Wild Visions: The Healing Power of Wilderness

Welcome to the Wild Visions: Field Notes, a space where ancestral skills, stories, and personal insights converge to honor the living spirit of the wild. Rooted in the same mission as our upcoming podcast, this blog explores wilderness not just as a place, but as a guide. From tracking and foraging, to myth and memory, we offer grounded practices and timeless teachings to help you reconnect with nature and with yourself. These are the skills and stories that remind us how to live in rhythm with the land, fostering both self-reliance and deep reverence

More than wilderness survival, Wild Visions is about transformation. Here we share how time in wild places brings clarity, healing, and renewal. The wilderness challenges, but it also restores, reflecting who we are and revealing what we can become. Whether you come for practical knowledge or the deeper questions, it stirs. This blog invites you to engage with wildness as both a mirror for the soul and a window into a more rooted way of being. Let the vision begin.

Tools, Sacredness, and the Work of the Heart

"If we use a tool on sacredness, we profane sacredness. The only way to make this right is for the person using the tool to maintain the highest level of prayer." -Sal Gencarelle

Sacredness is not fragile, but it is easily forgotten.

In the old way of seeing, sacredness is not something apart from life; it is the underlying reality of life. The river is sacred, not because we say it is, but because it is the living water that flows from the hand of the Creator. The fire is sacred, not just because of ceremony, but because it carries the original flame that has been passed down from generation to generation, warming both bodies and spirits. Yet there is a great danger in our age: when we try to "work on" the sacred, when we bring our tools to it without the right heart, we reduce it from the infinite to the measurable, from the living to the merely useful.

The quote above strikes at the tension between the sacred and the instrumental. It says plainly: if you approach the sacred as an object, a project, or a thing to be dissected, you profane it. But it offers a way forward: if you must approach the sacred with tools, do so only in the highest state of prayer. Prayer is not about words muttered to the sky. It is about your whole being: mind, heart, breath, coming into alignment with the deeper order of life.

The Great Forgetting

To understand why such teaching matters, we must remember what has been forgotten.

The Great Forgetting is the slow amnesia that has settled over human societies, pulling us away from our original instructions. Once, people lived in a daily relationship with the world around them. Every plant was known as a neighbor, every animal as a relative, every star as a marker in the great seasonal clock. Sacredness was not hidden in churches or lodges alone; it was in the way you greeted the day, the way you gathered food, the way you buried your dead.

The Great Forgetting is not a single event but an ongoing drift. It began when we stopped living in constant reciprocity with the land and began treating it as property. It deepened when we replaced relationship with resource, when we exchanged the cycles of nature for the schedules of machines. The sacred, once the foundation of life, was moved to the margins, visited occasionally, but no longer known.

And when you forget that something is sacred, you begin to handle it carelessly. You bring tools to it without prayer.

The Four Sacred Gifts

As taught by the Lakota Woptura lineage, the gifts given to the peoples of this land are four that are essential to restoring balance: the Canupa (sacred pipe), the drum, the sweat lodge, and the vision quest. These are not "tools" in the modern sense. They are living relationships, each one carrying a piece of the original instructions for how to walk in balance.

• The Canupa: Teaches that every breath is a prayer, and that our words carry weight in the seen and unseen worlds.

• The Drum: Holds the heartbeat of the Earth, reminding us that life itself is rhythm and relationship.

• The Sweat Lodge: Offers purification—not only of the body, but of thought, intention, and spirit.

• The Vision Quest: Returns us to the wilderness, stripping away the noise so we can hear the voice of the Creator directly.

Each of these can be mishandled if treated as mere instruments. A pipe can become a prop. A drum can become entertainment. A sweat lodge can become a spectacle. A vision quest can become an "extreme experience" for personal branding. Without prayer and humility, even the most sacred gifts can be profaned; once profaned, they lose their living power.

Tools and the Loss of Meaning

In the modern world, "tools" are not just hammers and shovels. Our cameras, computers, recorders, and even our words are tools. We use them to capture, categorize, and interpret the world around us. But when applied to the sacred without prayer, these tools can drain mystery from the living moment.

Take photography. In many Indigenous ceremonies, taking pictures is discouraged or forbidden. Not because the camera is inherently evil, but because it shifts the mode of presence. The person with the camera is no longer in the ceremony; they are outside it, framing and controlling it. The image is taken away, detached from the living context, and turned into a possession. The sacred has been reduced to a mere record.

The same can happen with academia. When we dissect ceremony to "understand" it, when we reduce the sacred to symbols and functions, we risk pulling it out of its living body. We might gain information, but lose a relationship. The sacred is defined by relationship, connection.

Returning to Center

The antidote to profanation is not abandonment of the tools altogether. It is to return to center. The center, as represented in the medicine wheel, is the place where all directions meet. It is a balance between the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. It is the point where our will aligns with the will of the Creator. When we act from the center, even our tools become extensions of prayer.

Returning to center means remembering who we are and why we are here. It means moving from control to connection, from extraction to exchange. When you are in the center, your tools do not dominate the sacred; they serve it. The knife used in the highest level of prayer does not desecrate; it becomes an offering, a witness, a helper.

