For our brothers.
I ask the plant spirits to help me,
I call the spirits,
I call my spirit protector.
May nothing enter,
May no spirit enter this body,
and may all be cleansed and pure.
-Icaro chanted by Shipibo shaman Don Adriano in Ayahuasca ceremony
The medicine told me to make a clearing, and so I did.
There was a path I couldn’t see, leading me somewhere out of my little brother’s Christmastime suicide a year ago. We were born to different parents and adopted by the same family, five years apart. Such different people, tangled up in the same strange, sad, little split-level house in suburban Iowa. It couldn’t contain either of us. I felt kindly toward him despite it all. He was a good kid.
Adoptees take their own lives at four times the rate others do. They are 1.87 times as likely to abuse substances. American suicide rates have climbed 30% in the first two decades of the millennium, with middle-aged white men in the Midwest at particular risk. Half of them use firearms for this. They cannot see how to build a life from where they sit. They sink.
My brother’s name is John.
It was the same path that led from my spiritual big brother’s broken-hearted surrender to alcoholism two New Years’ ago. He took me under his wing when I left Iowa for the Bay Area nightlife just after college. He guarded me to make sure I was safe and protected; he showed up whenever I called. We spent our time together listening to records and reel-to-reels and every kind of rock show you can imagine. We chose each other and stayed strongly connected, years after I left the cocaine huddles of the bar back-rooms for graduate school.
He was of the Oneida People. Native Americans like him experience 2.5 the suicide rate of the general population, and immeasurably higher rates of substance abuse and despair. Science has shown clearly that the causes are structural trauma and dispossession, not faulty genes. But that hasn’t stopped the victim blaming.
My brother’s name is Tiki Jim.
All of our brothers who take their own lives this time of year are here with us now. All of our people, our constellation of loved ones who have passed this time of year. The older we get, the more of them we encounter in this way, at this holiday constellation of intimate sorrows. Ask any elder: they nod. They know how the numbers grow over time. But this constellation also illuminates our pathways of living, and I do not intend to turn away from that light.
These are impossible knots of pain, bound up in intergenerational and situational tangles. There’s no way to make sense of them. They can’t just be straightened, flattened and fixed.
I spent many years in training as an anthropologist of ritual, witnessing the transformation that comes from fully submitting to ancient practices of healing. In the Black Holiness churches of the Mississippi Delta, in the ritual Sufi chants of West Africa, in the little fires of a thousand candles at the cathedral of Notre Dame: everywhere lit up, flashing all over. Healing and mystery. I believed in these things, because I needed to. And because they worked. In the sounds and sensations, in the togetherness, in the steps of the ritual process, are the earthy technologies of healing: the kind that mark us as humans. The kind that enable us to live through things that seem un-live-through-able.
When John died, I could see no ritual ahead for me. The brokenness of our adoptive family and the politics of it all - coupled with an intense regional ice storm - meant that his funeral was both unreachable, and un-ritual. Roman Catholic funerals are so beautiful to me, so ancient and full of mystery, but this one was out of reach. It was going to be a broken one, full of leaks and dangers. Instead, I had to find my own.
I needed healers to lead me to my constellation of brothers and a process to lead me past the events of their deaths. I was so angry that I died with them. Some friends flew away from the intensity of it all, and some came through. Somehow, a number of the latter had also lost brothers in this way, by suicide or sadness near the holidays. Maybe the first group were afraid this might happen to their brothers; I’m not sure.
A dear friend whose brother passed the Christmas before reached out. Her brother was an adoptee whose difficult life led to an unexpected death in his car, on the roads. We had sat together months later when a third friend of ours lost her brother to suicide during the pandemic, leaving two small kids. My friend understood this thing that cannot be spoken about experiencing a death like this, and she offered to show me her pathway.
Three months after John’s death, in the dark of the countryside, I was surrounded by a circle of others who also needed ritual healing. At the head, three healers distributed medicine to us in tiny cups: one, a deeply skilled woman healer from a line of indigenous practitioners; one, a longtime shamanic devotee and medical clinician with expertise in native medicines; and the third, my friend whose brother had died in a car accident. Her role in the circle was to understand and support the embodiment of healing: the food consumed, the movements made, the songs mouthed, the touch given.
Soon, I asked the Ayahuasca to take me to my brother. I asked the medicine to show me my birth mother and the women before her, whom I so desperately wanted to know in the absence of an adoptive family. I asked for my creative life back. I asked her to move the heavy stone of anxiety that seemed to be bruising my heart from the inside: the sharp one I have always tried to bubble wrap with booze and men and anger. It had been knocking around in there my whole life. I could feel it aching even as I settled into my place in the circle.
A lot happened over the next two nights with the medicine, more than I can write about here, but right now I want to tell you about my brothers, and what they brought me. It is Christmas time, and I offer this season over to them.
