Month 8, Day 22: My Earth-Healing Ceremony

Yesterday was the summer solstice, so to mark the change of seasons, I did my first bona fide Native American ritual: an Earth-healing ceremony.

Okay, so I didn’t read the fine print before I started doing the ritual. Apparently, you’re supposed to do it as a sort of “penance” for having done something wrong to the Earth.

Now, as much as I hate being out in nature, I’ve never really done anything (at least not intentionally or that I’m aware of) to hurt Mother Earth. I recycle. I try not to be wasteful. I don’t engage in strip mining or logging. I don’t even use aerosol hairspray. In general, I think I qualify as a pretty good citizen of the planet.

But I decided to do the ceremony anyway, to express my regret for all the crap you other losers are doing. (You can thank me later.)

According to writer Bobby Lake-Thom in his book Spirits of the Earth, “The Earth-Healing Ceremony is an ancient ceremony that can be done individually or in a group as a means of communicating with Nature and bonding with the Earth, and as a way to make restitution to all our relations in Nature.”

So I grabbed my boyfriend and went outside to make my restitution.

Now, you’re supposed to find a secluded spot in nature, but since I imagine the local police would frown upon the idea of me lighting a sacred fire in the park, I decided to do the ritual in my backyard.

The first step was to build a sacred circle of stones, and to build a ceremonial fire. This aspect of the ritual was the main reason I brought my boyfriend. He’s got more experience with fire than I do and he also really, really likes it. (Pyromania? Perhaps a bit.)

My not-so-raging sacred fire—and this was AFTER my boyfriend added some gasoline as an accelerant

Next, you take some pieces of wood and form them into an altar or tepee. I did my best on this part, but as you can see in the photo below, my tepee left something to be desired. I used stray dried-out branches from around my yard, reasoning that it wouldn’t exactly be “healing” to the Earth if I tore fresh branches off the trees.

My sad little tepee, to the left of the unlit fire

Then, you offer a gift of tobacco to the four directions, the Great Spirit, and Mother Earth. This is another place where my boyfriend came in handy. I quit smoking about a year ago, so I didn’t think buying tobacco would be a great idea. I know myself well enough to know that I would use precisely one cigarette’s worth of tobacco for the ritual, and then smoke myself silly for the next several hours. Luckily, my boyfriend had an old cigar lying around and was willing to sacrifice it in honor of Nature. Nice guy, right?

We lit the fire, burned the tobacco, said a prayer of thanks to Mother Earth, and apologized to Nature for all the wrongs we (and by we, I mean YOU, people!) have done, and the ritual was finished.

So now I guess I’m back on good terms with my friend Mother Nature. But I think I still need to have a long talk with her about this heat and all the damn bugs.