For you, who are now in the Dark Night of the Soul, in the grey zone of despair, in the liminal space. For you, who are experiencing or have lived through betrayal — of another, of yourself, and as it first seems, of the Creator. For you, who have been torn open, ripped apart, so that light may streak through.

This book was made for you, because I know you are capable of it. We will meet on the other side of the pain, the difficulty. But walking together, step by step.

One blood — yours and mine — the blood of black birch tar and white light, of darkness and illumination.

Together,
ININ

In ancient times, in the Northlands, in the land of white birches, young men let their horses run free at night — in dark nights, in mist and dew. Releasing what you love most into the wild, into the blackness. Entrusting your Soul, your strength, to the Great Spirit. In the black beginning, not knowing whether the Soul would find the strength to come home. In the darkness veiled by uncertainty and fear, yet within it, stubbornly, green shoots of hope sprout. In this moment of initiation nothing else exists, only trust and faith, the deepest listening and the ability to wait for dawn. What is written and told here is the sacred song of that trust — breathed out, flowed out, wept out and lamented out.

Whatever you have given over to the darkness, to the true deep inner mystery — your faith, your life force, your ability to trust, your knowledge of who you are. You must believe it will return, reforged in the fires of God. This book is a testimony of faith that the mist will fall. And what you truly are will be reborn anew. Truer and a thousand times more real.

There is a death during which the flesh lives. There is a death beyond death, in other bodies. And I know it as my second existence, alongside a full, teeming life.

I lie on bare earth threaded with grass stems. At first curled up like an embryo in a mother’s womb — knees there, a little cheek pressed up, palms shielding the face. Then something inside me unhooks, springs loose, and I fall heavily onto my back, arms cast out to the sides. Some tiny part of me finds this all laughable and exaggeratedly dramatic, but I am alone, tens of kilometres from the nearest settlement. The grass sees me, the oak’s sinewy branches, the house gable and the low clouds.

The damp earth holds me — simultaneously utterly indifferent and immediately attentive. Pathetic, dramatic, human, true. However unbelievable it seems even to myself, I am a human being and I am in pain, here, in solitude, where there are only the two of us — the earth and I, Qollari. In a time and place where it is impossible to be strong, to hold a stand, to hold the space. And heaven knows what else. And there is no need — for whom. Perhaps finally for myself. But I will think about that later, because now there is only now. There is only pain and that other thing, whose name is “emptiness”.

Somewhere above, clouds sail in their own business. I recall that long, long ago I read that here, in the Northlands, the clouds hang lowest. The heaviness of the clouds is close, low, nearby, but at the same moment feels utterly alienated. One that seems to have no concern for the bundle lying below, in muddy earth. For the woman who has stopped wanting to be here.

Damn it. God damn it. I am still breathing.

Noticing this feels slightly uncomfortable. One, two, three. Inhale, pause, exhale. In and out. The body simply continues its habit of being, even if the mind has said a hundred, a thousand times — stop, that’s it, enough. At that moment it doesn’t even occur to me, neither in my mind nor my heart, to call upon all the teachings about the sacredness of breath and the presence of the Spirit. I don’t feel God in my breath, I don’t feel myself, because in truth all feeling and emotion have “tripped the circuit breakers”. Sirens are wailing, atomic war in the existence, no one hears the grass growing.

And then colour seeps in with a groan. Grey, but not nuanced silver or brown, detailed, refined, dark here, light there. No, it is impenetrable and thick, but even that cannot be fully felt, the mind conjures it up, trying to grasp what is happening. Into me, a woman lying pathetically on the black earth, grey fog enters.

