The gift of medicine

By Richard Wagamese

In our home we start every day with meditation, prayer and a smudge with ceremonial medicines. Before we do anything we do this. We use sweet grass, sage, cedar and tobacco. It’s held in an abalone bowl, lit with a wooden match and fanned with a traditional eagle wing fan.

I bless my wife with it and then myself and then, in slow, measured, solemn steps, I carry that sacred medicine around the rooms of our home. I say a prayer as I have been taught. I offer thanks for everything that is present in my world and ask for nothing more.

Then when life gets hold of us, when the busyness and the issues of our life lays hold of our day and tugs it in wholly different directions, we’ll walk through a waft of that medicine and remember. We remember how we started the day – and we’re calmed.

That’s the particular gift of medicine – it reminds us that we went to ceremony, we went to prayer, we went to peace and it allows us to bring those moments into the ongoing moments of our days and our lives. Or, at least, to try our best to.

The smoke and scent inhabit a room. It lingers on your clothes. It clings to your hair. When the travels of your day get you weary or irritated or anxious, there’s always that frail scent of medicine to bring you to ceremony one more time.

Medicine burns when touched by fire. The smoke climbs higher, curling into the corners of the room where you sit watching it, following it with your eyes and there’s a feeling like desire at your belly and a cry ready at your throat.

There’s a point where smoke will disappear and the elders say that this is where the Old Ones wait to hear you, your petitions and your prayers, the Spirit World where all things return to balance and time is reduced to dream.

It vanishes. There’s a silence more profound than any words you’ve ever heard or read and when you close your eyes you feel the weight of ancient hands upon your shoulders and your brow and the sacred smoke comes to inhabit you and in its burn and smolder, a returning to the energy you were born in – and the room is filled with you.
That’s the gift of medicine.