times when it becomes a challenge to settle the mind for even a split second.

But in that moment lies a kind of eternity. A kind of truth, a simplicity beyond the mind's grasping, which lies out of what we call time.

There are also places that offer that (this waterfall along them). Where that meeting of the moment arises from making an offering of yourself to that place. Perhaps that offering is a kind of birthing also beyond space.

What is surrender?

'Honour Life...'

Those words emerged through the sound of falling water, out of making just the tiniest sliver of contact with an inner silence.

Okay, Creator, okay.

That skull now takes central place on my altar. There are things and circumstances which have and continue to accrue around it. When Gabriel died just a few days later I saw what had been witnessed that day as a direct indication of the most intimate of relationships, between life, and death.

One carries the other. The seed of our death is planted in our birth. This is the walk each of us makes. The very act of my writing this and your reading is but one proof. But, it goes further.

I had the blessing to sit up with the Spirit of the Deer, Holy Medicine, this weekend, to help our friend who is making that walk.

There was so much beauty, sacrifice, willingness for those of us who gathered.

When you find those who've recognised their blessings (their very lives, for starters), and devote themselves in service to Life, who continually honour both Life and Death, who commit to this path while moving through the sands of time, through all the difficulties and seeming contradictions of this human world, you find so many other things beside.

You discover you are a flame reflecting other flames, and as your Spirits rise together you see these lights encircle the world.

You see a tapering of the darkness which also grips the world, and human minds and hearts.

To see the world with brutal honesty. Both this inner, and what we call the outer realms.

You find there is nowhere you can hide. But also it emerges that there is no 'where' to hide, and no 'thing' to hide either.

The very nakedness of your existence is your rightful inheritance to be here. There is no 'thing' wrong with you. You are Home.

You are good enough.

It strikes this one quite recently as strange, how bewildering, and how many years it took to receive just a semblance of this realisation. And how deeply we immerse ourselves in the torture chamber of confusion by mistaking these dirty mirrors held in our minds with ourselves.

I've gone through the tribulations of recurring depression for close to a third of my life now. Protracted wells of withdrawal from outer life, when the flame burns real, real low.

Times when I don't yet contemplate taking my life, but when my desire is simply not to exist.

I think of that term, to 'take a life', whether one's own or that of another sentient being's.

Can we do that and 'take' that? Do our lives actually belong to us? What about 'taking our lives back'?

The kind of mental gymnastics, and the linguistic splitting of selves, which can immerse us in a very murky space.

In the space of this last depression, it was like both my arms were up to both protect and hide myself. A gesture of disengagement, desiring to be a vacuum with nowhere to hide. No escape, as they say.

Where to escape to? Is there anywhere in existence one can tuck away and not be noticed, not be experienced? Can you un-experience your own self? Is this what 'death' is? Is there a void where all pain disappears?

What is Oblivion?

Some traditions describe the Void as Bliss. The first utterance of the Buddha after awakening, some say, is 'I have been extinguished'.

I've slowly learned, after some time, that what I call my depressions, is yet another route to the waterfall.

And on that path is a seed of resistance. Where the desire for the Void is manifested as avoidance. (And notice now, how one word, 'void', is carried in the other).

Like the seed of life carried in death. For some the path is a very thin line continuously navigated between these dualities. Life, death, beauty, horror, resistance, acceptance, joy, sorrow.

I've been lucky, to have had a lot of help, offerings of assistance, to navigate the vagaries of this present incarnation.

Last winter, in my withdrawal, I managed to plumb a little deeper to identify the seed of my resistance. What was that little nut at the centre of all this discomfort? The one that was accruing all this pain around itself? That was deforming the present flow of almost all my thoughts into hidden channels, which seemed to carry so much power that it had lain a blanket of stone over this still beating human heart, and in addition muffled my mind into submission and retreat away from my flame?

When I stopped evading what I didn't want to see, I was able to isolate it down into a little voice, an insistent tapping at the base of my skull which I realised had lived there for a very, very long time.

'I'm not good enough'.

When I emerged and started taking another look around I could see that same tapping happening inside so many skulls. Friends, family, so-called strangers of the outer world.

I reflected this weekend on the distinction between pain and suffering. I have a friend who's experiencing a lot of pain, pains similar to the ones my mother experienced as she was on her exit from this realm.

I know so many who mask their pains by various means, but who remain caught in the perpetual motion of suffering.

It takes an incredible amount of bravery to heal.

And we are in the grip of so many fears. One of the principal ones being that little to large voice, 'I'm not good enough'.

I've seen so many lives, my own included, succumb to that voice.

The path of recovering yourself somehow starts from there. From feeling just even slightly good enough to start.

