The Living Fire: Teachings of the Old Ones

This is a place where the stories live

Gathered here is an evolving archive, a sacred bundle of myth, memory, and ancestral teachings passed down for generations on Turtle Island. These stories told around the winter fire in whispers and ceremony are not relics of the past. They are living threads of wisdom offering insight, balance, and guidance for those who listen. Some are well-known, others nearly forgotten. All are shared with care, rooted in respect for the people and lands from which they come. May this space serve as a quiet circle to sit, remember, and rekindle the teachings of the Old Ones.

The Earth Remembers

Beneath the surface of the Earth, where roots tangle like old stories, our ancestors lie curled like seeds, silent, glowing, waiting. They were planted in a time of sorrow, when songs were outlawed and language was spoken only in whispers to the trees. But the Earth remembered. In her soil, their bones and dreams turned loss into memory, and memory into nourishment. Beneath our feet, the Little People, the Wa Wila, move softly through the dark, brushing soil from sleeping faces, whispering stories into resting ears, drumming softly with stones so the heartbeat of the land is never lost.

Above, the wind carries those old melodies through birch and cedar. A child walks the forest path, led by a feeling he can’t yet name, his steps falling in rhythm with something ancient. He kneels to plant maize, and the Earth shifts. A sprout rises where a hand once fell. A drumbeat echoes in the sky. From seed to sprout, from silence to song—they rise. You cannot kill a people whose culture is ceremony, whose very ancestors are sown into the land.

We are not buried. We are blooming.

The Old Woman and the Black Dog

A Lakota Story From the Edge of the World

Somewhere on the edge of the prairie where it rises and falls into the broken lands of Makošíča, the Badlands, there is a place no map shows. Not a soul alive remembers how to find it. Roads have come, and tourists, and satellites in the sky, but still, no one sees this cave. It is hidden by time. It hides because it must.

Inside the cave lives an old woman. She is older than memory, older than the bones of the land. Her skin is creased like a dried-up walnut. She wears the dress of the ancestors, braintan buckskin, buttery soft with age, marked with the smell of smoke and earth. She does not speak. She does not leave. She has been here for generations beyond counting, sitting by the fire, working on a blanket strip made of dyed porcupine quills.

She flattens the quills with her teeth, as her grandmothers did long before the coming of glass beads and iron kettles. Her teeth are worn to nubs, but still, she bites, presses, and threads.

Beside her lies Šúŋka Sápa, the Black Dog. Massive, silent, always watching. He never sleeps with both eyes closed. He sees the old woman, her fire, her work. And he waits.

A few steps away from where she sits, an everlasting fire burns. She lit it when she came to this place, and she has kept it burning ever since. Over it hangs a great, handmade clay pot, ancient. Inside, wóžapi, a mashed berry soup, simmers and bubbles. But this is no ordinary soup. In it are the seeds of every plant, every medicine, every food that has ever grown. It is the belly of the Earth, stirring life.

Now and then, the old woman sets aside her quills. Slowly, she rises and shuffles over to the fire. Her steps are stiff. Her back bent. She stirs the soup with care, for if it scorches, the seeds may die, and who can say what will happen then?

While she stirs, Šúŋka Sápa moves quietly to her blanket strip. With his teeth, he pulls at the quills, just a few at first, one thread here, another there. And soon, what she has worked so long to create begins to unravel. By the time she returns, the design is changed, undone, and scattered across the floor.

She never scolds. She never chases him away. She only looks for a long while, taking in the tangle. She picks up a single quill, studies its color, and sees something she had not seen before. A new pattern. A new vision. Something even more beautiful. And so, she begins again.

Some say the old woman weaves the world. That every tribe, every creature, every mountain and river is stitched into her blanket. Some say that if she ever finishes her quillwork, with the final quill in place and the design complete, the world will come to an end. Everything will stop.

But she does not finish. The black dog sees to that.

And so it continues, creation and unraveling, vision and loss, the dance of fire and fiber, of soup and thread. This is the rhythm of time.

And maybe this is the teaching:

That the world is never finished.

That even ruin has beauty.

That something must always stir the soup.

And someone must always begin again.

