The Saga of a firetender

Not terribly long ago, I came to the conclusion that my life's work stands for the healing arts wherever they are found. The amusing thing about the concept was that I found them everywhere!

That's when I realized that all of the individual paths that I had thought I had been on in my life were just one big Superhighway designed to exercise, channel and direct my powers as an articulator of my experience in the healing arts. I just happened to be bouncing from guardrail to guardrail, across and under lanes and back again, moving forward, and by the grace of the Gods, not hitting anything substantial.

It was not my choice to see everything as a reflection of healing, rather, it was my obligation to communicate what I saw. The metaphor I kept coming back to was my experience on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation (SD) as firetender for sacred ceremonies. That's the person who works with the elements he or she is given to prepare, maintain, and energize a sacred space for others to experience the deepest part of themselves, in connection with all their relations. What good was anything I witnessed unless it was applied to help others?

My life had presented me with an enormous number of gifts that could be employed to help others experience themselves in new ways. Most of them were from the most potent lesson of all; learning how to change my personal pain into power. If there was a thread that connects all my personal themes like cable, it would have to be I have been gifted many stories to tell.

It took me a long time to figure out that it is all one story, the story of a firetender. You see, every time I chose one story to communicate, and one approach to the telling, I felt obligated to become that type of storyteller. I spent blocks of years writing a screenplay and eventually getting it produced as a movie, trying to be a screenwriter; years on stage trying to be a stand-up comic; years studying acting trying to be an actor; years writing and marketing a book trying to be an author; years on stage again trying to be a singer-songwriter; years again trying to be a photographic visual artist... get the picture?

I am none of these because I am all of them. Every time I focused in one area, and got reasonably proficient at it, another arena would beckon me to it and I simply had to see how I could communicate the wonders of the healing arts in that medium. Oftentimes, a new story to be told required a different medium for the telling.

The end result was that I had become so vast I could not fit myself into a box convenient enough to carry into the marketplace. I certainly had no idea how to carry myself in it!

Every foray into trying to "establish myself" or distinguish myself in one or other of those forms failed. The drive had to be all about the exploration then, didn't it? With each door slamming in my face, I learned better to take a step around the house and look for another door opening rather than pounding on the closed door to get it to open again. So I found myself stepping into a tremendous variety of rooms in the process.

After about twenty years of doing this, even I got to recognize the pattern. Success or failure was not part of the equation. All that was important was that I was building a body of useful work. It was not up to me to decide its best application. In fact, from where I sit today, the failures were amongst the most potent teachers. "It will all find its place," I reassured myself night after night.

I won't kid you about the agonizing months of despair. Picture yourself working for nine years on getting a movie you had written made. Its world premiere was as the opening night film of the 1994 Santa Barbara International Film Festival, complete with klieg lights, studio moguls, limos, and soon-to-be-dead along with up-and-coming movie stars. Incredibly enough that accidentally happened because of the Northridge earthquake, but that, too, is another story that only led to the movie's death the very night of its birth!

This character called firetender is more of an aspiration than a realization. It's a guiding spirit, if you will. This firetender is not the kind of healer people think of when one claims himself a Healer with a capital "H". He's kind of lacking in bells and whistles and fancy technological instruments and drugs, and his rap is a little on the raw side. He is, however, the type of healer that can touch most anyone. "Healing," he says, "is no big deal. We do it all the time. We just don't do it enough!"

This firetender guy began exploring the flames of spirit called "healing" when he was eighteen years old. He kept learning more and more about the different textures and manifestations of the fire, until, in his 55th year of life he found himself at the center of a warehouse full of different shapes and sizes of wicks and of burning materials and of holders.

He also had a body full of sacred scars from getting burned from the flames, but with them came some knowledge anyhow, of how to teach others to safely work with them.

Standing amidst the tools of his life, he knew the time had come to distribute the bounty of their applications to the people. He also knew that there were many more people seeking the light that he offered than he could find on his own. Of course, if it had to be, it was enough to be available to help the stray wanderer that landed on his doorstep. Still, there were so many more people to reach out to.

He had come to the conclusion that he wasn't the one to do the reaching. At his best, he could keep the inventory of tools up, produce different varieties to share and different ways to share them. What he could do was be the one to deliver the goods and begin teaching the recipients how to use them for the benefit of themselves so that they, in turn, could offer their light to others.