Mould. Not darkness — I know darkness, at least darkness has the decency to announce its arrival. Darkness has some action, direction — it torments, presses, guides, prevents or allows light to enter. It wants to be noticed for its importance, wants something real to happen. Darkness is a companion of sorts. Oppressive, yes. But present. Engaged. It takes you seriously. It is full and lets you decide whether you will see it as the creative beginning, or as fear, uncertainty, sleep, peace. Darkness offers you a choice. In darkness you are with your free will. The Grey does nothing. You yourself attribute to it further signs of life, internally trying to impute mockery, coldness. But there is none of that there. Look at all of this, it says. Look at what you have built your life upon. Ceremonies. Visions. Years in the jungle, learning to work with the Plants, singing their songs. Sacred words. Sacred mountains. Medicine you have carried in your palms ceaselessly across oceans.

Was any of it real?

Was it always only this. Just a woman wallowing in damp grass. Alone. Having given everything for something that never existed.

While the grey haze did its tormenting work, flaying my Soul, the body continued doing its grassy work, its earth work. To breathe, to ache, to feel uncomfortable. It wasn’t quite pain; it seemed as if every cell in the body desperately tried to ask the Grey haze questions. Ask, ask, ASK! — and receive no answers.

Once I was a medicine woman. Now I was the Mould. And I argued, argued with God.

It is essential for me to say this, because perhaps it gives some human and even trans-human explanation to what I mean when I say — I gave everything. For me this was not abstract, however dreadfully pathetic it may sound to the ear. I had given myself as material, as a black mass, as a resource, as Earth for wringing out, mowing down, ploughing up. On the human level this encompassed both body and resources, my own and my children’s stability. I had sincerely believed in the world around which I had wound my entire adult life. Lived in faithfulness, inspiration and trust that I was tended by both myself and something invisible, wise and full of compassion. I had been beside others in their Soul’s darkest nights. In the Amazon. In the Andean mountains. In the Northern lands. In ceremony spaces I had built together with others in the white birch and ice lands. Stay, stay, it will change, it will get better, healing will come, I promise, only stay.

And now I, myself, did not want to stay. Not a crumb, not a gram.

The Plants within me were silent. That was the most unbearable — harder than the pain, more unpleasant than the humiliation of having participated in all that had happened so fully, with such great openness, so sacredly wrongly. So divinely stupidly. The Plants had been my guides for more than thirteen years. The voices, songs, whispers of the God-Plants were the most reliable thing I knew. The realest thing I had been given. In the deepest ceremonies, in the darkest nights, in moments when I had nothing left — the Plants had always spoken. Now they were silent.

To receive no answer from the closest. To not feel the Spirit’s companionship and connection with All. To be shut out, to not feel presence, to not be guided. These are sorrows indescribable in words. Either you know this precisely and understand. Or to convey and explain it to you is beyond my power. This is that time and moment when no vibration or whisper can describe the pain of silence. How can one describe the severing from the Creator, when simultaneously it is impossible, yet at the same time it is totally felt, experienced, and arrives as one of the extreme stages of initiation in life?

This is the moment when you lie on the earth. And it is only earth.

My son had seen it already when I returned from the sacred Mount Shasta. He was twenty at the time. He possessed that full silence and gravity with which people smell who observe more than they put into words on small change. I was washing dishes after the first dinner with Chaski. He lazily got involved, as if not quite. Having passed me a glass he quietly and seemingly indifferently said:

I continued washing the bowls, forks and pans.

He handed me another glass. And went outside, to the little porch, to breathe fresh air.

I heard. Behind everything. I stored it within me. Like a key that someday, regrettably and — oh my! — would have to be taken from the inner drawer.

I continued washing.

So it is. So we do when we love without end or limit, so deeply and infinitely beautifully. And simultaneously know something about the other that it is not yet time to put into words. We wait. Hope, so very much hope, that the knowing is wrong. Give more time. And time is generous. Minutes, hours, events are served up so long, so many, until courage ripens within to take the knowing-key from the chest pocket. To turn it. To open what has long been clearly known. At that time I was given time. And I gave time. Along the way giving away everything else too, as if time required enormous effort from me in order to exist.

