Lessons from a Bearer of Light by Daniel Meurois

Dear friends, on this morning of a very chilly beginning of spring, I thought of offering you this extract from ¨LE CHAMANE ET LE CHRIST (THE SHAMAN AND THE CHRIST), because it seems to me it can be heart-warming, and reconnects with the Essence of Being. It is about this sought-after and possible fusion with Nature and its teaching presences, a fusion that we miss more than ever, where so many fundamental connections escape us at the end of this cycle.

The book of THE SHAMAN AND THE CHRIST and this blog are dedicated to:

‘To the Wendat people and their resilience,

To the unconditional loving souls and hearts,

To the hands that serve,

To the feet that are not afraid to walk,

...and to all those veils that you have to know how to lift within yourself.”

“Who will say the feeling one experiences when entering these forests as old as the world, and which alone give an idea of Creation as it came from the hands of God?” François René de Chateaubriand[1], Journey to America

The young Watan who receives his first life lessons under the direction of an old shaman...

"I already understood such a language when, for the first time, Tséhawéh, the old medicine man, took me with him into the forest to begin my education[2]. It was certainly the most decisive experience of my life, because all the others depended on it thereafter, even the one which, later, was to bring me into adulthood.

To reach the state that Tséhawéh had predicted, I had to begin by understanding – not in my head, but in my heart and my stomach – that I could never, ever be alone anywhere. I couldn't, because everything was populated. Everything was endowed with a consciousness, a breath, an intelligence, and therefore had its reason of being, its precise function and its destination. I could feel lonely... but my being definitely could not.

To live as I was called to live meant to mingle my whole being with this reality, to integrate it into my flesh by modifying my way of thinking, by controlling it, and then, above all, by placing myself, day after day, in union with the knowledge of the fact that all that constituted Nature was of my family.

At the center of the instruction that had been promised to me, my first challenge had therefore been to let the Natural Powers know that I knew this relationship, this truth, and that they could thus fully welcome me into their midst. As I was not trained yet, and I knew that I was at the dawn of this state that made every human a child of the Great Spirit, they had to help me break down my resistance and dissolve the fears that could arise.

Therefore, day after day, I had learned to sit facing a rock, a tree, facing the crackling of a fire at night or even in water up to my waist, so that "something" in me came to speak in my ear of my absolute kinship with what I observed, and which received me. I also had to bow for a long time, at breaking dawn, in front of the deer and the moose; then welcome the breath of the skunk even in my hair, or even repeat out loud and in rhythm the name of the Yänariskwa[3], in the hope that it would finally appear at sunset and begin to sing.

Tséhawéh was a man of few but fair and demanding words for me. As for my mother, taken by the culture of the land, like all the women of our villages, she no longer counted the days when I disappeared, when I was "swallowed up by the woods" and conversed with the people of Nature creatures.

There had been no secrets worthy of the name in what I had been taught and induced, season after season. No mysterious formulas, no strange substances to breathe nor chew, even if my instructor had never denied that there were some around here... The only "magic" he had communicated to me was part of a way of being, that is to say, of placing my consciousness in constant dialogue with all that was, animate as well as inanimate, without distinction of species or hierarchy. It had been a fascinating time for me as a young teenager...Sometimes, in the leafy retreats that I had been assigned to, forbidden to leave, I had felt sounds rising within me. I had to reproduce them instinctively and realize that they were calls or keys to other worlds...

In such moments, it had been very rare for an animal not to appear. From the snake to the porcupine, everything was offered to me, sometimes fleetingly, without even giving me time to be afraid.

"Afraid of what?" Tséhawéh asked me one day, when I told him about the silhouette of a bear behind some thickets, a few steps from me."Yes... afraid of what?" he resumed gently. You are his family and he is yours. Fear only your fear! If the Bear were to push you again into the great Circle of life and death, it would have been entrusted with a mission for you. Thus, there are sometimes snakes that sting to heal...just like men who hurt you and strip you to make you go forward..."

In my heart, it had seemed difficult to me to admit such a "law" in the human context, because I had always felt more in affinity with animals, plants, trees and rocks. At least, this world, Nature, was crystal-clear.”

[1] “In Voyage en Amérique, published in 1826, Chateaubriand writes that he arrived in Philadelphia on 10 July 1791. He visited New York, Boston and Lexington, before leaving by boat on the Hudson River to reach Albany. He then followed the Mohawk Trail up the Niagara Falls where he broke his arm and spent a month in recovery in the company of a Native American tribe. Chateaubriand then describes Native American tribes' customs, as well as zoological, political and economic consideration.” (ref. Wikipedia)

[2] Tséhawéh means "Bearer of Light". He is at the origin of the family name Sioui.

[3] The Wolf