This is as true for the carpenter shaping a beam for a lodge as it is for the writer shaping words about the sacred. The tool in itself is neutral. It is the spirit in which it is wielded that determines whether it becomes an act of profanation or an act of devotion.

The Inner State as the Real Tool

The deepest teaching in the quote is this: the real tool is you. Your mind, your breath, your intention, these are the instruments that touch the sacred first. If they are sharp with ego, rusted with distraction, or dulled by indifference, nothing you do will carry true power. But if they are honed in prayer, sanctified by humility, and guided by gratitude, every action can become an offering.

In this way, the highest level of prayer is not a technique; it is a condition of being. It is the carpenter singing as he shapes the wood, the midwife whispering blessings as she cuts the cord, the hunter offering tobacco before taking life. Prayer is not what you do before you work; it is the way you work.

Healing the Profaned

When sacredness has been profaned, it is not enough to stop using the tool. Healing must take place. This is where the Four Sacred Gifts come into play again, not as artifacts, but as relationships that can restore proper order.

• The Canupa can restore the integrity of our words and breath, helping us speak only from the center.

• The Drum can bring us back into rhythm with the heartbeat of life.

• The Sweat Lodge can cleanse the residue of careless action so that we may return to our work purified.

• The Vision Quest can strip away the distractions of the modern mind, bringing us face-to-face with what is real.

Through these gifts, we re-enter the relationship we once broke. We learn again to walk softly on the Earth, to hold the sacred with both hands, and to let prayer shape the way we work.

Beyond Ceremony

The temptation is to confine these lessons to formal ceremony. But sacredness is not bound to the lodge, the quest site, or the altar. It is everywhere, waiting to be recognized. The way you prepare food, speak to a stranger, handle a newborn, or bury the dead, all of these moments hold the potential for either desecration or devotion.

If we can hold the highest level of prayer while hammering a nail, writing an email, or turning the soil, we will find that the Great Forgetting begins to lift. Sacredness will not be something we visit; it will be something we live in. And when that happens, the tools will not profane the sacred, because we will no longer see a separation between them.

The Work Ahead

The old teachings tell us that the center is always there, no matter how far we have wandered. But returning to it is a deliberate act. It requires that we see how the Great Forgetting has shaped us, how we have used our tools without prayer, and how we have treated the sacred as a thing rather than a relationship.

It also requires courage. To live in the highest level of prayer in this modern world is to swim against the current. It is to refuse the quick photograph, the easy analysis, the careless consumption. To slow down, to listen deeply, and to act with intention, even when no one is watching.

And most importantly, it requires humility. We are not the keepers of the sacred; we are its servants. Our tools, no matter how advanced, are not what make us powerful. It is the prayer behind them, the center from which they are wielded, that determines whether we heal or harm.

Wrapping the Bundle

The quote above by Sal Gencarelle is not simply a warning. It is an invitation to live in a way that reunites the practical and the sacred, the useful and the holy. It tells us that the answer to the profane is not to withdraw from the world, but a deepened presence within it. It tells us that our tools, our words, our hands, our technologies, can be sanctified when guided by the highest level of prayer.

The Great Forgetting has taught us to separate sacredness from daily life. The Four Sacred Gifts remind us how to restore it. Returning to center shows us where to stand so that every action, even the use of a tool, becomes an act of reverence. And in that place, the boundary between sacred and ordinary disappears. Everything becomes holy again.

The Great Forgetting (part I)

“It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest.” -James Hillman

The story of civilization does not begin with tools, crops, or cities. It begins with a forgetting. The Great Forgetting was not merely the shift from foraging to farming, nor simply the rise of kings and markets. It was the breaking of an ancient relationship.

People once lived in a world alive with spirit. Every tree, stone, and stream carried a voice. Every act of hunting, gathering, or burning was bound with reverence, but something changed. Slowly, the world itself was declared silent. What had been kin became a resource. What had been communion became consumption.

This forgetting altered more than economies and landscapes. It altered perception. When the world was stripped of life, people came to see themselves differently, no longer as relatives in a circle, but as rulers standing apart. The forgetting taught us to treat the world as an object and ourselves as machines.

Signs of Forgetting

The evidence of this forgetting is everywhere.

• We have paved over more land in the last century than in all prior human history combined.

• Children can name hundreds of cartoon characters, but cannot name the plants growing in their yards.

• Modern people spend more than 90% of their time indoors.

• Entire populations now live in cities where the night sky is invisible, the soil is toxic, and birdsong is drowned by traffic.

• The average person consumes media and advertising for more hours each day than they spend in conversation with family.

This is not simply lifestyle. It is amnesia. We have forgotten how to belong to the living world.

A World Once Alive

Before the forgetting, dawn was not just light but a blessing. Fire was not merely chemical, but a spirit who carried prayers. Rivers sang, stones endured, and the forest spoke through bird and wind.

This was not a belief system. It was reality. Everything was alive. Everything participated in creation. Gratitude was not optional; it was the natural response to being surrounded by relatives.

Yes, people harvested and killed. Trees were felled, prairies burned, deer hunted, salmon speared. But, in the old way, these were not acts of plunder. They were an exchange. A hunter paused to thank the deer. A gatherer offered tobacco to the roots she pulled. Firekeepers sang to the flames. Every taking was met with honoring.

