We collect our pain into bundles of black cloth and tobacco; gather them in; and crawl silently into the palpable medicine of the lodge as we have done so many times before.

Outside the seasoned Oak burns brightly, imparting heat as ancient wisdom into the Grandfathers, now fully awake. They’ve traveled miles and many millennia to share their stony stories; and we sit, huddled in the darkness, ready to listen.

After the sweat we take our prayers and offer them to the fire. One by one they disappear, releasing those things we once held so tightly to ourselves – at times perhaps, even more tightly than our own names.

Lately it seems there’s a healthy portion of letting go to the work; the opening up of secret places, and waiting in the spaces left behind.

Waiting…

Nothing so much about crafting this time as recovery. And yet with both, there is a shaping of something integral in the process; and in that shaping, a removal of that which is no longer needed, through practice often arduous and repetitive…