I drank like that for years. I had to, because I knew no other way around the feelings churning in my gut. I always drank down to where I couldn’t drink any more, then endured the rigours, the terror, of sobering up and re-entering the world. Because I was a binge drinker I had extended periods when I didn’t drink, and during those times hope would rise in me that maybe this time I could avoid the seemingly inevitable collision with myself that always ended in that crazy downward spiral. In those times I worked, fell in love, played and lived almost like normal people do. Except for the fact that I never changed anything, never sought a reevaluation of my attitude towards life. When the fear returned—as it always did, sometimes after a year or more, sometimes after a few months—I drank because it was the only way I knew. It was all I had ever learned about coping.
Sometimes I sought sobriety with the same desperation with which I sought a drink. When I did, I play-acted at liking it. I gave memorable performances as a journalist, radio host, husband, lover, and friend. I could have earned an Oscar if there were a category for Best Performance by an Actor in a Limited Role, because I never learned to be among people the way others do. Life, the way I lived it, had never prepared me for that. Life as a drunk had taught me that reaching out was a pushing away, not a pulling in. Instead, I only ever offered enough to be invited in from my aloneness, then lingered on the edges of the circles I joined. I liked it at the edges because escaping back to alcohol was easier from there. Far easier than when you were immersed in a life. Knee-deep even was too far for me, so I only ever offered up the minimum, the least I could get away with offering of myself to keep from being alone.
But alone is where I always ended up. I never believed that there was anything that could change that, spin my life on its axis and show me a new direction. But I was wrong. I came off a binge in Calgary, sobered up, went to work, and became very deliberate in the choices I made. Deliberate enough to put ten months together without a drink. And that’s when I met John.
John had waged his own battle with the bottle. It was a monumental struggle because he had drunk the same way I did, except he had been a daily drinker, one of those who drown themselves in it from sun-up to sunset, until they keel over in defeat or death. John had been defeated and he knew it. He had been sober more than ten years when we met and had become a teacher of the traditional ways of our people. When he met me for the first time he just smiled, shook my hand, and looked at me with a pair of deep brown eyes that seemed to see right into me. He nodded at me and clapped a hand around my shoulders. No words were spoken, but I heard him say a lot in that small gesture. John knew. He knew in the intuitive way one desperation drinker knows another—by the history stencilled on our faces, the look that makes us pariahs, outcasts amongst the normal drinkers, but tells us we’re with another of the same breed, both when we’re drinking and when we’re not. He knew about the journeys I had taken, about the search for a right place, about the people, the things, the jobs, the money, and the light that was sparked in me every now and then that I could never keep lit. When he looked at me I felt known, and I trusted him.
He was an Ojibway. That helped. Fiftyish, he was tall, lean, with grey hair he kept tied in a long ponytail. He loved to joke and tease gently. His laugh was loud and contagious. When he told a story he was capable of making the world disappear and you would feel lifted up and transported to another world for as long as that tale lasted. He was the first person I’d ever met whom I could describe as disarming—he owned that indescribable knack for scaling the walls that damaged people like me erect around ourselves.
I started to tell John the stories of where I’d been. About the times in my life when I was confused and the many times I was afraid. I told him about the great weight of not knowing where I belonged, or where I was supposed to go in life. I talked about the wandering paths of my exile. I had worked as a tavern waiter, serving beer to longshoremen and the sailors who worked on the shipping lanes of the St. Lawrence River, and as a labourer on construction sites; I had pushed huge sleds filled with raw steel plates around a factory floor, planted trees, levelled railroad tracks, been a radio disc jockey, newspaper reporter, television host and producer, and I had mopped floors. Through all of these jobs I was looking for my place. But I’d never found it.
I tried living in different places: Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Ottawa, Kenora, Minaki, and a lot of smaller places for brief periods of time. In my younger days I hitchhiked around the country three times, looking for that one place I knew I could feel at peace, whole and content. I saw a lot of Canada, met a lot of people, did a lot of things, but I never found that one place.
But I came close many times. I would be in a place and it would feel right. I would feel right. One time it was on a high spire of rock in front of a waterfall in the Rocky Mountains. The cliffs on either side of me dropped away suddenly and the place where I stood was about the size of a tabletop. The water poured over the face of those cliffs about twenty feet in front of my face and there was a mystical feeling of emptiness in that span of twenty feet—an emptiness and a fullness at the same time. I could have stepped off and dropped straight down for hundreds of feet, landing in the swirling waters of turquoise, white, and silver. The mist was like pellets of mercury—icy cold against my face. The mountains were gathered around me like the heads and shoulders of friends, and there was no one else around for miles. It was just me and Creation in all its purity and I felt right. I stayed in that spot for hours just absorbing it all, hoping that I could carry some part of it back into the world with me, some part that would let me feel that way wherever I wound up. I couldn’t.
