Aho Matakuye O'yasin! (All My Relations or We Are All Relatives)

Tatanka Oyate ti-k I ya Ate, Oyate kili, Wacin niyan oe lo Anpetu kin le wakan ca Cewaki yelo namaho wo heya hey ho

Chuc Mung Nam Moi! Happy New Year! Happy 2022! We’ve been longing to communicate with you all but sequestered ourselves — not in a Covid-19 or Omnicron way, but rather in a good way — in a great way — at my teacher Shinzen Young’s year-end/beginning retreat. This after a killer cross-country drive that took us — us being me and my Hungarian Vizsla sidekick Rosalita aka RoZie — 2,218 miles, from Midwest America, across the Great Plains to the heart of the Southwest. We left our home in South Haven, Michigan, stopped in Chicago, busted to Omaha, Nebraska, spent Christmas Eve and Christmas day a mile high in Denver, Colorado, and enjoyed one of the best meals we’ve ever eaten in Santa Fe, New Mexico. No, it’s not Paris and they don’t allow dogs at Palomas, but Roz Grrl received some serious yum in her tum at breakfast the next morning. We then completed the jaunt down to the hardpan of the Sonoran Desert, where we’ve put the tush to the cush aka our bottom up on a Zafu centered on a Zabuton for the last ten days. Not only have we reclaimed our practice, we’re in a new place, in a beautiful way, that place being Cave Creek, Arizona, our home away from home, surrounded by our loving, virtual sangha as well as some old, western cowboy friends.

En route, here’s a few things we whipped past: The Buffalo Bill and Herbert Hoover Museums, the Amana Village Colonies, the birthplace of President Gerald R. Ford (in Omaha, Nebraska), The Holy Family Shrine, War Axe State Recreation Area, the Cheyenne Zoo, Nebraska cities of Ogllala and Brulé (towns named after Lakota tribal bands), Angel Fire and Eagle’s Nest, New Mexico, Acoma and Sky City, Santa Clara Pueblo (known as the “Singing Water Village”), and the Original Pony Express Station at Exit 211, fifty miles east of North Platte, Nebraska. North Platte holds some great memories, a town where we would grab lunch every summer on the way to the Wiwanyag Wacipi Wakan Ceremony, Wiwanyag meaning the sun, Wacipi being a dance, and Wakan translating to holy or sacred, or the Sacred Sun Dance Ceremony, pounding the ground on my teacher Phil’s tribe’s land at Crowdog’s Paradise on The Rosebud Reservation in south-central South Dakota. So many stories to tell and we’ll be telling them all, with upcoming posts planned on some of Shinzen’s extraordinary dharma talks, a December 2021 class with my teacher John Ashbrook, a visit to the Denver Museum of Natural History’s Ute exhibit (the people indigenous to the land that became Colorado and where we took the pic. above) up to the celebration of Vietnam’s Tet and the upcoming exciting Year of The Tiger, or Năm Con Hổ in Vietnamese.

Having just experienced a major. major purification and deep rewiring of our subconscious mind, there’s so much to express and so much goodness to relish as well as look forward to, we’ll be back in touch soon. Until then, blessings to each and every one of you my dear readers, and again Happy, Happy 2022. Toskha, Until the Next, P + R

Our Aho Ho Hoedown + Happy Holidays 2021

We celebrated the close of the 2021 retreat season last week and segued into the season of lights. Marking the end and new year’s dawn was our annual Aho Ho Hoedown, this time a special Holiday gathering featuring a talk from our local Mycologist and Mushroom Master Anthony Michael Blowers. In sharing the good news, some people inquired “Shrooms and Santa?”, to which I’d like to clarify: Tony knows his way in the woods as well as around the kitchen, but knows little of psilocybin, the psychoactive chemical in magical mushrooms. The magic was in the storytelling, in the fanciful lore that ties together the fabled red-capped Amanita Muscaria mushroom with Santa Claus, Flying Reindeer, and Siberian Shamanic rituals.

To start, we clarified our local Northern Midwest’s Aminita Muscaria species, known as var. guessowii, that being the bright yellow to orange rather than red type, the more “petite” version found often around the wooded grounds of The Higher Haven. Out in the American West the same mushroom grows larger, sometimes to the size of a frisbee. We touched on the symbiotic relationship between mushrooms and their natural environment, the communication and sharing that occurs, as well as how this new science offers almost daily developments. But the whimsical lore is what we were truly after, the body of knowledge around the fabled Amanita Muscaria that was traditionally passed from person-to-person by word-of-mouth.

Anthony painted a 19th-century Holiday scene to fire the imagination: a tribe called the Sámi, an indigenous Finno-Ugric-speaking people inhabited the region of Sápmi, which today encompasses large northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. The word shaman comes from the Sámi, their medicine people performing rituals utilizing Aminita Muscaria and using them ceremonially with tribal members. Donning red and white-trimmed robes, they’d forage, gather and share mushrooms. These folks had a close association also with the Reindeer and wild Caribou of the Finland region, feeding, handling and harnessing the beasts through an intimately shared connection with the land. They eventually discovered that Reindeer loved Amanita Muscaria as well. After digesting them, they’d leap about, jumping around erratically, effected by the Muscimol & Ibotenic Acid found in the mushroom.

It’s all fun and games until someone drinks Reindeer pee, which actually occurred, not at our party thankfully, but back amongst the Sámis, who held that special connection to the natural world many indigenous people do. The liver processing of people and circumpolar caribou was touched upon, as was the process of drying the mushroom often used to neutralize more volatile chemicals. Drying took two forms, both related to the spirit and ritual of Christmas: one by sticking them on trees, and particularly adorning local pine trees, and secondly by stuffing specimens down into stockings, hanging them out by the fire to dry.

I think you’re getting the picture. Of course we’re discussing an area of the world with brutal winters, and so it was said the shamans would go down to the chimney to reach their patrons, with the people leaving food and sweets for them. The associations and connection to Santa and his sleigh, to the Sun God and his chariot, to the jolly physicality of St. Nicholas, and how our traditions and holidays came to be, went on. I kidded Tony that next year we’ll be donning red robes and possibly taking this gig to the next level. For now, we’re headed out for our own year-end/beginning retreat and hope you enjoy a happy, healthy start to 2022, too.

Join Us for Our Holiday Aho Ho Hoedown