Sweat Lodge ceremony

My friend Victoria (Heckle) flew all the way in from Indiana yesterday just to have a visit with me and one last ceremony before she starts her new job. I'd been anticipating her arrival, and was surprised when she finally called me from ten feet outside my office door!We went to the sweat lodge ceremony last night, out at the tribe's ceremonial grounds on the prairie. The sun had begun to go down, but the sky was grey with thick, swirling clouds spanning the entire horizon. As we cut the wood and built the fire, lightning began to flash across the edges of the sky in bold, bright bolts. The rain began to pelt us with fat, cold drops--not a downpour, just a refreshment. So there we were, on the prairie surrounded by lightning, cooled by raindrops, and smelling the aroma of burning cedar wood. There were only five of us total for the ceremony last night, so we just sat in the soft grasses and talked and talked.As it got darker, the lighting became more intense and vivid. It began to shoot horizontally, igniting the thick black clouds. This wasn't a dangerous kind of storm; the lightning was in the far horizon and nothing became severe. Just amazing. Rain continued to drizzle. It wasn't that kind of miserable, muddy, gloomy rain; it was that refreshing, sweet-smelling, cool rain that only spatters you but doesn't soak you. We went all four rounds, and James made it hot, as usual. There was a lot of stuff we needed to "work on" in the ceremony, and Victoria and I talked to James about it as we rested in the grass. I told James that this week my mind has been occupied by two very strong, and very opposite, emotions for a couple of people who have been affecting me deeply right now--one by her bitter presence, and one by her baffling absence. Each of these situations has made me feel some feelings I don't enjoy and don't understand. The anger is easier to manage for me. As hard as it was, I knew Victoria and I needed to pray for someone who has been very hurt, and hurtful, in our lives recently. I came to understand that the only power this certain person has is to make me feel about her the way SHE feels about her, and that while I can easily disconnect from what she does, she cannot. Hurt people hurt people. The fear of loss is harder for me to manage. I'm wrestling with a confusing and troubling experience of seeing someone very beloved become further and further distant, for no reason I can understand, and it hurts. I cannot know, for example, whether the shunning is a result of something going wrong in my life or in theirs, but the result of either is the same: I feel left out. Being powerless to connect with someone I love is an awful feeling. This is a person I respect and treasure so deeply... I began to pray about it and I burst into tears right from the start as soon as I said the words out loud, "please don't take her from us. Please don't let us lose her..." I got no further that that before grief and fear just poured out down my cheeks. I'm not a needy, incomplete person codependently looking to others for fulfullment--this just happens to be a person I love, who has probably never had a relationship where the loss of her would actually be grieved before.   I still don't know what to do about this, and it's clear that in BOTH cases--my resentment of one person and my love of another--I can and should simply do nothing but wait and not press things. But after the ceremony I at least felt the weight of these emotions much lighter. It was a difficult sweat, not just because of the stinging heat but because of these particular difficulties. While they each involve a very different type of person doing a very different type of thing, they both end with the feeling of loss and powerlessness. All I can do is pray about it and be the man I know I can be, and hope that's enough. No, it IS enough. I'm a good man--that IS enough. Victoria and I watched the amazing lightning all the way home, 30 miles through the Oklahoma country. She said to me, "I feel like the lightning isn't a storm, it's more like a reward. Do you know what I mean?"I said, "Yeah, it's like God's way of saying, 'You have suffered for others, so THIS is for you'."