Still other times I would be at a play, a concert, a movie, or reading a book somewhere, and I would become so wrapped up in it all, in the sheer joy of experiencing someone’s magic spread out before me, that I would feel content and safe. The magic that is creativity would spark a light in me, a light that I found in literature, in the brush strokes of great painters, in music, dance, theatre, and film. When I was lost in that generous spirit, I would drink it all in, hoping that I could carry some part of it back into the world with me, some small part that would allow me to feel that rightness, that security, wherever I wound up. I couldn’t.
I tried finding rightness in money, cars, clothes, and all the bright and shiny things of the world. But they were only ever things, and I learned that things fade, get old, fall out of fashion, become uncool, unhip, unspectacular and incapable of giving a feeling of rightness anymore.
I told John all of that. Later, after I saw that he avoided judging me for what I said, and only murmured in agreement or recognition as I spoke, I told him about the booze. We began to talk. Real conversations that dizzied me in the ease with which they emerged from the great silence my life had been until then. In the beginning, these talks weren’t big ones. In fact, they made me feel like a little kid again. When you’re a kid and you have something you really, really want to say but can’t find the words for, you spend a lot of time doodling around in the sand with your toe. With John, at first, I did a lot of doodling around.
But he brought me out, mainly through jokes and stories, and it wasn’t long before we were sharing our experiences. I felt like an equal. He allowed me to feel like someone who really mattered. Finally, I was someone who counted, although I had much to learn. John, like any good teacher, made me curious about my feelings, my mysteries, my maps and territories. And like good teachers do, he gave me a compass that led me to explore further than I had before. John did that for me.
He talked to me about the traditions and teachings of our people and how they might just work for me in today’s world if I was strong enough to try them. We’d walk through the foothills or the prairies and he would point things out to me and explain how our people understood them. Things like how the prairie grasses symbolized humility, how the mountain symbols painted on a teepee represented faith, why the eagle is such a revered and honoured
creature. He talked about the four sacred medicines—sweet grass, tobacco, sage, and cedar—and how they came to be delivered to the people and what they were used for. He explained how much the world had changed in his lifetime and the lifetimes of others of his generation, and how change affected the lives of our people across the country. He explained the nature of traditional life in the tribal times before the settlers came. He told me how important it was for our people to reconnect to those old ways of being so that they might sustain us through even more difficult changes to come. These things and more he explained to me.
When I had questions, which was most of the time, he would explain quietly and humbly what he knew of these things. I never felt he was talking down to me during those conversations. Instead, I felt included, as though these teachings had always belonged to me and I was simply being reminded of them, not lectured to. I loved him for that. When my questions became more pointed, more direct and probing, he figured that I had learned enough to understand at a deeper level and he started to teach me about ceremony.
A ceremony is a very simple thing, I remember him telling me. It’s a way of talking to the Creator—Gitchee Manitou in the Ojibway language. It’s a way to line up your life and how you live it with the simple way of the heart.
Before he explained this to me I had believed that a ceremony was something that would intimidate me, something that would make me feel small, something I should fear. But I learned that a ceremony makes you bigger. It gives you power. It clears your heart, mind, spirit, eyes, ears, and mouth so you can experience the world as it is, not as it’s taught to you or as it seems to be sometimes. A ceremony is an act of love, John said. Ojibway ceremonies, when they’re done the right way with the right intention, are meant to help you know and understand yourself and your place in the universe.
To get me ready for the arrival of ceremony in my life, John explained the Medicine Wheel. I’d heard of it before, but like so many of the traditional ways of my people, I really had no idea of what it meant. I had some vague, romantic notion that it was an item of regalia to be worn on my chest, a tattoo maybe, or some mysterious object to hang on my wall that would protect me from all kinds of evil things.
“A Medicine Wheel is like a map,” he said.
“To lead me where?” I asked.
“To where you live.”
“You mean my home?”
“Yes. Where you live. Your insides. The Medicine Wheel acts like a guide to take you there,” he replied.
“And why would I need a map for that? Can’t I just find the way on my own?”
“Well, we human beings like to think we can,” he said. “We all like to believe that we can discover the necessary truths on our own—but we can’t. Like it or nor not, we need help, and the Medicine Wheel is one of the greatest tools our people have to help us find our individual truths.”
He went on to explain that a Medicine Wheel was a circle divided into four segments, each representing a direction from the physical world, our Mother Earth. The east, the direction of the rising sun, is the place of illumination, and its gift is innocence. The south is the direction that receives the most light from the sun and is the place of growth. Its gift is humility and trust. In the west, the sun sets and is the place where introspection happens in the long night to follow. The gift of the west is honesty. The north is the place of truth. After travelling the other three directions and looking at his life, the traveller who arrives in the north is graced with the gift of wisdom.
“You look at your life, where you’ve been, what you’ve done, how you felt about it all. That’s how you travel the Medicine Wheel,” John said. “The four directions also represent body, emotions, mind, and spirit. When you look back over your life, you look at the four parts of yourself and you gain wisdom. You find your truth.”
