Endings

               The signs of the east and new beginnings had been coming up strongly in the past year.   I was wearing out, and I knew I needed change, but new beginnings require hard endings sometimes.  In our last lodge before we moved, Charlie told us the spirits wanted us to know they were OK that the lodge was ending, and they were grateful for what they had been given.    

               I remembered several years ago when Charlie was desperately ill.  He had improved enough to walk out of the house as far as the sweat lodge.  Sweaty, our Navajo lodge, emanated intent of some kind.  I thought to myself, “He should touch it.”  Charlie shakily reached out and put his hand on the lodge.  Instantly, I felt what he was feeling: awareness of all the experiences he and the lodge had together over the years, and how much those two beings had meant to each other.  Charlie started to cry.  You can live a whole lifetime for a moment like that.

                We took the lodges down because it would have been wrong to leave them with people who didn’t understand them.  A couple of weeks before moving, a group of lodge members came out and respectfully dismantled the structures.  Grimly, I shut off my head and heart.  We dispersed the mud, bark, and juniper logs in the forest, and Sweaty was no more.

               The sacred objects told me from the closet in our new house, “Now is not the time for lodges.”  It still hurt.