Consumption without reverence was unthinkable. Life moved through "gift and return". 

A Story: A Village of Silence

There is a tale about a village that once sang to the dawn.

Each morning, the people lifted their voices. Children laughed as they brought water to the gardens. Elders prayed before tending the fire. The village lived in harmony, woven together with the living world.

But a new voice arose. Proclaiming, the sun does not listen. The fire does not care. The garden grows because you work it. Stop, your singing, it is foolishness.

Some resisted, many obeyed. The songs ceased. Days became silent. The children forgot the melodies. The elders stopped their prayers. The sun still rose, but no one greeted it. The bread still baked, but no one thanked the fire.

The world had not died, but in the people's eyes, it became lifeless. And the silence grew heavy in their hearts.

That village is our own.

The New Way

Agriculture itself was not the crime. Many Indigenous peoples cultivated crops while still honoring the land as kin. The rupture came when farming fused with hierarchy and conquest.

Land was claimed as property.. Fields were fenced. Animals became assets. Water was diverted, forests leveled, labor pressed into service under kings and overseers. The Gods, once companions, became monarchs ruling from above. Human society mirrored this cosmic order: rulers at the top, peasants at the bottom.

Once the world was declared dead, it could be dissected without conscience. Soil became dirt. Forests became lumber. Animals became commodities. People themselves became tools, their worth measured in labor and coin.

This was the "Great Forgetting", the slow erasure of relationship.

The Cost of Forgetting

The losses are written across the Earth's forests stripped bare, rivers poisoned, animals driven to extinction. But the deepest wound is carried in the human soul.

When the world is dead, meaning itself thins. Work becomes drudgery instead of offering. Food becomes fuel instead of communion. Relationships shrink to transactions. Grief becomes unbearable because death appears final and senseless.

Alienation spreads. People feel alone even in crowds. Addictions multiply, driven by hunger for connection. Violence grows easier because life no longer feels sacred. Mental anguish rises not only from individual struggle but from living inside a culture that has severed its ties to the living world.

This is the toll of the Great Forgetting.

A Story: The Two Hunters

Another story is told about two hunters.

The first hunter entered the forest with arrogance. He saw the deer as meat, the tree as an obstacle, land as his possession. When he killed, he felt only triumph and hunger.

The second hunter entered with reverence. He paused at the forest's edge, whispered thanks, and stepped lightly. He knew the deer had a spirit as alive as his own. When he killed, he bowed his head in prayer, honoring the balance. He knew his own body one day would feed the soil.

Both hunters fed their people. But only one remained in relationship. Only one remembered.

The Rainmaker

There is a story from China about a "Rainmaker" shared by Carl Jung, as told to him by Richard Wilhelm, which is often cited due to its multiple meanings. 

A tiny mountain village once fell into drought. Their crops withered, wells dried, the people were in despair. They tried everything to call the rains, Priests offered prayers, officials devised plans, but the sky remained empty. Finally, a wizened elder summoned the "Rainmaker" from a distant land.

When the Rainmaker arrived, the villagers expected chants, sacrifices, and charms. But he asked only that a small hut be erected at the edge of the village. There he sat in silence for three days. On the fourth day, clouds gathered and rain fell across the fields.

The astonished villagers demanded to know what magic he had worked. The Rainmaker replied, I did not call the rain. I sat until I was in balance within myself. When I came into this balance, the village came into balance. When the village came into balance, the heavens remembered how to rain.

This story is not about controlling nature. It is about remembering and restoring relationship. The Rainmaker did not fix the drought through power, but by returning himself to harmony. His balance rippled outward through the community, through the land, through the sky.

The Memory Beneath

The Great Forgetting was never total. The memory persists.

It lives in Indigenous teachings, carried forward despite colonization and suppression. It survives in ceremonies, where drum and song still call the spirits. It rises in children who talk to animals, in poets who hear rivers speak, in the awe we feel beneath the night sky.

Even science now circles back. Researchers have discovered that trees communicate through their roots and fungi, wolves reshape rivers, and Earth behaves like a living organism. In a new language, the old truth returns; the world is alive.

The memory waits beneath the surface like embers under ash.

The Threshold of Awakening

To name the Great Forgetting is not to surrender to despair. It is to recognize the wound so that healing can begin. We cannot awaken from what we refuse to acknowledge.

The forgetting was the loss of relationship. The awakening will be its renewal. It does not mean turning back to some imagined golden past, nor does it require abandoning modern tools. It means carrying forward the old memory that the world is alive, that reverence and reciprocity sustain life, that gratitude is the law of creation.

The Great Forgetting is not the end of the story. It is the threshold. Beyond it lies the possibility of remembering, of returning to center, of living once again, as if everything is alive, because it is.

Great Forgetting (Part 2): The Awakening

The Great Forgetting was the moment we fell from relation. We ceased to see the world as kin and began to treat as a commodity. We forgot that flowing rivers sing, that stoic stones endure, that deer and trees and winds live in circles with us. That forgetting spread like a shadow across history, giving rise to empires, machines, and markets, but also to alienation, despair, and ecological ruin.