The medicine told me to be patient, that she had a lot to show me, and that if I could trust her, I’d learn so much. In her vine state, she reached her tendrils throughout my body to find the places that needed healing. A tender bruise here, a broken toe that had never quite healed. Places I had ignored, she found worthy of her care. It was hard to accept that care, but she wanted to show me how. She touched a caveat on my back where a 25-year, baseball-sized cyst had been removed, leaving an empty space. And then she touched wounds that were even harder to find, that I had been ignoring with even more iciness. The kind John and Tiki Jim did not manage to excise in themselves. Sharp and heavy ones that no one knew were there.
Then she became a woman, like a close friend, holding my hand at the top of a dark landscape. I told the medicine that I trusted her to take me wherever she thought I should go.
She took me places, to peek inside special little tents nestled in a sprawling valley. In each, a resource: a pen and a notebook, a bucket full of sky-blue paint and a ladder, a friend singing a song. My beautiful son appeared in my sky to support: “Hi Mom!” He moved through with vibrance and joy, and then sweetly left me to my vision.
And the women healers appeared, the ones I hadn’t realized had been looking out for me. One told me that she prepared my womb for my son because she appreciated the work I had done with her family in Senegal. A ritualist from a different study showed me how she had led me through a difficult time in my life with her songs. An elder in saffron robes I had encountered in a trip through the Sahara desert revealed that she was, indeed, the woman Sufi saint I had believed her to be. My grade school art teacher let me know that she knew there was abuse in my home, and that’s why she had let me take special classes with her after school and in the summers. These healers taught me to nurture a creative life that could lift up over it all. Miss Jeri, the blues singer who ran the all-45’s record store in Haight-Ashbury, reminded me about the times she would teach me all her favorite songs, line the one by Barry White: Standing in the shadow of love love love love love!
And then, there he was: the presence of Tiki Jim appeared in the clouds. He didn’t say anything at all, just smiled down. He was about to say something hilarious. He was still watching over me every single day. He never left. And I thought of those nights in San Francisco and the scary guy in the alley and the boyfriend who pushed me around and the boss who treated me like shit, and there was Tiki Jim. Still there, pure, and without pain, having my back.
And there was John, next to him in the sky. I painted the sky blue for him and he shone. And John told me, “I am not mad at you, Alison, and I don’t blame you for leaving the family. You were always good to me. I was so scared and so desperate, I just didn’t know what to do, and I had to do this. I was just freaking out. I’m ok now. I love you.” And he stayed there in the blue, without pain.
My vision darkened and I saw my brothers return to their nighttime constellation. I was in the valley with the medicine again. She sat with me on the cool clean grass of the night. The air was so pure.
I asked her to show me the answers now, and to take me to my ancestors, and to make me a better mom, and to set me off writing again. Where would I see these? When did the action begin?
Worth a shot: she understood my neediness. And then she reminded me to trust her. She took me to a clearing, and I learned how to make one.
In the three months since my brother’s passing, I had been trying to do everything. Bonking around my house and neighborhood, never finishing anything, I knew it wasn’t working.
I felt acutely that I didn’t have a family at all: adoptive parents who had, thanks to different kinds of sickness, never gotten to know us, or to show us care. The friends who flew away when they saw how deeply John’s suicide wounded me. A job that had become such a void that my boss had attempted to push me out with a layoff during my bereavement leave, days after my brother’s death. I needed to plan, and arrange, and jump some hurdles and get some answers. New job, routine with the kid, write some things out. But I couldn’t get disentangled enough from all of these doings to get anything done. I got my kid off to school and lay in bed. Days and days on end.
What I needed to do first was to make a clearing. The medicine taught me this.
In ritual, I asked for doings and knowings. Instead, the medicine took me to me to a place. It was a clearing.
Is this where I meet my ancestors? I asked. The Gaels with the songs and green eyes? Have they been watching me? Will I meet them?
The medicine told me: This is the clearing. When you are striving, come to this clearing. And then she took me on to more tents, more learnings.
Over the next two days of ritual, whenever I felt myself straining for solutions, the medicine would take me again to the clearing. It was an ordinary grouping of trees around a soft, mulchy, mossy space mottled in leafy sunshine. Cooled here and there by the breeze, t-shirt weather. Clean enough to sit down in without a cushion. Could stay there forever. Just a clearing. Just a clearing.
The medicine said: When you are striving, come to this clearing. If you cannot see one, make one. That’s it. The rest will come later. You have to do it in the right order. Clearing first. That’s what she told me, again and again.
Got it.
In the world of popular culture - one in which Ayahuasca is a central character in a changing (and very hip) Western relationship to psychedelic therapy - much is made of the purging process associated with it and other plant medicines. As an anthropologist, I tend to be wary of any out-of-context representations of ritual, especially when they seem to dictate what something is supposed to mean. Think: Vice magazine’s piece about the phenomenon: Why You Vomit on Ayahuasca: Is it physical, mental, or both?
I had heard so many stories about late-coming, cult-y white guys demanding intense dedication to certain rituals in preparation for Ayahuasca ceremony, certain kinds of silence and unsustainable diet, more money than sounded right, or certain modest dress for women only. These dogmatic representations of Shamanism mapped onto what I have always heard, as an attuned researcher of ritual, when (largely white), Western people talk about beliefs and rites that seem strange to them. Shamanism does not have to be patriarchal; we know this from many years of comparative cultural study. Better yet, we know by asking the shamans.
