Weaving Ceremony
There are moments when a flake of ash catches my eye—on my porch, drifting down from the sky, resting quietly on the seal of the window of my green 2007 Subuaru Outback, who I affectionately call Norbert,
—and I wonder, who was that?
Bear, mouse, goat, horse, dove, dog, oak tree? Conifer? Owl? Woodpecker, moss, house, home, memory?
I begin to percolate and to write, little by little over a month of heat waves, ashen skies, and orange light. Face pressed against the glass of my living room window, safe from the flames for now, when a friend sends a report, from their home, from their friend, much farther north.
I sink to the floor.
Breathless.
They send a poem by Kim Stafford, Oregon’s ninth poet laureate, to honor the dead.
“Holy Smokes”
Downwind from where the forest burns
we inhale the cindered souls of trees
that in a whoosh became particulate
and rode the wind to enter us. With
this breath take in the spirit whisker
of a mouse, incinerate wren’s cry,
moss that leaped from green to nothing,
flailing leaf that in a fiery gasp
rushed through charcoal into dust
inside the billow of flame that roiled and –
holy, holy, holy became the smoke-smudge
pall that smuggled mountains into us.
Now freighted for life with dusky mist,
Even as we help sustain our neighbors
who lost everything but life, we survivors
are the walking shrine of little lives. We are them,
are earth mind suddenly, to weigh by human choice
what’s best for upward yearning seed of cedar,
footfall of the mouse, wingbeat of the wren.by Kim Stafford
My bones cry for ceremony. To grieve the spirits of the unnamed dead. To honor and acknowledge the loss, those who have been lost, and those of us left living and left behind.
My bones ache to stand in the streets in circle with my neighbors, most of whose names and faces and dreams and desires are unknown to me, and sing and drum and wail around a pyre—though the smell of smoke now makes me a little ill. I want to cry and remember our humanity from our bellies and our hearts. I want to remember the dead—to sing them across to the other side.
I want to write a song, but nothing I play feels quite right, so I play Wardruna’s Helvegen, a modern funeral song to honor our ancestral earth-bound human roots, to help the passing of the dead, and to remember our human-ness. It is a necessary rite of passage for both the dead and the living.
“Who will sing for me when I am gone?” Einar Selvik, the band’s frontman, said to the crowd among the Red Rocks in Colorado telling the creation story of Helvegen. “We will sing for you!” the crowd yelled back.
We will sing for you.
We will sing for you.
We are bound apart by a pandemic and propaganda, so I sing and cry and dance in my living room with my two cats. So far from you. I read and listen to our shared humanity. I join in their song. I write my poem, and I write my song. Isolated. Grieving. It is my ceremony.
What’s your song? What’s your ceremony?
Join me. Join us.
It is our ceremony.
9.18.2020