Good Medicine

I knew nothing of W. H. Murray until a few weeks ago.

Robert Macfarlane recounts Murray’s life in one of the chapters of The Wild Places. Murray was a Scot that found himself attracted to wild places and first began adventuring into wild places in Scotland during that hard time in history referred to in this country as the Dust Bowl Years or The Dirty Thirties.

Wildness, for Murray, took on a near-mystical importance.

The mentally embedded images and experiences discovered in wildness, during the dire years of mortal combat and imprisonment in German prison camps soon to follow, kept him from succumbing to total despair. He was, in the very worst of hard conditions, able to venture in his mind to beautiful and peaceful natural places unaffected by the insane brutalities and ravages that surrounded him.

I think, and this is just me thinking, that the vast majority of people on the planet are unable to see the insanity that surrounds them. It’s easy enough to see and hate the obviously insane violence that constantly fills our news feeds. What’s harder for most to see, in my oldering opinion, is the insanity created by the commerce and consumerism that daily surrounds and drastically affects all of us in large degrees.

The Mount Rogers National Recreation Area occupies 200,000 acres in SW Virginia. The area contains Virginia’s loftiest terrain and hosts some 500 miles of trails … the most notable being the part of the Appalachian as it wanders its way through Virginia. Mount Rogers, hence the name of the recreation area, stands 5,729 feet tall.

Shirli and I spent a few days in one of the campgrounds situated at above 3,800 feet. The signs of Spring, in the world down below us at 2000’ elevation, were well formed. Here, in the climate created by elevation, the hardwoods were just beginning to bud.

I stood at the overlook admiring and soaking in the views of the valley down below and the mountains on the near and distant horizons … land that once belonged to one of my bloodlines. My Cherokee bloodline.

There are times when, in respect for this line of my heritage, I feel compelled to make an offering.

This was one of those times.

I reached into my pocket, took out a pinch of tobacco, acknowledged the Creator and my Cherokee ancestors, and let the tobacco settle to the ground.

Mere seconds passed before a Raven made an appearance.

It lingered. Circling in near effortless close circles directly in front of me. The closest part of its flight circle brought it to maybe fifty feet from me. The circles got larger and farther from me as it drifted away and then went on its way.

I stood there. Halted. Amazed. Feeling in my insides that something out of the ordinary had occurred. Not knowing what out of the ordinary had occurred. I needed to know more, sought the more, and discovered the more about what I had experienced at the overlook. The Cherokee believe that birds are messengers between earth and heaven, between the People and Creator. The Raven, Turtle Dove, and Eagle are significant representatives.

People can believe what they choose to believe about this. I’m good with believing that the Creator, and my Cherokee Grandmothers and Grandfathers, were pleased and responded with a messenger showing their acceptance of not only the offering but more so of the offeror as one of theirs.

There is good medicine in wild places.

The solitude found in wild places is a highly medicinal thing. It offers us an opportunity to disconnect from and take a break from the routine of our normal synthetic lives. It forces us to reckon with ourselves, with what we have become, and with what we can become.

We are, when we open and allow ourselves to experience the interior processes of this wild places solitude, irrevocably changed.