At my first Native American sweat lodge, steam pressed on my sweaty skin as I sat in the pitch dark, womblike hut of willow branches covered in blankets. Water splashed onto red hot volcanic rocks, which hissed and sputtered as they turned liquid into vapor. The water pourer began an incantation, “Thank you for breathing. Thank you because the sun remembered to rise today…”
Giving thanks for breathing felt silly at first. The judgmental commentary in my mind was like, “I guess there's nothing too small to merit thanks.” But breathing is not a small thing. Breathing keeps us alive, and the lack of breathing is what is killing people from COVID-19.
And yet, when was the last time you gave thanks for breathing? Has this crisis made you grateful for things you haven’t appreciated in a long time?
Ceasing to take things for granted is a gift that many of us are receiving now. Confronted with our mortality and that of the people we love, the thorny virus is making it clear that nothing in this life is guaranteed. What we have, we can lose. And loss has a way of sharply bringing into focus what we most value.
The best drink of water I ever tasted came after another sweat lodge. The summer I graduated from Social Work school, I participated in a series of ceremonies with a Bolivian shaman in the Oregon mountains. We drank plant medicine in the evening, which made us throw up. We ingested no food or water while staying up all night in ceremony. At dawn we entered the sweat lodge and did four long, extremely hot rounds of prayer that took me to the limit of my physical endurance.
Emerging back into the light, the cool pine-scented air, the sun dappling the ground in synchrony with the swish of wind through leaves, the happy song of birds, miraculous. The world seemed made new. And still the shaman said, “Do not drink water for an hour, and when you do drink, do it slowly, gently. No guzzling.”
I was deliriously thirsty, daydreaming of opening my mouth under waterfalls. But I waited.
That first sip of water knocked me to the ground in a prayer of thanks. I understood down to my very cells the importance of water. As the Lakota say, "Water is life."
Take a breath with me. Drink a glass of pure, clear water with me. Let us give thanks for what we still have.
Does this quarantine have you yearning for freedom to visit your mother or your child? To hug your friends? To eat at your favorite restaurant? To just go wherever you want?
I understand. I am writing this on a notepad I keep in my purse, while I wait in line to enter Staff of Life, my go-to natural food store. Each customer stands on a sticker that tells us we are exactly 6 feet away from each other. It's inconvenient. It's taking a long time. But as I stand here with a sore back, scribbling, I think of how the drug wars back home in Mexico stole everyone's freedom and resources and forced a whole society to live in a years-long quarantine of fear for their lives.
In my hometown, my sister's restaurant was the favorite of many, but when she was targeted for extortion by a drug cartel, my family was forced to pack up the restaurant and move. My nephew, who has a complex disability, used to benefit from horse therapy, but when the shootings began and corpses appeared on the streets with vultures overhead, it was no longer safe to go to the horse ranch at the edge of town. My niece spent her first two years at home. In a country were girls are routinely kidnapped, trafficked and killed, my sister never once took her on a stroller walk through the neighborhood. We have grieved loss upon loss.
More than anything, I am aching to visit my mother. I want to sit at her kitchen table eating tamales with salsa and telling old family stories. I want my daughter to feel her grandma's hugs, but that has only happened a handful of times. We seldom travel to visit my family, and when we do, we stay in. Since the drug wars took over my homeland, every visit with my family has me wondering... will this be the last?
When I was a little girl my family took lots of road trips all over Mexico and Guatemala. Sipping coconut water on the beach, napping on a hammock, climbing every pyramid, hiking in the forest, eating every kind of tamal with every kind of salsa, strolling through every market full of riotous color, these are the memories I treasure.
Now, when I drive home to Felton from Santa Cruz through the beautiful redwood forest I sometimes weep. I grieve for all the precious places in Mexico that the drug wars have taken from us: my grandmother’s farm, the river where we swam as children, my uncle’s mango grove. And I give thanks that, for the moment, I can still enjoy this taste of freedom, my hair whipping around my face, as I smell the sweet mountain air.
Beloved poet and shaman Martin Prechtel writes, “Grief expressed out loud for someone … or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”
What he calls praise, I call gratitude, and like him I see the dance of gratitude and grief as two sides of an eternally spinning coin. No matter how this crisis unfolds, we know for sure that some of us won't be here when it's over. The Coronavirus has tumbled us into a dark night of the soul where we are confronting our mortality. All spiritual traditions tell us that the way to die well, is to live fully and without regret. And the secret to living a life free of regret is to appreciate all that you have by exercising gratitude, and to honor all that you’ve lost by letting yourself grieve. Hug your loved ones if you can, and speak your love to those you can't. Let yourself weep, have a little funeral for those dreams and expectations that will never come to pass, for the world will never be the same after this.
I hope to see you on the other side, and when we meet again, I shall be so grateful.
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