Grass. Alone. Clouds. The god-damned, god-blessed breath and the living body.

I had four children. One marriage in which I was denied being myself, following my calling. And another that simply dissolved. I had travelled thousands of kilometres across the world, carrying the message of the God-Plants. Sat, crouched, wept, risen — in the Amazon, in the mountains, in the Northern forests. I had built something. Something I called a life I believed in. More than once. Built it, lost everything or consciously crumbled it. And built again, because this path also demands that.

I felt so exhausted that even the deepest sleep brought no relief. Weariness lived in my bones. Exhaustion was my bones. I had drained out there, in that Soul-cell that generates faith, that makes one go forward.

And yet. I was still breathing and lying on the grass, and the clouds flowed on, winds nibbled the tree branches — utterly uninterested.

Just then through the inner fog there broke out a burning sensation. Pay attention, turn your attention here! Unwillingly, unable to, I still allowed myself to feel — with a sharp taste, like one who no longer has the strength to experience. The earth beneath me holds. Simply holds. And that is all.

Not dramatically or somehow specially emphasising this holding. Does not give up, does not betray, does not hand over and does not sell. Holds without explanation, without judgement, evaluation. Without great comments, demands, deals. With such patience as has existed since the very first times, when patience first acquired a word and a name.

Something in me recognised it, behind the mould, behind the murk, knew without knowing. It was not yet hope, not that, it was something much more ancient than that. Something dwelt beneath the pain, beneath the companions’ silence, even behind the desire to stop breathing. Like the change in a wave’s motion that is still only dreamed of by the Moon in the sky. The moment before a wave is born, before the winds begin to blow, before, before.

These were not thoughts. This intuition arose from a field and space beneath the mind, a frequency that the body recognised before the mind had a chance to reject it. I refused to understand, I did not want to, I did not need to. Only let the earth continue to hold. Only that.

She had tried to do everything right — through times, through lives. In another time, in another body, in the Andean mountains, she had once seen what was coming. She had spoken, said it, talked, prayed — until her voice went out. No one had listened to her, no one had believed her prophecy. And then she watched as the world she so dearly loved collapsed and dissolved into rags.

And in another life, in Andalusia, in the dry southern land covered by sharp and grey stones, she had made a different prophecy to the powerful. Because a seer must not be silent, if the Spirit so says. With subtle precision she had described distant lands rising beyond the horizon, full of gold, full of treasures. Knowing that her prophecy would bring death and ruin to thousands of innocent people, yet simultaneously understanding that this was only one step in the Universe’s shared story. It had to be spoken, so that fate could fulfil itself. Like Judas. The traitor who allows God to be resurrected. Through lives she had seen and said what she saw. This life was the conclusion of unfinished work. At least at this moment, in this version of the timeline.

Lying on the grass, she did not yet know this. She knew, but this remembering had not yet awakened. It required everything that had been before, this moment and what would yet come. At that moment she knew only the Grey. And the cold. And the Earth, which holds.

And here it begins — the story of all that has happened.

The beginning is not to be found at sacred Mount Shasta, where I first looked into his eyes and saw what seemed to me the fulfilment of everything, the reality of reality. That time when I did not yet understand that what I see in the other is my own light, reflected back.

Nor is it to be found at that moment when during the Sacred Marriage ceremony my tongue tangled and I mispronounced the most important vow in English letters. My heart wanted to say — I will cradle your children, but instead what came out was the word’s close cousin. One small nuance in pronunciation, and instead of expressing the love with which I would cradle our children, I said that I would lay them in the black earth. My Heart expressed one thing, my body, my tongue knew something else. Words are medicine, they are potent remedies, they create and they dismantle Universes. And this vow was fulfilled.

