“For people who are chronically ill, the losses are multiple and permanent and therefore difficult to resolve. Because these losses are unending, they’re known as infinite losses…” –Social Work Today

“Life will return to burned areas in short order. Fungi are already crawling around in the ashes of the fire, laying the foundation for soil that will support the plants that will constitute the early stage of the forest’s re-growth…And ash is nature’s fertilizer. Plant blight, disease and insects are reduced or eliminated by burns. Mineral soil is the compost that Douglas fir seedling roots need to grow. ‘Dead trees’ or snags are full of life.” –Bill Weiler, wildlife habitat expert

Six Weeks Before

The face in the waterfall is clear.

I stand at the base of Wahclella Falls, one of the most powerful in the Columbia Gorge, my feet to basalt 15 million years old, a memory of time before humans, the Miocene era of liquid stone. I’ve just made an offering, an object of great value to me, tossed into the pool of the falls. In my bones is a memory of this, gold at the base of a waterfall, a spirit’s hoard. My partner snapped the photo without my knowing, and there an image, a face emerging from the water.

I am an animist because it makes life more interesting. Animism holds the simultaneous: that things can be real and not real at the same time. We don’t really know much at all about how nature works, the whys of evolution, the function of ecosystems both within and without our bodies. Believing in consciousness and reciprocal relationship has supported me in the not knowing, for mystery is inherent in any student of magic and myth.

In graduate school my research interests included the myths of Northern Europe, how mythic consciousness teaches us new ways of viewing time. These models have disappeared from most dominant systems of thought, but they exist still (in the complex of spiral eternity that is myth itself) in indigenous spiritualities. As a person of European descent, the indigenous spirituality of my forebearers (Celtic, Slavic, Nordic, Germanic) is largely fragmented, and I am separated by oceans and hundreds of years from earth-based ancestral home^[1]. So I choose to live where I live, to learn about these traditional lands of the “Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Cowlitz bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla and many other Tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River.” Here I weave fabric into existence by studying the severed threads.

When I pray to the waterfall spirit my own threads are severed, life fragmented by a diagnosis as mysterious as myth, as improbable as animism in a capitalist culture. Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Six months ago my health collapsed after a semester of teaching. I had been in decline for years but rationalized my ailments as stress related—divorce, long distance parenting, a child abandoned by a parent, a child on the autism spectrum, homeschooling, moving, financial instability, professional insecurity…and on… I lost my job, could not return to complete my doctorate, spent weeks, then months, in bed. As the weather improved in the spring so did my health, enough that I could walk to the waterfall, enough that I could pray. But in chronic, cyclic illness, respite is temporary and improvement is only half the norm.

Four Weeks Before

The trail is shaded by dripping moss and the fertile, loamy smell of needled dirt drifts up, balsam. Even in these ideal conditions—seventy degrees in Eagle Creek Canyon, good sleep, a respite from symptoms this week as the air is sunny and dry—I am not feeling well. Also I don’t really understand this illness, not yet. I keep trying to do these things I have always done easily, like take my three children on a hike. But I’m shaky less than a mile in and the sheer drop cliff, the narrow trail 120 feet up with cable lines for security, is prohibitive. We will never see Punch Bowl Falls, Loowit Falls, the High Bridge unburned. On the way back to the car I drift into trance, children far ahead. In another photo from this time, air gold, backdrop green, I levitate in a pool of sun a foot above the ground.

One month later, a child the same age as my daughter, in that same stretch of hike, lobs a smoke bomb into the tinder woods. The canyon explodes in flame, the start of a burn that will last two months, charring 50,000 acres.

One year later, my ME/CFS has cycled from moderate to severe.

I spend my days in a darkened room. I can’t rise without shaking, run fevers daily, have symptoms resembling the worst, most endless flu. I wait until my family is at home before bathing for fear of falling, drowning. I lie on my side, my pillow constantly wet with tears. I make a video, which I later delete.

“Is this a life?” I sob into the dusk of the screen.

“This is not a life? I must be dying. This is not a life.”

Within days I will receive a phone call from the specialist at Stanford, confirming that my brain is on fire, my body inflamed, my immune system unable to function in the midst of so much internal heat. My body is working, inefficiently, to suppress the fires that smolder at the edges of my consciousness.

In that moon the fires swept through my body. I became charred earth.

Rainfall

Here in the Pacific Northwest the rains—persistent, continual—come in November. In November of 2017 the rains extinguished the Gorge fire. For the next year hotspots would crop up, fire deep in a root ball or soil duff preserved over winter to emerge in the new light of spring.

In November of 2018 I finally learned what was making me so ill: viruses, five at least, smoldering low grade in my body, jacking up levels of an inflammatory protein—C4a, one most doctors don’t even know to test for—to three times what they should be. I began a course of treatment both conventional and naturopathic and within two days I was able to walk without assistance.