All the same, I was terrified that I would misstep or lose my guts in a purge that could bring up some kind of unexpected psychosis, reduce me to a catatonic state, or betray whatever secret thing I have wrong with me - the kind of self-hatred that can fuel suicidal behavior and addiction. I expressed these fears to the practitioners I was working with, and they shared their own experiences with anxieties about ritual, and about life. They guided me to set realistic expectations and to treat ritual best practices as just that - not a dance with demons. To be gentle with myself.
Instead, our shamans recommended practices that would help us focus, to ease off hard-to-metabolize stuff like stimulants, sugars, excess fats, salt, alcohol, SSRIs, and other chemicals that can deregulate our systems or cause our hearts to beat too fast. As much as we could, anyway. To wear comfortable clothing and avoid stressful events or people in days leading up to ritual. To reflect on what we love, and what we need, and to draw inward.
I turned away from alcohol for the first time in months, which left me feeling more acutely the pain of grieving. I softly latched my side door to friends whose presence kept me from feeling loneliness, but who overfilled their pockets with my time and my care. I taught my gut to remember nutrient-rich foods and to lay down the weird comfort of excessive fat and salt. At first I felt hungry. When it was time for rituals, I felt very sensitive and young, like a lifetime of band-aids had peeled off. I was clearing.
In the Ayahuasca circle, I did not purge in the conventional sense. A little spit on the second night. Others did, and I was happy their bodies were taking care of them in this way.
Instead, John and Tiki Jim sent me laughter. To purge, my body wanted me to remember my lightness, to access the BIG JOY that I can always feel deep in my being, but always felt I had to bury behind a thick membrane of doing and making.
I laughed, I giggled uncontrollably. Not like a madman, but like a kid. I had laughed like this with both of my brothers so many times, despite all of the traumas we endured together and apart. I can see their laughter, I can see their BIG JOYS. They are released, now, to these joys on their planes; I am still here, with mine. All running through each other, healing, healing. That was our purge.
I made a clearing.
In the months since I experienced the healings offered by the Ayahuasca medicine and these truly devoted, knowledgable, and electrically funny ritual practitioners, I’ve been working on my clearing. I continue, sometimes unevenly, to learn to live independently of the effects of alcohol. Feeling the jagged grain of life’s brokenness brings to light medicine of a different kind: it has inspired me to start writing again seven years after I forgot I could. I have learned to rest, which, for those starved of it, can lead to a kind of radical change conventional doing could never offer.
Something else happened as I recognized how I had been drinking in order to calm my system enough to engage with the narratives spun by my adoptive family. These stories were keeping us sick, and I was throwing up any force field I could to keep from taking the steps I needed to to clear those stories out of my system. It was just those stories that forced my brother to succumb to suicide. I had to disentangle from them first. But once they were cleared, I realized I didn’t know my story at all. I didn’t know who I was. The medicine did not tell me: she showed me a clearing, and the rest is up to me.
A few months after ceremony, I woke up and ordered a genetic test. I don’t remember making a conscious decision to do this. My fingers did the walking. In the clearing, I found my birth father, and soon after, my birth mother, who had been waiting for me for 47 years. She calls me “darling.” We work out the difficult pathway of reuniting together, and find that there are joys at every turn. The sense of being myself for the first time takes root and grows all through me like a fresh green vine: one that does not have to fight for space. I nourish it first.
I turn to my son without the sense of shame that dulled my ability to see him, to see us, fully. We have so much more laughter than ever, and he has had the joy of witnessing this transformation with me. He knows that trauma can take root, but that it can also loosen, turn to mulch, and nourish stronger strains of growth.
Sour relationships have turned over for new, sweeter ones in the mulch. I experience these new belongings as gifts from my brothers. I grow with the people in my life who are not afraid to face the facts of loss, of trauma, and of the difficult work of letting go.
I let go of the warped sense of security that my work life has entailed. Although it has been extremely difficult to avoid applying for jobs that offer steady income but deep personal unhappiness, I am taking my time to build something independent that can exist alongside my creative life and my moral center.
I thank my protectors of anxiety, of hiding inside, of perceiving danger at its first signs. I answer to them by listening to my gut, where the medicine sits, and by doing the tedious, but important, work of setting boundaries and keeping them clear. I tend to them.
I do the work of survival that my brothers did not have the resources to do, and I honor them. I celebrate them this holiday week. John and Tiki Jim: I love you guys so much and I miss you every day. Thank you, thank you, into the blue blue sky and back.
Healing takes transformation; transformation needs a clearing.
I make the clearing.
In the sun mansion
We kiss its brilliance
The light steps within
Bow down, follow the footprints
-From a traditional Peruvian Icaro
12/19/23
Thanks so much Ali. We lost three friends week before last, one very close. We lost a friend to suicide in early fall. That was on the heels of deadly illnesses we survived last year, and of my dad’s death. Lots of grief often without sense. I mourn your losses. My spirits are lifted by your healing and the story you wove out of it. Hugs and tears. Thanks. — Pat