By Joe Raymond

As a person of mixed white and Indigenous (Taíno) heritage who lives on lands loved long ago and still loved by the Munsee-Lenape peoples along the banks of the Mahicannituck River (now called “Hudson”), I greet these holidays with a mix of reverence and sorrow: reverence for the spirits of Grandmother Summer Wind and Grandfather Winter Wind who are said to have met in their youth when the World Turtle was still very ancient, but younger than today. 

These Winds are among our ancestors: because I live on their land, I honor them in the liturgy of my heart.  They reunite twice a year, once at the beginning of the planting season and once at the end of harvesting (with various iterations of the story describing their relationship as complementary aspects of nature that brought the right timing of wind, rain, snows, sun, moon, and storms with all of the uncertainty that rules the edges and quite frequently spills over into everyday human experience).   

Here is a retelling of their story: picture a large island around which a river quickens.  This river is a little more than a creek; to ford it, young men have carried their little brothers and sisters and those with infirmities upon their shoulders; perhaps some rafts were constructed from the wood members of the wigwams that are packed in watertight skins to bear them across the rapid waters.  Not all shall cross over; to them is the duty of declaring the holiness and the peace of the island, and to admit those from other tribes who shall invoke the gathering of the stones, the running water, the gathering of the Lenni Lenape, the Original Peoples… and of course, the invocation of the Winds.

Smooth stones are collected from a place where they were set at the end of the last gathering, fires are lit, and what we might know as liturgy is offered; then the feast is taken and younger members play and have contests to prove their boasts, and the older members trade news and have their own games--less of strength of body than of sharpness of mind and wit.  In their minds is that reality spilling over: how almost on a whim it seems that the fruitful year could fall to calamity, and how the drought of one summer was miraculously ended by late storms.  

But these are the concerns of  the Winds: even though they meet in our spirit-eyes as elder, and very elder… they cavort and dance as though time is meaningless to them. Perhaps it is this way for them, but much less so for us-- because soon, the festivities end: the wigwams are taken apart and what can be left to the earth and to the river is left, and what must be packed away is set upon the rafts or the shoulders of young men, and so the tribes depart back to their respective places.

A mature (yet still robust) Grandfather Winter Wind will escort Grandmother Summer Wind, who now moves with an increasingly weary deliberativeness; they seek a longhouse to the far north, a place guarded by wolves and snow-bears where she will rest a season out of her frailty, to be reborn after the Solstice in the far south, in a hidden cove known only to World Turtle for whom our all-too-short lives are but mere heartbeats deep within their core.

Thus parted, Grandfather Winter Wind takes up a walking stick and makes his way south once more, healing the sick trees and animals he meets, and showing departing spirits their path home… while Young Maiden Summer Wind makes her way back to the holy meeting ground in time to meet her aging partner, giving her life essence along the way to encourage seeds and spores and the ground sprout forth and cover the word once again in a verdant panoply of growth.

The Winds meet again, invoked by the elders for the spring gathering-- and afterward (in this version of the story I’ve heard, my heart fills in the gaps), a mature Grandmother Summer Wind escorts the declining Grandfather Winter Wind to rest, where he is reborn anew after the summer solstice… perhaps his rebirth is at his ever-wintry longhouse at some parallel where Algonquian tongues are met by more Inuit tongues, where as Brave Young Winter Wind, he will learn his craft from guardian wolves and bears until he is called south again to oversee the harvest festivals.

One such place where the festivals were said to have taken place is on the upper Delaware River, or perhaps further upstream along some narrower tributaries where those gathered smooth stones have been worn down over the long epochs of glaciations and the motion of World Turtle through the ages.

English is our common tongue, a language of iron tempered by blood, tightly bound to centuries of occupation, extraction, dominance, and of categorical assignments that divides and conquer… a language that long persisted past the usefulness of its early Saxon and other cognate cousins by assimilation of many Latin, Greek, French, and Arabic words, and far many more words from other languages than I could possibly enumerate.