Yet forgetting is never final. Memory remains like embers under ash, waiting for breath to revive them. Awakening is the act of remembering what was always true: the world is alive, and we are a part of it.

Awakening is not nostalgia for some vanished past. It is a turning, a return to the center, and a stepping forward. The old knowing does not vanish; it waits. And in our time, as the Earth groans under the weight of our forgetting, memory calls to us more urgently than ever

The Depth of Forgetting

Consider the life of the average modern person:

• They spend 95% of their time indoors.

• They stare at screens for 10 or more hours a day.

• They can identify thousands of corporate logos, but only a handful of plants and animals.

• They go months without bare feet touching the Earth.

• They are schooled in a hyper-materialist worldview that prizes objectification, competition, and separation.

We have become fluent in the language of technology and commerce, but illiterate in the language of Earth. We know the names of brands but not of birds, the functions of machines but not the habits of rivers.

This is what forgetting looks like in our bodies and daily lives. It is not only cultural, it is personal. It shapes how we breathe, how we move, how we dream.

In the Time Before Memory

There was a time before the shadow fell when people lived in harmony with the land. The Old Ones, our first ancestors, followed the slow turning of the seasons. They could smell rain on the wind before it fell. They knew the voice of rivers when the salmon returned, and the silent language of deer in the shadows.

The animals were not other. They were relatives, companions, guides. Raven brought warnings. Wolf taught the family way. Bear showed the path inward. In those days, the boundaries between human and animal dream and waking, visible and unseen, were not rigid. The Old Ones could step into the vision of an eagle or the awareness of a fox as naturally as they breathed.

This was the old agreement to live in reciprocity with all of creation.

But change crept in. The wanderers set down roots. Villages rose where once there had been only campfires. They fenced the Earth into rectangles, planting seeds in straight lines. The hunt gave way to the field, and the people’s path no longer followed elk or pinion harvest. This was the beginning of the Great Forgetting.

The Earth, once revered as Mother, became a resource to be exploited. The voices of wind and water dimmed beneath the scrape of plows. The stories and ceremonies that bound people to Earth and sky fell silent, replaced by the clamor of building and storing. A living, breathing world was flattened into something ordinary, something useful, something for sale.

Yet beneath the noise and hurry, a longing remained. The people felt an emptiness they could not name. They chased possessions, knowledge, and power, but none of it filled the void. It was only a shadow of the deep connection their ancestors had lived.

The Great Forgetting Crosses the Water

When the Great Forgetting crossed the ocean to Turtle Island, it did not creep like a slow shadow. It struck like a storm. Indigenous peoples who had walked in balance for untold generations faced a force determined to sever them from their ways.

Yet they carried medicine strong enough to endure. As taught by the Woptura lineage, Four sacred gifts were given by Spirit: the Canupa (sacred pipe), the drum, the Inipi (sweat lodge), and the Hanblechia (vision quest).

These were not relics of a lost age; they were living bridges back to the center and the great hoop of life. The sacred pipe was prayer embodied, the drum carried the heartbeat of creation. The sweat lodge purified body, spirit, soul, and mind, a womb of renewal, and the vision quest stripped away distractions, sending the seeker alone into the raw quiet of the land.

There, without food, without shelter, beyond what Creator gave a person, could once again hear the speech of stones and the counsel of wind.

These spirit-given gifts endure because the Earth endures. And they remain pathways for awakening, not only for Native peoples but for all who approach with humility and reverence..

Thresholds of Awakening

Awakening rarely arrives in comfort. It comes in thresholds of illness, grief, solitude, and silence. It comes when the old way of seeing collapses and something deeper breaks through.

A person may awaken on a mountain fast alone with hunger and stars. Another may awaken at a graveside when the weight of mortality strips away illusions. Still another may awaken quietly while sitting by a river, suddenly realizing that the water is not flowing past them but with them.

These moments do not create truth. They reveal it. They tear the veil of forgetting.

Practices of Remembering

Awakening must be tended. Memory is not restored once and for all; it must be nourished.

• Solitude in nature: To sit alone under the sky is to remember scale and humility. Wilderness fasts and vigils are ancient ways of breaking through the veil.

• Ceremony: Songs, prayers, dances, and offerings create bridges between worlds. They remind us we are participants, not masters.

• Storytelling: Myths and parables awaken memory, reminding us that raven still speaks, the rain still listens, the stones still endure.

• Gratitude: Gratitude restores relationship. To thank the tree, the river, the deer, the fire is to remember that nothing is owed, everything is a gift.

• Community: Awakening deepens in circles. When elders mirror our stories, when friends gather at the fire, when communities honor the Earth together, memory takes root.

A Story: The Circle and the Center

Once, the people forgot the center. Without it, they quarreled, wandered, and fell into despair. Families were torn apart, leaders fought among themselves, and the community lost its direction.

Finally, a wizened elder stepped forward. He drew a great circle on the Earth with his staff and placed a stone at its center.

“This,” he said, pointing to the stone, “is the center. When you forget it, you forget yourselves. But when you return to it, the circle becomes whole.”

