Saga of a firefighter
Lifestyle FashionNot too long ago, I came to the conclusion that my life’s work has to do with the healing arts wherever they may be found. The overwhelming thing about the concept was that I found them everywhere!
All the individual roads I had thought I had been on in my life were just one big Superhighway designed to exercise, channel and direct my powers as an articulator of the world of healing arts. I was just bouncing from rail to rail, across and under rails and back, moving forward and, by the grace of the gods, not hitting anything substantial!
My obligation was to communicate what I experienced. The metaphor I kept coming back to was my time on the Pine Ridge (SD) Indian Reservation as a firefighter for sacred ceremonies. That is the person who works with the elements to prepare, maintain and energize a sacred space for others to experience the deepest part of themselves in connection with all their relationships.
Life had presented me with a myriad of gifts that could be used to help others experience themselves in new ways. Most of them were from the most powerful lesson of all; turning my personal pain into power. If there was one thread that connected all of my personal issues like cable, it would have to be I’ve been given a lot of stories to tell about this.
It took me a long time to realize that it’s all one story, the story of a firefighter. And that firefighter was asked to work with many different kinds of materials, under all kinds of different conditions. Each foray into trying to “establish” or distinguish myself in one or another specific form of the healing arts led me to yet another form that I was forced to explore and then articulate.
So the trip had to be all about exploration, right? A lot of doors closed in my face. With each one, I learned better to step around the house and look for another door to open instead of banging on the closed door to make it open again. So I found myself walking into a tremendous variety of rooms in the process. In each room I found a new fire and materials that I had to learn to work with.
After about twenty years of doing this, even I could recognize the pattern. Success or failure was irrelevant. The only important thing was that he was building a body of useful experience. It wasn’t up to me to decide its best application, or even define what “success” meant. In fact, from where I sit today, what seem like “failures” were some of my strongest teachers. “Everything will find its place,” he reassured me night after night. And he did!
I’m not going to joke about the agonizing months, sometimes years, of despair. Imagine working for nine years to make a movie you had written. Its world premiere was as the opening night movie of the 1994 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, complete with klieg lights, studio moguls, limousines, and future dead, along with up-and-coming movie stars. Being the prestigious opening night movie. accidentally it happened because of the Northridge earthquake, but that’s just one more story that led to the movie’s death on the very night of its birth!
This character called firetender is more of an aspiration than a realization. He is a spirit guide, so to speak. This firefighter is not the kind of healer people think of when they call themselves a healer with a capital “H”. He lacks bells and whistles and fancy technological instruments and drugs, and his rapping is a bit crude. He is, however, the kind of healer who can touch just about anyone. “Healing,” he says, “isn’t a big deal. We do it all the time. We just don’t do it enough!”
He also has a body full of holy scars from being burned by the flames, but with them came some knowledge anyway, of how to teach others to work safely with them.
Standing in the midst of the tools of his life, he knew the time had come to distribute the bounty of his apps to the people. He also knew that there were far more people seeking the light he offered than he could find on his own. What he could do right now was start teaching the people in his life how to use what they had taught him so that they, in turn, could offer their light to others.
That, this firefighter knew, was enough.