“I don’t get it. Where is this Wheel? Do I have to go somewhere to start making my way around it?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “You can use the Wheel and its teachings anywhere. It’s inside you where all truth is. You just need to be willing to look for it. If you want to learn about yourself and your life you can walk the Wheel anywhere. And that’s exactly what I have in mind for you.”
He went on to tell me that it was important for me to perform a ceremony for myself, one that would enable me to experience what it was like to use the Medicine Wheel and its teachings in my life. Rather than spend an agonizing time talking about these life teachings and how they applied to me, John wanted me to do a ceremony on my own that would make the Medicine Wheel clear to me. I was to gather a yard of white cotton cloth that I would cut into as many small squares as possible. Then, I was to gather some white thread, tobacco, a blanket, and a large canteen. When I had these things I was to let him know. I trusted John, though it felt odd to follow directions without a full explanation. But I believed that a collection of things as seemingly harmless as what he was asking for couldn’t bring too fearful a result, so I went along.
“Is there some place you know that’s special for you?” he asked when I had gathered all of the materials.
“Yes,” I said, without a lot of thought.
There was a hill where I had been going for a month or so to watch sunsets. The hill faced the Rocky Mountains, which were only about twenty miles away. I’d found it by accident one day while driving aimlessly about. Maybe the Ojibway in me, the part that remembered a home territory much like this, with high craggy cliffs and thick bush enveloped in a huge, tangible silence, was attracted to that setting. I don’t know. But I do know that it was one of those places that felt right, and I’d returned again and again.
To get to the top I needed to park my car by the side of a gravel road and walk about half a mile around and up to a small copse of trees where there was an outcropping of rock with a ledge from which I could dangle my feet. The drop from that ledge to the road was more than two hundred feet and I had seen eagles and hawks soar between me and the road below. It’s an eerie feeling when you see great birds from above, and eerier still when they make their silent passes against a backdrop of coyote howls from the hoodoos and hills all around you. There were bears in that territory, too, though I hadn’t seen any during my visits to the hill.
I’d sit there silently and watch the sun fade into the arms of the Rockies and then make my way back down in the gathering darkness, filled with a sense of mystery and a foreign calm that always lessened the closer I got to the city of Calgary again.
“Sounds like it’s the right place, then,” John said.
We drove out together late one morning. It was summer, and the brilliance of the sun seemed to fill everything we passed with a vibrant energy so that the world was virtually quivering with life. I was vibrating, too, but with a different energy. I was anxious and uncertain and the fact that John didn’t talk much on the drive unsettled me further. I sensed that what he was about to ask me to do was a big enough matter that small talk seemed insignificant in the face of it. I felt the knot of apprehension grow in my belly. When we got to the hill we walked to the top of it in the same dense silence.
At the ledge he drew a large circle on the ground with his walking stick. To the west I could see the Rocky Mountains, and I could follow their ragged sweep to the south and north over foothills thick with trees. Eastward, forest, rock, and the huge bowl of the sky hovered over the great plains. The road looked like a pale grey ribbon from that height, and John’s car was a small dot of colour at the base of the hill. I felt distant from everything at that moment. When he’d finished inscribing the circle, John told me to sit in it with all my articles.
“This will be your home for the next four days,” he said. “You can’t step out of this circle for any reason. That meal we ate in town is the last food you’ll have for that length of time, and the water you carried in has got to last you through.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I would have no fire. I would have nothing to read. My job for the next four
days was to sit in that circle and look around at the world. I was to pay strict attention and think about my life.
“Each time you think of something in this world and in your life that you are thankful for, you put tobacco in the cloth and tie it,” John instructed. “You look around you and you think. Go back to things, places, people. Try to remember how you felt at certain times in your life. It might be hard—you may cry, you may want to run away—but if you stay and do this thing, you’ll find things to be thankful for. You’ll learn what it means to have gratitude and you’ll make a pouch for each of them.”
The pouches were to be tied together with the thread until they formed a long chain. “Then what?” I asked.
“I’ll let you know,” was all he said.
It seemed like a huge demand. To go without food and shelter was nothing new to me. I’d been homeless on a few occasions in my life and sleeping outdoors was hardly a new experience. But to do so by choice was different. I was suddenly very afraid. The fear came from the idea of being alone and powerless on a hill far removed from the things I’d learned to take for granted in the cities where I’d lived. This was going to just be me, armed with nothing, alone in a world that suddenly seemed untamed and unpredictable, far wilder than it ever had before. I was going to be left alone with myself—and it terrified me.
My mind raced. For the next ninety-six hours I was to be silent. I could pray aloud if I felt like it, or I could even sing a prayer song, but beyond that I was to remain silent. John told me that the circle I sat in represented life and because of that I needed to be very respectful. I could not kill anything in that circle. If I needed to relieve myself I would have to bury my waste and keep the circle as clean and as pure as possible. The blanket was all the protection I would have. When I grew hungry and uncomfortable I was to pray and let Creation know how I was feeling, but not to ask for anything but the strength to see this ceremony through to its end.
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