The Bearwalker: Spirit on Two Legs

As it was told to me, in the old days, before the talking wires and the world forgot how to listen, there were those who walked between the worlds. They did not move like other men. Their steps were heavy with medicine, their eyes full of shadow. Some called them Bearwalkers.

To the unknowing, the Bearwalker inspired fear. Whispers passed between lodge walls and under blankets late at night, stories of men turning to beasts, of great black bears walking upright beneath a moonless sky. Tracks in the snow that began as paw prints and ended as human feet or the other way around. Strange lights in the trees. A presence watching, just beyond the firelight.

These were not mere tales to frighten children. They were teachings wrapped in caution, wrapped again in mystery.

But not all teachings are rooted in fear.

Among the Anishinaabeg, it is said that the Bearwalker is not a creature of malice but a spirit, Makwa bimose the Bear Walker, who moves between this world and the next. Once human, now more than human, the Bearwalker returns not to haunt but to guide.

When a Bearwalker is seen standing upright in the form of a bear or sometimes appearing as a fireball, or as an orb in a photograph, it is a sign. A sign that the spirit world has heard your call. Such appearances are rare and not for everyone. Only those with open hearts and clear vision will perceive them.

The old ones remind us…It is not the Bearwalker who brings fear, but the fear in our own hearts. As with the bear itself, both healer and predator, so too is the Bearwalkers’ medicine powerful. It can clarify or confuse, depending on the spirit of the one who receives it.

Those who walk with good intentions have nothing to fear.

Among many nations, the bear is honored as a healer and protector. The Bear Clan held the medicine bundles. Their dreams were full of knowledge. The bear walks alone, just as the one who seeks vision must walk alone into the forest. To follow the bear’s path is to undergo transformation, not to wield power over others, but to awaken power within oneself.

In walking the bear’s path, we remember what modern life asks us to forget, that we are still wild, still dreaming, still connected to something deeper than the surface of things.

There are stories still being told around campfires, deep in the forest, away from the sounds of civilization.

In one telling, a young man grieving his grandmother’s death wandered into the forest, praying for a sign. For three nights, he fasted beneath cedar boughs. On the third night, a shadow moved toward him, tall, upright, furred. His heart did not panic. He remembered his grandmother’s words, “Do not run from what you do not understand. Listen first”.

The shadow came close, then knelt beside him. In the morning, he woke to find bear tracks around his camp, and an eagle feather lay gently on his chest. That man became a healer, guided by dreams and helped by unseen hands.

Another tells a story of a grandmother who saw a fireball outside her window. She knew it wasn’t lightning or mischief. It was her long-passed husband’s spirit bringing a message. The next day, she visited a feverish child in the village. She brewed willow bark and bear root, the medicine her husband once taught her, and the child quickly recovered.

The Bearwalker had walked again, not to harm but to help.

For those who remember, the Bearwalker is not a monster of horror stories, but a bridge. A reminder that the veil between worlds is thin, and our ancestors are close. That help is already on the way, if we know how to ask.

They say the Bearwalker appears in many forms: a ripple in the shadows, a song that plays at just the right time, a chill down the spine, a hum in the ears. A presence felt, not feared.

These are not signs of danger but of presence.

So, if you are walking alone and feel the hair rise on the back of your neck, do not run. If you dream of a bear standing upright or see something glimmer in the corner of your eye, take heart. Someone is with you, Someone from your bloodline, Someone who remembers the old ways.

They have not left you.

They are Bearwalkers now.

And maybe they remind us of the Bearwalker inside us, the wild part still watching from the woods of our soul, waiting to be remembered.

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Authors Note

Stories like the Bearwalker invite us to see beyond fear and into the mystery of what it means to be human, and more than human. In many traditions, the bear is a symbol of healing, solitude, instinct, and power rooted in the Earth. Perhaps, the Bearwalker is not only a spirit that visits from the Other Side, but also a part of ourselves: the wild part that must be forgotten, even buried, to survive in the modern world.

But what if it's not gone?

What if the Bearwalker is a call, not just from our ancestors, but from the part of us that still remembers? The part that listens. That dreams. That walks alone in the woods without needing to be told what is sacred.

Have you felt the Bearwalker in your life?

What part of your wild self have you had to forget?

And what might happen if you remembered?