The medicine of collecting hundreds of sticks

I am responsible for collecting, peeling, and painting four hundred and something sticks for ceremony this year.

Oh, to be in a process that can’t be Googled or rushed. The only way to find a Choke Cherry tree is to find a Choke Cherry tree. The only way to debark a stick is one at a time with your partner’s mom’s box cutter. Nothing can be optimized or strategized.

To collect a few hundred sticks means asking community members where their favorite Choke Cherry trees are. I’ve heard tree stories and tree lore. Maybe here. Maybe there. Stick gathering has led to dinners with friends and facilitation while peeling bark. I was in a roadside thicket last week when my client told me her labor was progressing and it was time to gather round. A trunk full of sticks came with me to the hospital. My car smelled of cherry when I drove home 13 hours later.

I – a lifelong led-foot – am driving 14mph trying to Tree-ID from the roadside. Being passed for the first time in my life.

I was rejected from three opportunities I was hopeful about this week. I was really hopeful. All of the emails came while I was doing stick stuff. I thought about writing to you about the medicine of rejection, but I am not in a “rejection is protection” state of mind. I am in a “rejection makes me cry and feel hopeless” state of mind. But, the sticks are here. There are more to be gathered. Ceremony requires sticks.

Oh, we are going to a concert on the green? I’ll bring my sticks. You steward a farm? I’d like to come by and look for trees.

In my first forays into gathering, I would strategize on the drive: okay, I will get 100 tonight, 100 tomorrow, and then the other 200 or so next Wednesday. Now, I gather every time I see a tree that lets me know they want to participate, to offer. I have stopped counting. I will gather the sticks that each chunk of trees volunteers and then I will move on.

I’ve rushed my whole life, necessarily and unnecessarily so. I obsess over doing more in less time. My favorite class in grad school was Quality Improvement class. Just ask my friends, I would not shut up about it. But, the slow, mandatory presence of gathering sticks is dripping into my life. If I can’t optimize sticks then I can’t optimize the other things I want to do when I am not doing sticks because I don’t know when I will be doing stick stuff. In this way, everything becomes stick stuff. Where will the next tree be? Will there be phone service on that road so I can take that meeting while searching? Probably not.

Ceremony slows us in this way and entangles us back into each other, to process, to presence. To the ungoogleable, the Ancestrally mandated, the way we’ve always done it.

Finally, a note that I will be at Sundance Ceremony with my community from July 10-22 and won’t be sending out a newsletter during that time.