It does not begin on the night before the flight to San Francisco either, when my son, who had mystically just returned from Assisi — the birthplace of Saint Francis — placed in my palms a tiny figurine of the holy man. Saint Francis, the pauper who gave away everything and called it freedom. Coming to me the night before I went toward everything I had been seeking. The night before I flew to the city named after him on the other side of the world. Whatever that might contain and open.

Nor even on a winter morning in the white birch land, at the Northern gates, when I sat at the edge of a snowy field that sparkled in the cold sun in thousands of diamonds, when a full-blooded knowing opened within me of my unfinished work across lives. A message that arrived to me like a letter dropped into a postbox, having wandered in timelessness for a very, very long time.

Nor when I stood in an ordinary building materials store, holding shampoo with the dark scent of birch tar. And breathing, breathing, drawing into myself the black breath of truth. The moment when, for the first time in a long while, I felt the Plants speaking again — not during a ceremony, not in the jungle, not in dreams, but in the very middle of a busy city, standing among brooms, toilet paper rolls and bags of dog food. Medicine comes when it needs to, it does not demand a properly staged moment, it demands the moment when you are ready.

It begins here. The story sprouts here.

On damp grass, watching as clouds dissolve in the sky, as evening descends slowly across the meadow, as day turns to night in which not a single star is visible. Ripening alongside a woman who makes a quiet decision, not conscious, not loud, not bravado. Made in the body, in the bones, in that part that is beyond. Not to give up. Without knowing what is coming. Without relief that the grey fog of unknowing and emptiness has gone. Without signs and road markers, without soothing words, justifications, acceptance. Not yet then.

Ripening because the ancient below knows that the grey fog of despair has no edges and no end, it only pulls deeper and deeper into the whirlpool. But the longing for the Creator and for oneself will never fully disappear. And better to rise now, than from a five-miles-deeper bog. Something deep, in the body, beyond thoughts, beyond pain, beyond the desire to disappear — something very old and fundamental knew this. This path had been walked before. There is no solution there.

Beyond everything there is still something that is yours, that is you, that you are.

Your colt in the mist has not yet been lost. Your prayers are still galloping through the world, carrying a calling and a supplication.

The mist will fall. The dew will fall.

And what I have released into freedom, my strength, my spark, the Creator’s voice within me — it will return. Not as I remember it or imagine it to be. Not through another and others, but through myself. In my own hands, the real, not the ghost.

For you, who read these words, being in the Darkness or at the threshold of the Grey fog:

Know — the Haudenosaunee people, the people of the great turtle island, tell of a woman. A wife who fell from the sky. The people tell that she once fell from the Earth that rises beyond the clouds, in her hands holding the seeds of all the Plants. Falling down, down, down, birds flew up to meet her and caught her, bearing her on their wings. From the sea depths the Great Turtle also surfaced and invited her to land gently on its ample back. At that moment, from nowhere, a muskrat appeared and with its paws helped the woman descend onto the turtle’s back. In that moment beneath the woman’s feet dark earth began to appear, sprout and grow, full of plant seeds and shoots. When the Sky Woman’s feet finally touched the earth, she began to dance. Wherever she stepped, seeds sprouted, blooming all the wondrous flowers, plants and Herbs that grow green upon this Earth.

The people also tell that as she fell the woman did not know what she carried. She only fell. And the world itself with subtle precision organised itself. A hand here, a shell mosaic there, the fan of a bird’s wing on one side, a water beast’s paw on the other. Seeds that know by themselves what they must grow into. And a body that knows how to take the first dance-steps, even if you have fallen from the Heavens, from everything you know, arrived from the other side of the Universe.

So know, if you are falling — you are the Sky Woman. You carry more than you know. The world joins hands so that you may fulfil your task, even without knowing it. You will not die. Where you land, a mighty plant will sprout. Some flower. Angel’s trumpet. A hibiscus bush. Perhaps a grass stem that will hold you in one of your future fallings, when you are ready to become yet more yourself, the true self.

© ININ NINI | all rights reserved | THE BLOOD OF THE BIRCH