Earth's Sweat Lodge
Since the beginning of the year, everything I have been learning about Climate Change had me dreading this summer season. Things weren’t too bad until the heat dome capped Southern California at the beginning of the month. It’s been thermometer-busting hot during the day. Then the heat hangs on through most of the night when it would normally cool off. Our home doesn’t have central air conditioning or heating - guess it wasn’t needed back in the 70s when the place was built. I am grateful to have electric fans, but mostly they’ve just blowing hot air around. Sleeping in the stifling air is barely restful. The lack of sleep is catching up with me, fogging my conscious mind and blurring my senses.
A few days ago during a meeting, a man started sharing his experiences with sweat lodges. Someone else chimed in, describing how the heat was so intense that his body was forced to be still in the darkness with only his thoughts roaming his mind. The sweat lodge ceremony is practiced by many indigenous First Nation peoples of North America as means of purification and healing. The lodge itself is a dome-like structure, symbolic of a womb. During the ceremony, the temperature inside is heated to the point of inducing a sweat in the ritual participants. It is not just an overheated sauna, it is a sacred ceremony, with the person hosting the sweat being trained to conduct the ritual, while ensuring everyone’s safety.
As I listened to the conversation, I wondered if the atmospheric heat dome is the Earth’s sweat lodge. Forcing us humans out of our accustomed routines, altering the pace of our activities, challenging the limitations of our socialized beliefs about how life should be lived. Depriving us of rest and comfort to release our mind’s habituated thought, opening it to the infinitude of possibilities in the unity of Life’s consciousness.
As human-induced Climate Change breaks the stability of the environment that has allowed our species to flourish, is the Earth giving us pause to remember who our sacred host is as we journey around the Sun? To ask ourselves, what am I doing now to honor Life’s host?
