Contrary Dancers

It is contrary time.  From the 1st of February until the vernal equinox, the world is unwinding.  In indigenous lodges where the protocol is to approach the elders and the fire in a clockwise motion, during this time the protocol switches to counter clockwise.  The indigenous people, and those ancestral proteins that live in the DNA of us all, know that at all thresholds there is a threshing.  The grubs must come up from the grass.  The tolls and hobgoblins under the bridges must surface.  That which has been denied, rejected, disavowed must be finally faced.  Contrary time is such a time.

Culturally, here in the West, we are surely at a threshold.  There are grubs, and hobgoblins filling the nightly newscasts.  How hard it is not to turn away.  How hard it is not to Other.  I went to a Contrary Dance a number of times at Six Nations near Brantford, Ontario, Canada.  It is a seasonal ceremony set to honour Grandmother and Grandfather Wendigocon.  It was touted and I experienced it as the most healing ceremony in the calendar.  The healing of the body, the emotions, the mind, and finally, the spirit was woven into the tapestry of the three-day dance.  Body tired, cold, hungry, and thirsty, I encountered the contrary that lived in me.  

We need to embrace our human form.  We need to take loving care of the container gifted us for this earthly journey.  And, we soon discover, the body holds the emotions. All the emotions.  The first time I did Child’s Pose in a yoga class, I could not exit the studio fast enough before the tears started to flow.  These long denied and hidden emotions ambushed me.  I had no idea that this grief was locked in my body. Contorting my adult body into such a vulnerable and innocent pose released the age-old grief.  It was such a healing and cathartic purge.  The body is surely our source of wisdom.  The mind alone can be the source of so much dis-ease.  In my mind I build castles in the air and move in furniture.  Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Elie Wiesel, said the source of evil was the rational mind.  This is counter intuitive to the Kings and Queens of the rational West.  Yet, the mind without the emotions, all the emotions, can justify all manner of cruelty.  And this cruelty is too often visited upon the bodies of the innocent.  It amazes me how the indigenous peoples knew what our lauded sciences today reveal.  The body, matter, Earth is our true home.  What we do or fail to do to our own animal body, to the bodies of others, to the Earth herself, tells our story. We need to come home, to the body, to the emotions.  The mind must be servant to the body, not the other way around.  Then, only then, do we reconnect to Spirit.  I know that much of this wisdom runs counter clockwise to the hubris of the West.  Yet, even these castles are crumbling.  

The healing energy of Grandmother and Grandfather Wendigocon is a powerful one.  A necessary one.  One that with wisdom and humility mediates against the force and power of the Wendigo.  We know Wendigo all too well in its unconscious and dark forms.  This is what haunts our social media feed, our corporate towers, our political arenas.  The Wendigo.  I know some indigenous elders who would never write that name, nor pronounce it without burning sage.  We sons and daughters of the mind, the West, the rational, can be so vulnerable to the Windego.  Our hubris makes it so. I burn sage for us all. 

wendigo, a mythological cannibalistic monster in the spiritual tradition of North American Algonquian-speaking tribes. It is associated with winter and described as either a fearsome beast that stalks and eats humans or as a spirit that possesses humans, causing them to turn into cannibals.

The dancers of the Contrary Dance dress in burlap robes.  Torn and tattered and inside out and backward, the regalia remembers what is too often forgotten. The dancers themselves dance for us all.  They unwind the certainty of our endeavours.  They turn willingly though not naively toward the dark.  They conjure up the hidden, the disavowed, the rejected.  For the three days and nights of the ceremony, they move, they embody, they dance to put the world right again.  Into chaos they go to find a new order.  When we emerge from the ceremony, punch drunk with deep healing, we walk into the new dawn.  Because they dance, we move into the springtime, the season of growth, refreshed and renewed.  We have risen from the belly of the beast and know the leviathans that live amongst us all.  

Would that something other than an election, an environmental crisis, or a screaming headline could reveal to us what we need to face.  Would that there could be leaders willing to wear burlap and contort themselves into right service.  Would that the emotions sullied by virtue signaling and mired in ideologies could be released in firelight to dance against the lodge walls of our hearts.  Wendigo, Anansi, Coyote, Fox, Raven, Loki, Hermes, Heyoka, Mercurius, Judas, Eshu and perhaps even Trump are our Contrary Dancers.  They unwind our certainty; they show us what we would rather not see.  They evoke our emotions and move our bodies in ways that surprise even us.  If their dances can be contained, if their chaos can be held, if their contrariness can be mediated, maybe in the wee hours of predawn, tired and hungry and cold, we find the healing hidden in the macabre contortions. 

This is a gathering of Lovers.
In this gathering
there is no high, no low,
no smart, no ignorant,
no special assembly,
no grand discourse,
no proper schooling required.
There is no master,
no disciple.
This gathering is more like a drunken party,
full of tricksters, fools,
mad men and mad women.
This is a gathering of Lovers.

Rumi