The Big Trip: Equinox

After the Inipi ceremony and the evening with Virgil, I needed a day to process everything. I left St. Paul after breakfast, and wandered around southern Minnesota on country roads and headed toward Mankato.

Mankato is a Lakota word meaning “blue earth,” and (perhaps not surprisingly) it’s located in Blue Earth county. Now, I had visited Mankato fifteen, maybe seventeen, years earlier. I lived in St. Croix for my high school and college years, and my summer job for several years running was to work in a Christian bookstore run by a missionary couple, Gary and his wife Marty. So during Thanksgiving break at college one year, I didn’t have enough money to fly back home to St. Croix, so

my employers arranged for me to spend the holiday with Marty’s parents on a farm in southwestern Minnesota.

Back then it was a long bus ride from Minneapolis to tiny Mankato, which seemed at the time to be the last outpost of civilization, then an even longer ride to the snowy prairie wilds where Marty’s father gave me a toboggan ride over his fallow cornfields, pulling me along by his tractor. It was a lovely time. The trip back to college, however, was a disaster; my bus to Mankato turned over in a ditch, and we slept on the floor in a bus station overnight.

Today’s trip through Mankato was uneventful, and the city had grown tremendously in the intervening years; their website would indicate that the growth has continued unabated. I ate some lunch and wrote some postcards at the Blue Earth County Fairgrounds in Garden City. I passed through Good Thunder. And I got lost, winding up in Amboy not once but twice.

The second time, I was disconcerted by a jackrabbit crossing the road. I don’t know that I had seen a jackrabbit before, but I was impressed how very much bigger it was than a regular rabbit. Huge feet and back legs, and ears that looked like they were going all the way to heaven—white ears, with a sort of black elongated spot on the back. And he was just crossing the road, casually, rather like Morty the moose on Northern Exposure. It was quite exciting. I just wanted to tell you that.

Saw my first wild turkeys, too. Incredibly long necks.

On this leg of the journey I was listening to a tape of Lynn V. Andrews’s Medicine Woman. I have tremendous ambivalence about Andrews; she was the first person I heard described as a “plastic shaman,” and her books have been thoroughly discredited as being mostly fiction. But she came along at a time when I was being strongly drawn to Native American spirituality, and while something in me doubted her veracity even then, it was important for me to hear those stories, and immerse myself in that worldview.

One odd reaction, though: the further afield I went spiritually, the more I felt reaffirmed as a Christian. Not so much in tenets to believe or disbelieve, but in the religious grounding I had received. Looking back now, I’m not sure whether this was an instinctual, protective reaction against being pulled into unfamiliar spiritual waters, or whether it was a simple reaffirmation of what I truly believed. But whatever the cause, I concluded that my experience of God was genuine, had been genuine, would still be genuine, whether that experience took place in a church among friends, or on the windswept Plains, alone or among strangers.

I found myself in the town of Butterfield, where they had a public park that welcomed campers. There were a few other campers, but mine was the only tent. It stormed that night, I remember, the first of several dramatic weather events on my trip, but I fell asleep feeling tremendously cozy and content.

Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday. Today you’ll see a strange sight: people walking around with smudges on their foreheads, like gray bindis over their third eyes, or like someone stubbed out a cigarette on them. These are people who have come from an Ash Wednesday service that begins the forty days of Lent.

Early in the service, ashes from burned palm fronds, leftovers from the previous year’s Palm Sunday celebration, are placed on the worshipers’ foreheads.

Sometimes the smudge looks like a small cross, sometimes it’s just a smudge. As the ashes are imposed, the minister says, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.

I never went in for the whole Lenten penitential/self-abnegation thing. For me, Ash Wednesday was more existential. It was a meditation about mortality, about our connection to the earth, about our union with everything that lives, about impermanence. Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.

I also like that it comes the day after Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday,” the day of feasting before the traditional Lenten fast. I like that it’s the last day of the Carnival season, a heady Bacchanalia in most parts of the world. I especially like that “Carnival” is derived from the Latin carne vale: “Farewell, flesh!”—as apt an adieu to physical existence as it is to meat during the fast.

My private annual ritual always includes a reading of T.S. Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday,” a poem that powerfully captures both my anxiety and my hope. It begins:

Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know The infirm glory of the positive hour Because I do not think Because I know I shall not know The one veritable transitory power Because I cannot drink There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are . . . .

Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

The Big Trip: The Day My Life Changed

The drive itself took, what, fifteen minutes? Twenty at most. At the time, St. Paul was definitely

Minneapolis’s poorer, more down-at-heels twin. Now it’s described as a somewhat bookish brother to Minneapolis in that it is festooned with small liberal arts colleges, tightly adherent to tradition, fastidious in its street level presentation, and less interested in the high-rise, glass-sheathed architecture meant to be appreciated by “angels and aviators.”

I arrived early at Mazakute Episcopal Mission, which was named for Paul Mazakute, the first Native American ordained in the Episcopal Church. I nervously entered the small church in the run-down part of town, and searched for the Rev. Virgil Foote, with whom I had scheduled an interview for The Witness magazine (which sadly ceased publication in 2003 at the age of 86). Foote is a Lakota, and his wife Kathleen, also an Episcopal priest, is white. Together they ministered in this little church to a blended congregation: about 70% of them were Native Americans of several different tribes, the rest white, black, and Latino. They said their ministry represented the place where the Red Road and the White Road cross.

The service itself was a conventional Rite II liturgy, with a few significant adaptations. The priests were careful to take off their shoes before stepping up behind the altar, since it was sacred ground. They used a mixture of sage and sweetgrass in the thurible in place of the more common frankincense or Jerusalem incense. There were medicine flags behind the altar on either size of the cross, gifts from the medicine men and women of Standing Rock and Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations. And drums accompanied the Prayers of the People, which were read in several different languages.

I was warmly received at the coffee hour afterwards, which was really more of a potluck lunch. Then Virgil astounded me by inviting me to the congregation’s Inipi, or sweat lodge ceremony (one of the seven sacred rites of the Lakota), which they conduct most Sunday afternoons after the service. Of course I leapt at the chance.

We drove to the sweat lodge, which the congregation had constructed the year before,

and while the fire-tenders made a large fire in a large firepit, and heated volcanic stones that retained heat especially well, the rest of us made prayer bundles of tobacco, one tiny pouch per prayer. Some of them we offered to the fire; some we carried with us into the lodge.

The fire-heated stones are brought into the lodge and placed in the center, in a pit. Water is poured on the stones periodically to create steam. The temperature in the lodge was higher than any sauna or steam room I’ve ever experienced—hotter than anything I’ve experienced—and after the flap was closed and we were in pitch darkness, it was a case of extreme sensory deprivation: no light, no oxygen, no water.

Four times during the ceremony—at the end of each of the four “rounds,” one for self-purification, one for healing, one for calling the spirits, and one for gratitude—the flap is opened, and we breathe for a few moments, and a ladle of water is passed around; but that one ladle must be shared by all, so one is constantly torn between desperate thirst and putting someone else’s need ahead of your own. Each successive round, the lodge gets hotter and hotter.

Prayer are said, in English and in Lakota. Songs are sung. The grandfathers—the stones themselves—are honored and thanked. The sacred pipe is smoked and passed. In that extraordinary heat and darkness, visions are not uncommon. The ceremony lasts for a good two hours.

Beyond that, tradition dictates that nothing said inside an Inipi can be repeated outside the lodge. The sacred setting and complete anonymity allowed us to share with greater intimacy than in any other group setting I’ve ever encountered.

We finished not long before sunset. Cool air. Water. Light. Gifts of incaculable wealth. The sense of connectedness—to the spirits, to the Great Spirit, to the earth, to one another—was overwhelming.

It made you want to sit very quietly for a long while.

That evening at their home, I interviewed Virgil and his wife Kathleen. Perhaps I’ll post the complete interview sometime. But what I really learned from them is hard, even now, to articulate.

I learned that thoughts and words are far more powerful than we could imagine.

I learned that wise people of every religion realize that the truth is found in every spiritual tradition—it’s only the language and the external symbols that are different, and once we understand the underlying reality, division ceases to exist.

And once again, I learned that sometimes the simplest questions can dig out of us the most hidden of hopes. At the end of the evening, for example, the Footes asked me if I understood the content of the vision that came to me when I had my initatory out-of-body experience. I told them, in a small, hesitant voice, that I thought it meant I was being called to be a healer. But, I said, I don’t know what form that would take or what it would look like. They suggested I visit a medicine man friend of theirs at Pine Ridge when I drove through South Dakota.

We offered a few more prayers with the sacred pipe, then I headed on my way. I ended up in an overpriced motel in St. Paul at midnight. Was I miserable because I was tired and the place wasn’t worth a quarter of what I had to pay? Or was it because I had caught a glimpse of something that was to completely alter my perspective on life, religion, and reality, and I didn’t want to go back to the ordinary world quite so suddenly?