Descending the Warrior Mountain
Months after I published Befriend Your Inner B*tch, I came across a Cree “Life-Path” story shared by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira in Hospicing Modernity, with permission from Cree elder John Crier. It’s about four mountains representing four stages of life.
It spoke to me, and by the time the story had me descending the second of the four mountains, the Warrior Mountain, I had tears in my eyes.
The Warrior Mountain is where you find “your unique gifts, the unique medicines you bring that eventually you will learn to put to use as they are needed.” But you can get lost there: “you could just be living in your own bubble, walking in circles without direction, for the longest time.”¹
For over twenty years I’ve been chasing an intuition that I could earn a living doing things I love, am good at, and that are useful. Things that would sustain and nourish me even as they paid my bills and met a need in the world.
In line with this, at the end of Befriend Your Inner B*tch I quoted Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass:
“Each plant does what it does in order to increase its own growth. But as it happens, when the individuals flourish, so does the whole. The way of three sisters reminds me of one of the most important teachings of our people. The most important thing each of us can know is our unique gift and how to use it in the world. Individuality is cherished and nurtured because in order for the whole to flourish, each of has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction.”²
However, while part of me felt this was true, another part of me saw it as idealistic, and unlikely to be possible.
The tears that came as the story of the four mountains took me down Warrior Mountain were from that second part of me — the non-believer. And the feeling was relief. As I listened, the story was both mapping my experience and offering something new: guidance. When it spoke of those who have gotten lost circling Warrior Mountain, I recognised myself — me telling myself I was on track while actually, across many years and in a range of contexts, I had been caught up in proving my on-trackness to other people.
The story also spoke to what my long illness had given me — the illness that preceded me publishing Befriend Your Inner B*tch. These were the story’s words:
“Right around the corner from that difficult part of the path there is a clearing, but you can only see it when you are already exhausted from fighting with your shadows and the shadows of the trees. In this clearing you can rest, you can fast, you can breathe, you can observe, you can hear your heartbeat synchronise with the heartbeat of the earth … If you manage to quiet your spirit and become humble before the land, you may be contacted by the spirits who know what you need, the next steps you must take, and the seedlings of the gifts and medicines you have inside you.
From that point of contact onwards, your medicines start to grow and to work through you and at least half of the fears and insecurities disappear. On the way down this mountain, you develop familiarity and closeness with your gifts and your medicines, you learn as much as possible about them, and this feels really good in a surprising way.”¹
As I listened, I reflected on the feeling that writing and publishing Befriend Your Inner B*tch had given me; a wholesome, nourishing feeling. But I was being pulled to notice something else as well. Its wisdom — which I had come to know inside out — had been helping me find my way. In the map of the story, it felt true to say that it had helped me break free from the toxic traps that kept me circling warrior mountain (“the difficult part of the path”). If people have medicines, maybe this was one of mine.
Do people have medicines?
Do I?
The difference between believing that, if nurtured, something wholesome will grow from the soil within you — something that will nourish both you and others — and believing that your passions are side-quests, to be indulged only when work and life give you time, feels huge.
In Sand Talk, indigenous author Tyson Yunkaporta writes that in the adolescent culture of modernity, people often find themselves asking what the purpose of their life is. His answer is simple: our purpose is to act as custodians of reality.³
I hear this as encouragement to pay careful attention to all that we see, feel and understand; and to delicately shepherd it towards a loving future. Each of us would play our part by learning about our unique medicines, and bringing them to work alongside those of others, in increasingly sophisticated blends.
For me, these indigenous stories and reflections help to lift me out of the banality that modern life can become. A banality where my life is segmented into blunt chunks; career, family and free-time. Each one with a more or less routine set of chore-like tasks, and all the three of them, the filling of a sandwich. A sandwich where the bottom slice of bread is a background disappointment of “there-must-be-more-than-this”, and the top slice of bread is the fear that to drop any of the balls is to risk various flavours of personal loss. (For example loss of health, home, my child’s wellbeing; or in general, the loss of the rigid, fragile structure that just about sustains normalcy.)
In the lifted place, I still want a house, my health, my son’s wellbeing, but not as a list that I’m scared of jeopardising. Not as blocky too-close skyscrapers dominating my internal horizons. Rather, when I experience a genuine belief that I have unique medicines I’m being asked to bring, medicines which I can use to “contribute to the well-being of my family, my community, the land, and all relations” – medicines I must learn how to integrate along with those of others – I feel an engaged hope. Life is a gift, and I am here, playing a small but unique part in how it’s unfolding.
The tears that came as I was listening to the Four Mountains story were from relief; the relief that accompanied my growing belief in this way of seeing. And it was the depth and rigour of the Four Mountains story – so full of indigenous wisdom – that took me there.
One final observation: in writing the latter part of this piece, I’ve been intentionally moving back and forth between two alternative ways of experiencing life. It’s been hard, and that has itself been illuminating. Blocky skyscraper me has wanted to ridicule unique medicine me. But the humiliation feels worth it, once I’ve found her again.
In my day-to-day life, I’m still agnostic as to whether spirit can – or even is – guiding me to share my unique medicines, but I am committed to listening. I want to find out.
References
- Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity (2021), drawing on a Cree life-path story shared with permission from Cree elder John Crier. (Chapter 7, Living and Dying Well).
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013).
- Tyson Yunkaporta, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (2019).
Mind Shepard 