The circle reminded them of the greater whole of life, the powers of creation, the Sun, Moon, seasons, the medicine wheel, and the unbroken hoop of creation. The stone at the center reminded them of their grounding in what is eternal and unmoving, the place where the seen and unseen worlds meet.

So the people began to gather at the stone. There they prayed, told stories, and even settled their disputes, for in its presence they remembered they were part of something greater than themselves. Slowly, balance returned to their lives.

Awakening is always this: a return to the center. Not a step backward into the past, but a step deeper into what has always been true. To awaken is to remember that the circle exists, that there is a center, and that by returning to it we find ourselves again.

The Earth Remembers

The Great Forgetting is not the end of the story. The Earth remembers. The animals remember. The ancestors are waiting for us to remember.

The land is not ours to own but ours to love. We are part of its body just as rivers, trees, and clouds are. When we take up the Four Sacred Gifts and return to the center, we begin to heal the broken parts of ourselves. We awaken the wisdom sleeping beneath our skin. We step back into the old agreement, into the sacred dance where every footfall is a prayer and every breath an offering.

Why Awakening Matters Now

We live in a time of unraveling. Climate shift, mass extinction, and social fracture are all symptoms of the forgetting. But they are also opportunities for remembering.

Awakening is no longer optional. It is survival. Without it, we spiral deeper into alienation and destruction. With it, we rediscover balance, reciprocity, and a sense of meaning and purpose.

The question is not whether awakening will happen; it is already happening. The question is whether we will embrace it fully in time to heal what can still be healed.

Wrapping the Bundle

In the old way, people lived in reciprocity with the land. The Great Forgetting severed that relationship, but the story does not end in loss. The Earth still remembers, and so do we.

Awakening is the return. It is remembering that we are part of the circle. It is walking once more in the old agreement. It is standing again in the sacred hoop where all beings belong.

This is the invitation of In The Old Way to guide those ready to step back into conversation with the Earth to stand again in the circle of all beings and to remember what was never truly lost.

Vibration: The Living Bridge Between Worlds

What if the thing that heals isn’t seen, but felt? Not in the mind but in the bones?

There’s a rhythm that lives beneath all things, not just the beating of our hearts or the pulsing of blood through our veins, but something older. Something more fundamental. Call it frequency spirit or song, it’s the vibration that ties the seen to the unseen, the body to the soul, the prayer to the answer.

Vibration is not just metaphor. It’s the doorway. The bridge. The place where the physical brushes up against the nonphysical, and something real passes between them. In ceremony, this truth becomes not an idea, but a lived experience.

The Drum That Calls the Spirits

I’ve sat in the inipi. I’ve fasted on the hill, with nothing but a pipe and a prayer. I’ve felt how the vibration of a single song can shift the temperature in the room. How the sound of a drum, steady and sure, can pierce the veil between this world and the next.

In Lakota ceremony, the drum isn’t just an instrument. It’s a being. It’s the heartbeat of Unci Maka, Grandmother Earth. When the drum speaks, the spirits listen. When the song rises, shaped by breath and intention, it calls not just to memory or emotion but to creation itself.

This isn't performance. This isn’t entertainment. This is how healing begins.

What Lives in the Liminal

Ceremony is a container, yes, but more than that, it’s a field. A sacred field. A thin place. A space where time bends and reality softens. That field isn’t conjured up by fire or smoke alone. It’s carried on vibration, frequency, and the architecture of sound and intention.

Within that field, something happens that can’t be forced or manufactured. It must be invited. It must be listened for. That’s where the facilitator’s role becomes sacred.

Too often, we treat healing like a task, something done to someone. Speak the right words, burn the right herbs, say the right prayer, and maybe something shifts. But real healing doesn’t follow that formula.

Healing isn’t applied. It’s revealed. The facilitator’s role is not to fix, but to create space.

They prepare the ground. They align their frequency. They cleanse the space with song, drum, and prayer, then step aside and let the spirits come in and do what only they can.

The Power of Intention

I’ve seen people come into the circle burdened with grief, confusion, fear, even a touch of doubt. Then the first song begins. The vibration bypasses the intellect. It moves straight to the bones. It stirs something ancient that was waiting to be remembered.

But none of this can happen without intention.

Intention is the true offering. It’s what the seeker lies at the center of the circle. Without it, the ceremony becomes hollow like a drum with no skin.

The spirits that arrive don’t come for show. They come for sincerity. They come for the one who has laid down their armor and whispered, “I am ready to see.”

Sitting Inside the Sacred Circle

There’s a reason nearly every tradition on Earth uses the circle in ceremony. Its wholeness. It’s balance. It’s the place where the directions meet and the center holds. But it’s also a boundary, a line in the Earth that says, “This space is different.”

To enter that circle is to say, “I want to remember.”

When someone sits in that circle, whether in a vision quest or sweat lodge, they are returning to the center. They bring no distractions. No food. No water. Just their breath. Their longing. Their offering.

It is in that stillness that vibration begins its work.

The songs rise. The drum speaks. The seeker begins to resonate, not with their thoughts, but with something deeper. The vibration works through the body like a tuning fork, not by adding anything, but by remembering what’s already there.

