Turning Toward
the Mystery

Before the moon rose to a height that dimmed the constellations, I stood in awe.

As she continued to rise higher and higher in her fullness, the dark silhouettes of the peaks loomed with a reassuring comfort above us. I searched out constellations — Orion, Ursa Major — and stars...

I finally blinked, took a deep breath and held my fingers up to the night sky. In the space covered by just one of my thumbnails were 100,000 galaxies.

I reminded myself that I am a speck that lives on the tip of an ever-expanding universe, the surface of a vast and constantly inflating balloon. Another deep breath. Perpetual awe...

"To go into solitude, a person needs to retire as much from their chamber as from society," Emerson wrote. "I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a person would be alone, let them look at the moon and the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between one and what one touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give one, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime."

Coming back into my body, I found myself peering out to where I imagined the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy to be.

"This supermassive black hole," Chris Hedges explains, "has perhaps 4 million times the mass of the sun and is 25,000 light-years from Earth. It is a place where space and time bend until time stops, where all our equations and understanding of the physical universe no longer make sense, where what we perceive as reality is overthrown."

Completely nonlinear. Uncolonized.

"Light, trapped inside, cannot escape. No physicist can explain the internal dynamics of a black hole. Yet it seems probable that 13.8 billion years ago a black hole exploded and caused the universe to be created. At the core of a black hole, from all we can determine, lies the infinite — or perhaps portals to other places in the universe."

No one knows.

The world does not fit into the rational boxes we construct. It is beyond our control and finally our comprehension. Human beings are not the measure of all things.

One of my biggest initiations into the Mystery transpired seven years ago, during a journey that led me here, to Montana, for the first time. I was filming a commemorative horseback ride retracing the Cheyenne Outbreak. The webseries, ironically titled, The Ride Home.

While the journey itself is a story for another time, I long to share a particular part that is forever etched in my being.

He is my dear friend, a young Cheyenne man with a trickster spirit and beautifully tender heart, named Alexander Little Coyote.

Alex was only 17 years old when our paths crossed and we unknowingly embarked on this sacred journey together. During the summer of 2012, we traversed the middle of America, fully immersed in Nature, sleeping on the Earth, circling daily, holding ritual at "battle fields" that in truth, are massacre sites, all the while being guided by the indigenous grandmothers, and the horses, and of course, the unseen.

A walking prayer.

Every day, intimately watching, seemingly communing with storms, the intensity of which I'd never experienced. Wholly witnessing the wrath of Nature.

The Ride Home was my initiation into the nonlinear, the uncolonized, the divine feminine. The true wild.

It was also an initiation into the most unlikely of friendships.

As I'm typing this, I recall sifting through footage and happening upon an informal moment with Alex. He is talking to me off camera about the "statistics" he was facing as a Native youth, and the disproportionately high chances he has of being incarcerated, drug-addicted or even committing suicide. With his characteristic teenage bravado he then insisted that he would be going to jail, at some point in his life.

I ask Alex why he thinks that this is inevitable. He pauses, looking down and dropping his "tough guy" act just long enough to whisper,

This is the same 17-year-old boy that moved me with a wisdom and steadiness beyond his years during our time together.

This is the same young man who, in one year, taught me more about tradition, friendship, loyalty and trust than I had ever previously known.

Now, I have two young boys of my own. A week ago, we celebrated their birthdays — one turned six and the other, two. My husband and I chose to name our youngest Ethan Alexander, in honor of Alex Little Coyote.

It is surreal that this past Saturday marked the 6th anniversary of Alex's death. While walking on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation on November 2, 2013, Alex was tragically struck and killed by a drunk driver.

Another circle around the sun, and without fail, a sense of deep longing and grief arrived at my doorstep this past weekend, greeting me like old friends. Writing this to you is my way of opening the door and greeting them.

I've come to understand that it would be a disservice to not share Alex with you. It would also be a disservice to look at Alex's death as an accident; likewise the endemic of tragedy among Indian youth, paired with internalized oppression, cannot be looked at in a historical vacuum.

Those whose lives pay homage to the mystery, to the sacred — such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than cash and products — could not be accommodated in modern culture, therefore devalued, dehumanized and ultimately done away with.

On the other hand, those who live disconnected from the sources of life, who neither fear nor honor nor understand the power of Nature, who place their faith in human technology and align, albeit unconsciously, with the ethic of exploitation, the cult of the self and lust for demented growth, are deemed of value.

"All that concerns itself with beauty and truth, with those forces that have the power to transform us, is being steadily extinguished. All life is finite. All life is fragile. The ecosystem on Earth will die. It will be slain by our failure to protect it, or it will succumb to the vast array of natural forces, from colliding asteroids to exploding stars — including, one day, our sun — which turn into supernovas and throw out high-energy radiation, that have doomed countless planets in the 100 billion galaxies beyond ours. We have lost the capacity for reverence. We slew those who tried to warn us. Now we slay ourselves."

This is at the heart of why I practice.

Placing this story on the altar.