The importance of Circles

Last night S was very sad about our cats that died in the summer.  She finds all change extreamly hard with her anxiety disorder, so losing our little boys was a real challenge for her.  It comes out sometime at unexpected moments.  Often late at night when I don't want to think about dead cats or sad children and I am really wanting to be done parenting.  But I also feel the power of the circle in those times.  The value of the everyday changes we have made.  In the last year I have been getting into the habit of laying down tobbacco every day, trying to smudge everyday and having a circle every week as a family which we open up to the ancestors.

While sometimes these things do not seem to mean much to the children, I see the power of all those little steps in these late nights.  S told me "I will never stop loving them." in a kind of defiant way and we could talk about how she did not ever need to stop loving them, that they were with the ancestors in the spirit world and while their bodies were gone they were still with us - like the sage that had physical form and then is changed, so it is with them.  We have their collars as part of our circle quilt and we wrote their names on the inside of the quilt (there is a hole in the middle for this purpose) so we remember them whenever we come together as a circle.  I also talked about how in smudging every day and giving the tobbacco we are remembering our ancestors and those in the spirit world and thanking the mother for all the love we have had from these beings and remembering how they continue to influence us everyday.

I felt lot better having that conversation with her that the christian one where you were told your pet was just dead - they had no soul saved by jesus or that they would see you in heaven - waiting for death to see fluffly seemed wrong to me.  It felt good having an answer to her feelings.  It felt good to see those everyday reminders to take the tobbacco build into something a little bit more.  It felt good to draw on the wisdom of the ancestors and the old ways.  It felt like a little step on the good red road.  EM