And even that path, at least from personal experience, is both very tough but deeply rewarding. The cost is facing things deeply, your wound, your ancestral wounds, the identification of self with that woundedness. The personalities we might have constructed over lifetimes around that scar tissue.

There are some really large bandaids we might have to rip or tear off in the act of getting well. We can't often determine how fast or slow that process will be.

Fear is a strange master. It's difficult to recognise a friend in our fears. How that might be transmuted into a revelation of what appears to be its opposite. Which is love.

The prize which begins to appear at this journey is winning yourself back.

Some folks speak of enlightenment as if we turn into someone else, or our 'higher' selves. I don't know about that, it feels like a kind of evasion, a mental trap. 'I'm not good enough'.

I think we all are but don't necessarily know it yet.

I have a friend who runs a sweat who likes to invite us to set down our 'burden baskets' before the grandmothers and grandfathers.

Sometimes the work is unspectacular. Not the bells and whistles of our imagined liberation, our 'samadhi'. It can be either tough or gentle or both. But it is a process of 'enlightenment'. As in, you do get lighter.

I often see an image of our true centres wrapped by onionskins of constructed selves, thoughts, memories, embodied hurt, trauma, each skin bearing an outer or inner surface of pain.

Somehow releasing those skins reveals a deeper gift we never knew was waiting there. Perhaps a kind of 'empty' space at the centre, contact with our actual being-ness, past the imagined narrative of 'who' we are.

Some of us go to sweat, some to other places, to enter the opportunity to drop our burdens in the dark.

A lot of work goes on in the dark. But in that dark, that heat, there is the spirit of Fire. So many things happen.

You burn off. You get to witness, in places you can no longer hide. You discover there is no way not to witness, in the full nakedness of the moment. The Spirit of inner fire lights everything up, every hidden corner and recess of avoidance, every terrifying chamber of past hurt, every defence you've erected to screen off some awful truth.

But that spirit also brings your flame up.

And then you see, all these other flames around you, and inside you.

There's all that inner work, but also a deepening, a reprieve from the perceived isolation and loneliness of carrying the burdens of our minds from one place to another, without ever, really, truly resting, in or out of ourselves.

When the arms of the Creator come up to hold you and you realise they've always been there.

You've been held your whole life. And there are others with you.

It's my greatest privilege to see and be seen by others, so many I now count as my brothers and sisters, uncles, aunties, grandmothers and grandfathers, nephews and nieces, in this ever-expanding constellation of one family united by a growing fire.

And this weekend, I saw so much courage.

I like to remind myself that courage relates to 'coeur'; that French word rooted in Latin, which means 'Heart'.

When we speak of courage, we're speak less of an absence of fear than what it means to lead with the Heart.

When we live in environments and relationships of encouragement, we are opening and growing our hearts together.

And watch for those environments and relationships of discouragement, those which would shrink your Heart. That little inner voice which tells you you're not 'good' enough.

I'm seeing so many warriors come up now. And I don't use that word lightly. We are at war, in so many ways, a war which has been unfolding for centuries, generations.

But I'm sure in the midst of this war (one aspect of this war is to hide, diminish or deny the warriors) you see them too. The mothers, the fathers, the teachers, the builders, the frontline workers, the land defenders, the growers.

I sat this weekend with the spirits of my ancestors. I thought of all the ones seen and unseen. I spoke within and through my DNA to them, to ask for support and blessings, and to help them back in return through this present lifetime. I saw their suffering and their sacrifice too. I spoke forward as well, to the younger ones already here, to the ones who are coming.

I spoke to my mother, my father. Both warriors in so many ways. Both bearing courage through so many times of fear, adversity, unknowingness and insecurity.

Without that courage I wouldn't be here. Both as a fact of being, and as a guest discovering their root in the place they call Canada.

I spoke to my friend, the one we had lit the Fire to support, when we got to express ourselves in the morning.

My friend is most definitely a warrior. A warrior-scholar, to be precise. And his sitting up by the Fire, while dealing with enormous pain, is one of the bravest things I've witnessed.

It was his first time at this Fireplace, with this Medicine.

In undertaking that journey, to heal, I thought of my first time and this simple thing I learned.

The most important thing is to Show Up.

In any way, for your own Life.

Everything follows from that. Show up, and Come Home.

We all came Home that night, and into the landing strip of the following morning. We rode that ship all night together. We're still here.

And I thought, yesterday and upon waking today, about this life journey. What it means to do the right thing.

And the words came back to me:

Do everything with Love.

Honour Life.

And this one thing I learned from Joseph Campbell:

The greatest privilege of a lifetime is being You.

May All Sentient Beings be Released from Pain and Suffering.

– All My Relations.