That’s the beauty of this kind of medicine. It doesn’t impose. It restores. It brings the seeker back into harmony with how they were created, their original instructions.

A Living Cosmology

In the old way, we didn’t separate physics from spirit. Sound from prayer. Science from mystery. Everything vibrated. Stones. Trees. Ancestors. Dreams.

This wasn’t metaphor. It was memory.

Ceremony isn’t escapism. It’s return. It’s the ancient technology of alignment. A kind of sacred recalibration, where the dissonant is made resonant and the lost made whole.

When you fast long enough, pray deep enough, or sit still enough, you don’t just find answers. You begin to hear the original frequency of your soul, the silent song. That’s what the wilderness reveals. That’s what the sweat lodge shakes loose. That’s what the song restores.

And once you hear it, you don’t forget it again.

The Role of the Facilitator

The facilitator is not a performer or a healer in the modern sense. They are a steward. A midwife. A gatekeeper of the sacred.

Their job is to remember the songs. To tend the fire. To watch the weather and read the wind. To prepare the altar, not just with tools but with presence.

Their medicine is not power, it’s restraint. Not noise, but attention. They do not command spirits. They make space for them. They do not direct the healing. They get out of the way.

A good facilitator listens more than they speak. They feel when a song is needed and when silence will serve better. They follow what the field is asking, not what the ego wants.

That’s where the real work happens.

The Spirits Do Their Work

When the field is set and the vibration is true, the facilitator steps back. This is the moment where trust becomes everything.

The spirits arrive. Maybe not how you expect them. Sometimes they come quietly. Sometimes loud. Sometimes with weeping. Sometimes with stillness.

And sometimes the healing that comes isn’t what the seeker thought they came for. They asked for clarity and received a question in return. They begged for peace and were met with a storm. But always something comes. Something moves. Something is made whole.

Not because someone fixed them, but because the space was honest enough, and the song true enough, that the unseen could enter.

That’s what ceremony is for.

Wrapping the Bundle

We live in a noisy world. Loud. Fast. Distracted. But, in the old way, healing wasn’t always loud. It was subtle. It was quiet. It was vibrational.

Vibration teaches us to listen again, not just with our ears, but with our whole being. To feel what lives beneath words. To understand that the world isn’t built on matter alone, but on frequency and movement. On the breath between things.

When we gather in ceremony, we are not performing a tradition. We are participating in the architecture of the universe. We are remembering the instructions written into the stones and stars.

And when we do that, when we drum, when we pray, when we sit in the circle with sincerity, healing comes.

It may come in silence. Or, in song. It may come in the night wind, or a dream you don’t yet understand.

But it will come because the spirits are always listening. And vibration is how we call them home.

Healing the Dust of Death: Ceremony, Recovery, and the Return to Spirit

Healing the Dust of Death: Ceremony, Recovery, and the Return to Spirit

The elders often speak of a heaviness that settles on people after too much loss:

War.

Displacement.

Personal grief that cuts so deep it changes the way you see the world.

They called it the Dust of Death.

This Dust doesn’t come all at once. It drifts in over time, settling into the corners of a person’s spirit until the colors fade, the music dulls, and connection feels elusive. The dust is more than sadness, it’s a spiritual numbness, a forgetting of joy, a loss of place in the great circle of life.

Native communities understood early on that this dust could choke the soul if left alone. They didn’t ignore it. They gathered the people. They lit the fire. They turned to ceremony, the pipe, the sweat lodge, the vision quest, the songs, and the drum to stir the spirit, cleanse the heart, and bring people back to life.

Today, in a different setting, another circle forms, the meeting halls of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and Narcotics Anonymous (NA). Here, the 12 Steps offer a path of surrender, self-examination, and community healing. And though the language may be different, the bones are the same. Ceremony and recovery both aim for the same thing: to lift the dust, restore clarity, and bring a person home to themselves and their Creator.

The Dust and How It Spreads

Dust builds when pain goes unhealed. It passes from parent to child, from one generation’s wound to the next. It grows heavier with each loss, the broken treaties, the stolen lands, the wars that took sons and daughters. It shows up in our own lives too: broken homes, abuse, addiction, despair.

Unhealed, it drives people to numb themselves in whatever way they can: bottles, powders, violence, sex, distractions. But instead of relief, the "dust of death" grows thicker.

Clearing the Dust: The Old Ways

In the old way, the dust wasn’t just seen as a personal problem. It was a community burden. Healing was everyone’s work.

The Canupa (Sacred Pipe)

The pipe is prayer in motion. In its bowl, the Earth. In its stem, sky. Together, they bridge the human heart with the Great Mystery. Smoking the sacred pipe is an offering, a surrender. Step 3 of the 12 Steps speaks the same truth: “Turn our will and our lives over to the care of God.” Healing begins when we admit we can’t carry this alone.

The Inipi (Sweat Lodge)

A low, dark lodge. Stones heated in the fire. Water poured, steam rising. It’s a return to the womb of the Earth Mother, a place to sweat out the grief and shame we’ve been holding. It takes courage to step inside, the same courage that Step 4 calls for: to take a fearless moral inventory and face ourselves honestly. We emerge lighter, like shedding a skin.