It is that same irony of our language by which an occupier’s name (Sir Thomas West, the third Lord de la Warr in the pre-Union English Peerage) came to label a people group, a clade of languages they speak, and the life-giving river waters of the Delaware River itself, along with a colony that was expropriated from the Lenape peoples as among the first of many injustices visited by human settlers and newcomers against their indigenous distant cousins.

I live about a forty-minute drive from a place known as Minisink, a colonial Dutch loanword from the native Munsee word for island, which has been mistranslated in the past “a gathering of stones” – Minis-as-sink.  

Even if this term “a gathering of stones” is incorrect, I am still comforted by this term, for we are all children of that same stone woman referred to by Dōgen Zenji in his Mountains and Rivers Sutra:

Master Ta-Yang Shan-K'ai addressed the assembly: "The blue mountains are constantly walking. The stone woman gives birth to a child in the night." 

The mountains lack none of their proper virtues; hence, they are constantly at rest and constantly walking. We must devote ourselves to a detailed study of this virtue of walking. The walking of the mountains is like that of people: do not doubt that the mountains walk simply because they may not appear to walk like humans.

The evidence of the mountains “being constantly at rest and constantly walking” – negates the dualism inherent in describing motion and non-motion while never denying the mountainousness of the mountains. In my hands I hold such a stone, which was a member of a collection of stones called a mountain, who was uplifted and then worn down, born from that Stone Woman and made smooth by the rivers.  We, too, are all born of that same creation- - we all share this same water and earth, being shaped by and through these elemental forces spilling over and into us.  

This is why this time of year is very bittersweet for me: the sorrow for all that we have lost in our connections to the elements, the land, and the people is real for me, it is grounded in these marvelous stones, and it is cleansed by the running waters.  How then, shall I hold this grief- my grief on behalf of ancestors, white stones and red stones and brown and all the scintillating quartzes and silicates and ferrite by which we discriminate one stone from the next who have executed great crimes of words, deeds, and motives in our bodies while also being capable of doing great good for all the Stone Woman’s children?

"Without judgment". 

This is one of the core teachings of Dōgen Zenji:  It helps prevent me from attaching my (often faulty) biases and feelings from becoming firmly held delusions that can set us aflame and against each other. 

I consider my upbringing according to the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church – which for right or wrong imprinted itself onto the many pagan customs of the European native peoples in waves emanating from Rome, and has woven into its fabric many of the liturgical and former legal structures of Imperial Rome (the Curia, the Collegium Pontificum, and so forth).

Therefore, without judgment for "this" or "that," I greet this time to reflect on how Jesus would receive strangers into his sanctuary of Zion – a place built not from religious or political or capitalist imperialism or some attachment to "blood and soil," but a place of applied and non-attached love – expressed through the sacrifice of our self-will that shines in direct contrast to the hyper-narcissism of those whose rule may well once again cause the "souls of the people to groan" (if not gnash their teeth).

We have two years to follow that example of Christ-likeness (or if one prefers, to be unattached in our practice of Zen that frees us from paying mental rent to that guy or his appointed cronies, that allows us to continue to do work for social justice, climate justice, and to win more hearts to a message of democratic socialism even as the fruits of unbridled end-stage capitalism begin to waste and spoil on the vine. We have two years to follow the teachings of the imams and the Prophet (pbuh), to be steadfast in a practice of almsgivings and personal struggle against those arising aspects of our nature which must be accurately discerned and disposed of. 

Even as we may lay smooth stones and light candles or other representations of our inner spark of life in remembrance of those who have crossed and will cross the Great Sky River ahead of us, and for those whom we may leave behind when Grandmother and Grandfather Winds come to welcome us to the other shore, may we live our lives in service to family, tribe, and all people.

Let us be well, and let us do well in the seasons to come, whether they be seasons of rejoicing or of grieving.

Joe Raymond is a formal student of the Mountains and Rivers Order of Zen Buddhism and is an active member of the Mid Hudson Valley Democratic Socialists of America.

Image credit: Joe Raymond