Frost in the Tepee Moon
and the unknowable mystery
Greetings and Welcome to Wild Leaf, a publication of writings from the wild remembrance of the Holy Now. If you like what you read, kindly tap the “❤️” at the bottom of the page here, so others can find this publication too.
This week I have had the ultimate luxury of spaciousness. This post sat on my desk (desk!) for more than three days, as I slowly tended to it - a rarity in my life these days. With that, please enjoy this week’s offering.
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Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota wičháša wakȟáŋ, or holy man, who lived on Turtle Island during the unprecedented times of 1863 - 1950, referred to the month of January as Frost in the Tepee Moon1. (His book has found its way into my hands and as I read it for the first time, I am frequently in tears, always in awe.)
The thermometer outside our yurt has shown 0°F the past few mornings. There is, sometimes, frost in the yurt. Sometimes we can see our crystallized breath over an hour after we’ve lit the morning fire, where, oddly enough, only in deep winter, the first rays of the rising winter sun, entering through the eastern door there, land perfectly in the heart of our blazing fire. We didn’t plan that.
It can be hard on the human spirit to endure these levels of frost, snow and perpetual cold, especially from a yurt clinging to the side of a mountain six to seven thousand feet above sea level, and I have immense compassion for all peoples living in such conditions. That being said, there is something deeply meaningful about living like this through a winter. Within me arises this otherworldly sense of universality and non-linear connectedness, immersed as we are, through the seasons, minimally sheltered, among the living fabric of Mother Earth. It’s like, I can breathe for the first time.
Black Elk speaks of the Moon of the Red Grass Appearing (April), the Moon When the Cherries Are Ripe (July), the Moon of the Popping Trees (December), in relation to the incredible sequence of events in his life. I recently listened to Ecuadorian indigenous environmental activist, Nina Sicha Gualinga, speak about how in many native languages, “there is no word to separate us from the trees, the land, and the rivers. There is no word for nature. Because once we use that word, we are separating our own bodies from this body,” motioning to the earth.
One body: those trees, these hands, that river.
There is something good about the name, Moon of the Popping Trees, compared to, for example, December. With the former, I can feel myself in the cold, leafless forest, beneath the sounding of frozen trees, watching my breath rise like smoke towards a grey cloud-covered sky; a moving part of a living ecosystem. It evokes relationship and a real sense of place-based seasonality. The latter brings to mind crinkly red wrapping paper and holiday gift cards; a kind of advertised memory imprint of a consumer existing in a consumer culture.
Living the way we do, experiencing, skin to skin, the seasonal flavors and frequencies of this particular mountain and watershed of western Colorado, humbles and slows us into a kind of identity-less trance, though notably vital and in step with the soft rumblings of thunder, snow and deer. It is less about “me” and “my agenda” and more about “we” and “surviving.” There is a real seat at our family table for thunder storms, wind, coyote and mud.
They say true resiliency and community are both born from the seed of survival.
This way of life continues to change my consciousness and sense of the Sacred. It turns my heart to a different cognizance of the Now. It brings out our Old Eyes.
We begin to feel the lifeways, the cosmologies and the long lineages of peoples who live/d on these lands, those people without a word for separation between their body and the body of earth, who, with minimal sheltering, endure/d deep winter in a circle around the fire, singing, dreaming and storytelling in new life.
“You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken, the people flourished. The flowering tree was the living center of the hoop, and the circle of the four quarters nourished it. The east gave peace and light, the south gave warmth, the west gave rain, and the north with its cold and mighty wind gave strength and endurance. This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion. Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our teepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.” - Black Elk Speaks
The snow melts, the greening earth emerges. The green gives way to blooms, fruits and seeds. The rainbow spectrum of abundance. The falling back, the water drying from leaves, the nakedness of winter. The silence. The cold. The long wait. The sleeping seed and bear, the visions of spring. The rapture of bloom.
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I remember a poem I wrote when my daughter was just a little bundle of gushy flesh in my arms. I scribbled poems from a rocking chair as I nursed her and my life from one world to the next. She was born in January, during the Frost in the Tepee Moon.
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green light emerges from the earth. the spruce tips sway like kelp in the sea, that slowly, turning winter to spring
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So the circle of Creation continues to spin.
There’s a steadiness beneath it all, a slow turning of the wheel of time, in tempo with the greater, pulsing universe.
A steady spin; a cosmic weaving of sunlight and shadow; something quietly and lovingly enduring, holding together the holy hoop of Life.
And at its wings lives infinity, at the fringes of its silence. The mystery pours out like an ecstatic completion of silence, in millionfold forms and fragrances, where the forms of you and me dance like leaves, here in a moment, gone the next.
It’s a miracle. It’s unknowable. And it’s been an unknowable miracle since the beginning of time. The Spirit of the World, Black Elk called it. The Great Mystery.
Sometimes, in our running of the hamster wheel that is modern culture, we fall prey to the illusion that this incredible outpouring of mysterious unknowableness, is, in fact predictable and less than miraculous. We think, tomorrow will happen. This will happen. That is mundane. I will live. She will live. Our nation will live. When in fact, Nothing. Is guaranteed. And this has always been the truth. Nothing is guaranteed.
So we pay attention to the way the sun dances northerly in the winter and southerly in the summer. We watch that balance. We pay attention to the way Life moves, the way the stars move and the moon, so we can be more like them, more stable, more mysterious, more surrendered. We get low. We listen.
You can hear the singing stream beneath the frost and ice.
In ceremony, I have heard this word repeated four times: zhawaneimishinaam, zhawaneimishinaam, zhawaneimishinaam, zhawaneimishinaam. Please bless us, please feel compassion for us, please love us unconditionally. It’s usually used as a closing prayer. It can also be a prayer in itself. It’s a prayer for all of us.
Zhawaneimishinaam contains the pejorative -ish because traditionally, it’s poor form to tell someone to do something - to assume that sort of dominion over another’s life and tell them what to do it with - because a person’s life is their gift, and their path to walk. So we say, please bless and love pitiful, pathetic us. We abase ourselves before the being we ask. We do not tell the spirit what to do, we ask for compassion.
- James Vukelich Kaagegaabaw, The Seven Teachings and The Seven Grandfather Teachings
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Much Love,
Leah
Black Elk & Neihardt, J. G. (1979). Black Elk speaks: Being the life story of a holy man of the Oglala Sioux. University of Nebraska Press.