The Vision Quest (Hanbleceya)

Alone on the hill. No food. No shelter. Just you, the wind, the stars, and your prayers. Here, the dust is confronted head-on. The vision quest strips away every distraction until only what’s real remains. In the 12 Steps, Steps 6 and 7 echo this, becoming willing to let go of what no longer serves, and asking the Creator to help us change. On the hill, the veil thins. We remember who we are and why we were sent here.

Sacred Song and Drum

The heartbeat of the drum is the heartbeat of the people. Songs carry prayers into the air, binding the circle together. In the lodge, around the fire, or in the meeting hall, rhythm and voice break the silence that trauma loves to fill. Step Meetings do this in their way, one person’s story reminding another they’re not alone.

When the Old Ways Meet the New

Ceremony and recovery walk side by side. Both demand honesty. Both require surrender. Both depend on the strength of the circle.

Surrender: In the pipe ceremony and during Step 3, we relinquish control and place our trust in something greater.

Purification: In the sweat lodge and Step 4, we face the truth about ourselves and release what poisons us.

Vision: On the hill or in Steps 6 and 7, we ask to be changed, to walk in a better way.

Community: In the drum circle or the meeting room, we heal together, not alone.

A Way Forward

The "Dust of Death" does not have to be the final word. Whether we step into a lodge or a meeting hall, sit alone on the hill or in a circle of folding chairs, the work is the same: to lift the dust, to reclaim joy that was stolen, and to remember that we belong to one another.

Ceremony and the 12 Steps are not relics of the past or tools for the few. They are living paths. Together, they can help us see clearly again, breathe deeply again, love fully again.

The dust can be cleared.

The heart can be restored.

The circle can be made whole.

Windows and Mirrors: How Wilderness Reflects and Reveals the Path of Transformation

The wilderness is not just a landscape; it is a state of mind. It is not simply where we go to hike, camp, or get away. It is a living, breathing presence. One that listens. One that sees. Out in the quiet where the wind moves through sage and stone, where the birds fall silent and the sun leans low, the land begins to speak. Or, more accurately, it begins to reflect and reveal.

You don’t just enter the wilderness. The wilderness enters you.

When the walls of your ordinary life fall away, no schedule, no phone, no name badge, no one watching, you start to remember something ancient. You begin to feel what it means to be fully human again.

This isn’t a place where you study nature from a distance. It’s a place where nature studies you. Not with words but with shadow scent and wind. And if you’re paying attention, it doesn’t just show you the outer world, it turns you inward. It shows you who you are.

The Mirror: Seeing Ourselves Clearly

When we strip away the noise of civilization, something unexpected happens. We find a mirror, but not the kind we hang on walls. This one is made of still water, broken twigs, startled birds, and the hush between our own breaths.

In this mirror, you begin to see the stories you carry, Stories you didn’t know were still shaping you.

• I am not enough?

• I must be strong at all times.

• I don’t belong.

These thoughts rise up not because the wilderness puts them there, but because it gives them nowhere to hide.

And then comes the most humbling part: the land reflects all of it. Not with judgment, but with honesty. Your fear, your impatience, your grief, your longing, they show up in your breath, your posture, your pace, the way you meet the wind.

This is where the work of inner tracking begins.

Inner Tracking: The Art of Witnessing Yourself

Just as a skilled tracker reads the story of a deer in the dust, hooves splayed wide, stride shortened, a sudden shift in direction, you begin to track yourself. You begin to notice what’s under the surface. Not just the thoughts in your head, but the currents flowing beneath those thoughts.

Inner tracking is the sacred practice of observing your inner landscape, the way a tracker studies the Earth. You watch for patterns. Where does your mind go when you feel vulnerable? What emotion flares up when the wind picks up or the sun begins to set? What do you reach for when there’s no one else around?

This isn’t about self-analysis. It’s not about judgment or fixing. It’s about presence. About learning to read the trail of your own soul. It’s about coming into relationship with the parts of yourself you’ve ignored, forgotten, or cast aside.

In this way, the wilderness becomes a teacher, not of facts or field guides, but of truths. It teaches you to see what’s real.

A Vision in the Wild: Meeting the Medicine Bear

Years ago, during a wilderness fast, a traditional vision quest, I had a dream unlike any other. I had gone out seeking guidance, alone, without food or water, wrapped in the stillness of the desert.

In the deep hours of the night, I was pulled into a vision.

I found myself at the entrance of a small cave, a den. As I stepped inside, it opened into a tiny room where a small campfire burned, and sitting by the fire was a massive bear, not threatening but observing. I felt no fear, only recognition. In that moment, it showed me bones and roots, grief and wisdom. It didn’t speak a word, but its presence carried deep meaning.

That bear, the Medicine Bear, was not simply an animal of power. It was a mirror of my deeper self. A reflection of the part of me that knows how to heal, how to endure, how to carry the sacred.

That vision changed me, and it continues to guide my work today.

When we fast, when we go without, when we listen, really listen, we don’t just find clarity. We find contact with something greater. With the part of ourselves that knows.

The wilderness doesn’t just reflect, it reveals. 

The Window: Seeing What Lies Beyond

And just as the mirror shows us who we are, the window shows us what is.

