I was asked to make musk ox medicine recently. And when I do medicine work, I will invite dreams to share with me what the medicine is meant for.
Musk ox came to me and spoke of old aches and pains – the choices we carry from our past. The actions we are not so proud of. How when passing over the great snow lands of time our burdens and our blessings, our choices, pains, joys, sorrows – all these keep us warm – like the coat of the great musk ox. These weigh us down, but hoof after hoof, we must move forward – the very weight of our backbone is a challenge to carry, but musk ox carries what he needs to survive the storm.
Musk ox showed me a storm. A great storm, which he carried himself through. Grandfather medicine. Meta–cine he said –This musk ox showed me the storm transforming into a landscape so beautiful it must have been musk ox dreaming – all ice crystals flowing in the wind, the power and grace of the snow, the beauty – those immense landscapes so gallop–able – so far for musk ox to charge – as far as the eye could see and musk ox reminded me that to carry this weight is a grace – to carry our pasts with honour is strength, and that even the littlest of us (I being so young still, only just in my early thirties) hold burdens that we are learning to allow to warm us, rather than hold us down.
The person I made this medicine for, I was told after, carried many shadows in their past. Deeds done that are unforgivable. I was told once, but that first time was before I had made the medicine and in that first telling I did not hear what was told to me. Not because I was not listening – but because, in the ways that the creator sometimes does – it was blocked out of my mind. I think back to that moment and it isn’t fuzzy, I remember clearly sitting on the edge of my bed, listening. It’s like the words were garbled – somehow made from clarity into white noise, and that is when, in retrospect, my curiosity picks up.
Musk ox came to me and breathed quietly in my face, musk gathering in the air all around – “We are learning to carry burdens we are all proud of, and not so proud of” he said. There are changes happening in the world and all around us, celestial transitions, that shed light on shadow, on the integration of dark and light.
Forgiveness, fear, sorrow
On forgiveness. On fear. On sorrow, and the balance of understanding.
If I’m honest, it took the making of this medicine, the seeing of these dreams, for me to understand this in the way I do now.
Musk ox told me this is the medicine our nation needs (our many nations) – to hold our past with honour, dignity, and respect because we are learning to travel long distances through harsh times, and how we move through is sometimes the only choice we have to mitigate how we arrive at each our inter– dependent destinies.
If I had heard what was shared with me about this Elder, what his past had held – I might not have made the medicine. He had hurt a lover many years back, and I have been on the run, like my mother, and grandmother before her, from lovers for many years. Seeking shelter, safety, community – home, when home was never normally a “safe” place, and lovers sometimes meant something other than love.
I know what it is to live with fear of our beloved other. I know what it is to flee. To run. I still live with the echoes of bruises on my arms and heart, and some days it doesn’t seem to matter how far I have run, those bruises still ache.
If I had known this was who I was making medicine for I might not have made it.
But, instead, I was called into the making, into the dreaming, and into the learning with musk ox, and the seeing of how I too am learning to hold what I have seen, heard, said and done.
I am honoured by musk ox and the journey he brought me on. I saw the strength and the overcoming of fear.
I saw the beauty of us when we venture out to move our great bodies forward, through the storms, as we have always done.
And I saw the beauty, the strength, the grace – the great snow storms swirling around ourselves and our communities and nations, and how we are all venturing out into those great snow storms, and what finds us out there can be so, so heavy, and so so beautiful.