Lessons From A Solstice Sweat Lodge
Along with our cold weather coats, vests, knit caps, gloves and boots, I’ve also gathered up my go-to reading, like Jack London’s short story “To Build A Fire.” This volume helps each year when winter moves in and many of us start to feel like the doomed protagonist of his tale and need winter words for their kindred experience. I always think “At least it’s not as bad as it turned out for that poor bastard” or like when I was on Denali where the temperature reached -70 at one point. I thought I was prepared, but it was still cold beyond belief.
I’ve also re-memorized Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” He was called the Poet of the Yukon for good reason.
Near the end of the tale, after his friend had lit the boiler fire and “stuffed in Sam McGee” and taken a hike so as not to “hear him sizzle so,” he returns to find this-
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please close that door.
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm —
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.”
Damn, if those lines didn’t remind me of one solstice, maybe fifteen years ago, when I participated in a sweat lodge throughout the longest night of the year. My friend and I parked in the driveway of the host who owned the house with the lodge. It was maybe fifteen feet in diameter, made by lashing saplings together and covering them with canvas and old rugs and tarps. I’ve never seen a sweat lodge that didn’t look like some old bunch of junk wrapped up for the winter.
There was already a fire going, a few feet from the lodge. Someone said it was big enough to be seen on Google earth. Rocks were being heated in the fire and then being brought into the structure with shovels.
When it was time, everyone stripped down to their underwear, piling our clothes on patches of non-snowy ground or hanging them from branches There was a bucket inside, from which water was being poured on the rocks to create the steam.
I had been in sweats before and knew what to expect, but it was still nearly unbearable when the steam started to build up. It’s sort of like making risotto. You add a little liquid, stir, wait a while, add more liquid. I sat as close as I could to a little opening in the structure, occasionally just feeling a tiny bit of cold air. Just when it felt like it couldn’t get any hotter, more water was poured and more steam hissed out.
I didn’t understand some of the words, not unlike a Catholic mass in Latin. You don’t really need to understand it to benefit from the ritual. The non-native leader had been certified (however that is done) by some Native process that allowed and legitimized it.
Nothing more needed to be said. The process was healing, detoxifying, full of hope. The earth and sky and fellowship, the rocks, the snow, the cold fire of far away stars.
Henry Beston wrote that the world was “sick to its thin blood for lack of elemental things, for fire before the hands, for water welling from the earth, for air, for the dear earth itself underfoot.”
We can make this a night of renewal and healing, wherever we are.