The window is the opening into a world we usually ignore. The interconnected world. The one where everything is alive and aware, Raven, Cloud, River, Rock. All participants in a sacred conversation.

In daily life, we are walled in not just by buildings but by beliefs. We insulate ourselves from mystery, from discomfort, from wonder. But in the wilderness, those walls fall away.

When we step outside, truly outside, we enter relationship. We stop being observers and become participants.

The wind doesn’t just pass us by. It carries memory.

The track of a deer in morning frost doesn’t just say “an animal was here”. It asks:

• Can you be this aware?

• Can you walk with this much care?

Crushed sagebrush underfoot doesn’t just release a scent. It stirs something old in your bones.

These are windows into the unseen world, a world where transformation is not abstract but embodied. Not a concept but a felt reality.

Practices of Attention

To receive these teachings, you must slow down. You must stop trying to get somewhere and let yourself arrive.

Slowness is the first language of the Earth.

Here are a few practices I teach and use myself, simple, rooted, and powerful.

Sit Spot: Choose one wild place and return to it often. Sit. Watch. Listen. Over time, the land begins to recognize you. You become part of the pattern.

Five Senses Awakening: When you arrive, engage every sense. What do you hear beyond your thoughts? What moves at the edge of sight?

Journaling and Reflection: Write about your experiences after each outing. Not just what you saw, but what you felt. What did the land show you about yourself? What new question arrived?

Gratitude: Begin and end every visit with thanks. Offer something: a sip of water, a song, a strand of hair. Speak aloud. Treat the land as you would an elder.

These practices don’t help you learn about nature. They help you learn from it.

Encounters with the Unseen

The wild doesn’t always speak in words, but it speaks. And when it does, it often bypasses the intellect and goes straight to the Soul.

Sometimes the message arrives like thunder. A bald eagle appears overhead just as you whisper a prayer. A tree that has been showing up in your dreams reveals itself around the bend of the trail, its bark textured like a memory. A sudden downpour cuts your plans short and leaves you soaked, humbled, listening.

But more often, the wilderness speaks in whispers. A subtle shift in mood. A quiet knowing that wasn’t there before. A strange sense of peace or presence that comes from nowhere and stays with you for days. You might not be able to explain it, and that’s the point. These are not puzzle pieces to be solved. They are seeds. Seeds of meaning are planted in the dark soil of your being.

Like any seed, they may need time. Weeks. Months. Maybe years. Not everything revealed in the wild will make sense right away. That dream, that animal, that emotion, don’t rush to name it. Let it rest. Let it grow. The land doesn’t hand out clear answers. It invites you into a relationship with mystery. And the more you trust that mystery, the more it will trust you in return.

The Initiation of Discomfort

If you spend enough time in the wild, it will test you.

You may get cold. Wet. Lost. You may feel fear rise in your chest as night falls. You may face the kind of silence that stretches wide and deep and uncomfortable. And in those moments, you may want to turn back. But don’t. That’s where the threshold lies.

The wilderness doesn’t punish. It initiates.

When things go wrong, when the map doesn’t help, when the path disappears, when your confidence crumbles, that’s when the real work begins. You’re no longer operating from the script of daily life. You’re not in control, and there’s no one to blame or perform for. You meet yourself raw and real.

This is the forge of transformation. The place where what is false burns away, and what is essential comes forward. You find patience not because the world gives it to you but because you have no other choice. You find strength not in bravado, but in staying present through your fear. You learn to listen when there is no sound. You learn to trust when there is no path.

Discomfort is not the enemy. It’s the doorway. And what it leads to is not always comfort, but clarity.

Returning to the Village

The wisdom you gather out there isn’t meant to stay out there. You go to the wilderness to remember, but you return to share. That’s how the old ways work. The one who leaves comes back bearing gifts, not always in the form of words or teachings, but in the way they walk, in the way they listen, in the stillness behind their eyes.

You may return from the mountains, desert, or forest without a single dramatic story to tell. That’s fine. You’re not coming back to impress. You’re coming back to integrate. To embody. To live what you’ve learned. You might carry a deeper stillness, a clearer gaze, a quieter urgency to live more aligned with your values. You might become the kind of person who notices things, who pauses before speaking, who walks a little more gently on the Earth.

And that in itself is a teaching.

We need more people who’ve been changed by the land. Who carry its presence into their homes and workplaces, and relationships. Who don’t speak for the Earth, but speak with Her, through how they live. You become a mirror for others, a window into another way of being. You become, in your own quiet way, the wilderness walking.

Before You Go: A Field Note

Next time you go to the land, remember this.

• Offer thanks before your feet touch the trail.

• Set an intention, but let it breathe.

• Bring water, a journal, and wonder.

• Listen more than you speak.

• Don’t try to make something happen; let it happen.

You don’t need to hike ten miles. You don’t need to fast for four days. Even a few hours in a pocket of wildness is enough.

The Earth is not silent.

She’s waiting.

For you to slow down.

To open.

To remember.

Go often.

Go humbly.

Go alone sometimes.

Let the wilderness mirror what’s true.

Let it show you what’s possible.

And when you return, return changed.