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A Reason to Give Thanks
Took place November 23 - 25, 2007published December 11, 2007
by Jeffrey Pierce
Thanksgiving this year was celebrated with my girlfriend, Otter's, family. After the traditional family feast on Thursday with the extended collection of relatives, we headed for her cabin in Central Oregon. The cabin is a wooden structure built by a member of the older generation. There's no electricity or running water, just plenty of fresh air and wide open skies of Oregon's high desert.
To reach the cabin from our home in Oregon's Willamette Valley required us to cross the snowy Cascade Mountains. While stopping to let the kids stretch their legs, I engaged in my annual winter tradition - walking around barefoot in the snow. I don't remember exactly when or why I adopted the tradition, only that it's how I greet the first snow I encounter each year, regardless of whether it's fallen on my hometown or packed in deep drifts on some rugged mountain peak.
No wonder my pagan nickname (yes, I was really given one) is Winter.
Jeffrey walks barefoot in the snow.
The cabin is perched on the rimrock of a dry canyon and looks back east toward the Cascades and Mt. Jefferson - one of the sacred sites that I've worked with over the course of my practice.
In the shadow of Mt. Jefferson.
It's always useful to be open to instruction, no matter how long we've been practicing. Sometimes we're taught in dreams. Sometimes we're taught by an incarnated teacher. And sometimes, we're taught by the weave of life itself.
I've been honing my knowledge of the elements and their related energy. There's an entire area of magick that I've been exploring that I refer to as elemental hybrids. Instead of calling upon the energy of one element (such as air, fire, water, or earth) I'm working on calling the energy created by the blending of two elements.
Most of the work that I do is in areas that have an abundance of water, places like temperate rainforests (such as the fairie grove) or stretches of coastline like the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary or places like a hidden sea cave. But here, in Oregon's high desert, there are different elemental combinations at work. The air is so dry that what little water that accumulates quickly evaporates into the dry air and freezes as spikes of frost, creating amazing formations of ice on nearly every available surfaces.
Spikes of frost on a tree's bare branches.
It's an interesting combination of air and water, a hybrid that I don't offer consider in the work that I do given the environments that I'm typically exposed to.
I'm tremendously blessed where family is concerned. Both Sparrow and Bear are eagerly waiting for me to begin teaching them magick. My father is incredibly open-minded and openly talks about energy and reincarnation. One of my brothers and his wife is pagan and my sister is very interested in shamanism. What's more is that Otter's family is not only accepting of my beliefs, but her mother is open-minded, curious, and very respectful of my beliefs. It was Otter's mom who read the family prayer over our feast at the cabin, a piece by Tom Barrett that begins with, "We thank the great spiritual beings who have shared their wisdom" and continues on, expressing gratitude for the opportunity to "experience sensations of a human body/mind" and gives thanks to the natural world and the "community of humankind."
Those of you who have read Old Ways for awhile probably realize that it hasn't always been this way. I was raised by Pentecostal missionaries who openly challenged my beliefs. I was reunited with my biological father in the summer of 2006 and my pagan brother and my sister who is interested in shamanism were wildly unexpected bonuses.
People often express their difficulties to me and ask how it can possibly be good when they go through such challenges. I can only point to my own path as an example. You never know how things may end up.
A dead deer or elk was half-buried in the sand near Seafield Creek, my home for the second night of the trek. While the animal had died, it gave life to so much around it. Sea gulls and ravens fed on it the entire time I was there. There were tracks from other predators that had scavenged the carcass. One death, so much life. There, in stark relief, was a reminder of the theme of death that was hinted at in the opening contrail. Life from death is a concept that's not only useful to me in letting go when I want to hold on, but in healing those wounds and ego-lessly embracing life on the other side of that death.
A solitary deer watches the early morning hikers.
During our time at the cabin, Otter led the kids and I to a small cave where we searched for bones left by various predators. While we found roughly twice the amount of bones as that reflected in the photograph below, I only took two with me - the largest bone and the tooth at the lower right.
A cluster of bones found in the debris of a small cave.
During the final day of our visit to the cabin, Sparrow stepped on a rusty nail that pushed through her shoe and punctured the skin of her foot. After soaking the foot and performing the standard first aid, I retrieved the large bone that I'd found in the cave and past it over her injury three times, tying the energy from the rusted nail to it and pulling it from her foot. I then pushed the energy from the bone to the basin of water and then poured the water over the railing of the cabin's porch and over the rim of the canyon.
The concept is pretty simple. Since the bone was already dead, tying the source of a possible infection to it killed the infection as well. Water is a great medium to transfer energy from one object to another, which is why I transferred the infection energy to the water. But then the energy has to be disposed. In many situations, you're best served to pour the water over the roots of a tree and ask the tree to ground and transmute the energy for you. Remember the spikes of frost? Everything happens for a reason. With the air so hungry for water, I entrusted the energy to the elements, knowing that the dry, frigid air would ground the energy as frost and then slowly transmute it as it evaporated in the next day's sunlight.
And of course Sparrow's foot healed quickly and without a trace of infection.