Now, two years later, in spite of some flare ups and the persistent threat of a viral pandemic, my health is stable. But I walk the world changed, trail not recognizable, a new self, or maybe a cyclic self. Self dead and reborn.

Cycles

In all myth there are cycles. In the myths of my Norwegian ancestors, shared with me by my grandfather, Sigurd, the end of the world is the beginning of the world. At Ragnarok all is devastated, the sun turns dark, the earth is submerged, fire giants emerge from Muspelheim and steam fills the air, even gods are doomed to die. But in the Eddic poem Völuspá, Ragnarok represents a necessary ending. After the death, a rebirth. Some gods survive, along with two humans, Ask and Embla (tree names, Ash and Elm), the fields sprout without needing to be sown, and the gold game pieces of the gods are retrieved from grass newly green.

In his work Sacred and Profane, Mircea Eliade introduced the idea of Eternal Return, that through a mythic/religious consciousness, certain acts could bring us into relationship with divine cycles through symbolic action and ritual.

“One essential difference between these two qualities of (profane and sacred) time strikes us immediately: by its very nature sacred time is reversible in the sense that, properly speaking, it is a primordial mythical time made present.”^[2]

Profane time is time without meaning, whereas mythic time is time made meaningful. In a culture so firmly subscribed to the model of profane, linear time, any thing or person existing outside this model is an aberration, monstrous. For example, I cannot work…not because I don’t want to work, but because my cyclic illness precludes a linear progression through an academic year. Reasonable accommodation for disability doesn’t allow absence, and I can’t with any accuracy predict when I may need a week of rest or year to heal.

Written in my journal when I was deeply ill:

“I thought that when you became sick there was help for you. I thought there were doctors, systems, people who could hold your hand, offer education, support. I thought there was a financial safety net, social security disability, automatically enacted. Instead I have existed for years without a doctor who knows anything about my illness, therefore I have no ability to access services, or disability insurance. I have flatlined in a culture of independent expectation and no one seems to notice. No one seems to care.”

In profane, linear, socially acceptable time my experience is without meaning. It becomes what the Journal of Social Work calls a litany of “infinite loss.” There is no end to the losses: loss of status, identity, profession, ability both physical and mental, friends, connections, possibility, security, opportunities, belief, trust, hope. People with chronic illness can’t properly grieve these losses in linear time, because they perpetuate, become an inescapable story of endless death. The losses stack and threaten, for with a self so firmly dissolved and no support in sight, is this a life?

People with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis are six times more likely than the general population to kill themselves. We have an illness that is not just widely misunderstood by the medical community, but actively maligned, dismissed and disbelieved. Without experts, like medical doctors, who can advocate for us in the twisted system of disability insurance and resources, many of us go without financial support or services. I’ve had doctors make me worse with treatments, I’ve been told I had depression instead of an incurable chronic illness and an adjustment disorder instead of medical PTSD, and most recently I was told by the determination arm of Social Security that I could return to work full time as a university professor because my illness was not considered severe enough to warrant benefits.

There is no way to prove severity with ME/CFS, no tests to confirm physical abilities, and to the outside world, I look fine. My specialist at Stanford, the only MD who will treat me, is overwhelmed and won’t complete any patient’s Residual Functional Capacity forms. My primary care physician is a FNP and can’t speak to ME/CFS and the necessary limits it imposes on my physical and cognitive abilities. If I exceed those limits, I am at risk for relapse.

 There is an emotion attached to this equation. In linear time, some may call it hopelessness. In linear time, I call it despair.

But in mythic time, obstacles are opportunities, and losses are offerings to the sacred, to the potentiate of a unique and potent whole.

Illness as a Rite of Passage

Last year my family and I returned to Wahclella Falls. I carried an Oregon sunstone in my mouth for the hike, a gift infused with words I can’t yet speak.

 The trail was different. Rock and slip, ash and dust, what was once a partial loop is now an out and back. The forest burned in pastiche, a quilt of char, some trees down and dead, some elder firs blackened but still alive. And everywhere in the woods, a wealth of green, herbaceous stands of mugwort and queen Anne’s lace remembered and re-seeded from two years ago, alive. On the path, a yellow woolly bear, nibbling its way to chrysalis.

In the canyon I stood again on the ancient stone to commune with the spirits.

“You are still here!” I wave, hands reaching.

“Of course we are.” The water rushes, deafening. It sounds like a roaring laugh.

The canyon walls drip vines the same as before, there is no easy path to the waterfall pool. I tiptoe over flotsam and throw in the sunstone. Behind me, my partner takes a photo.

In the waterfall, eyes emerge.

In mythic time, we make meaning from essential devastations, we see the cycles of death and birth as necessary, we move from linear, infinite losses into regenerative growth.

In a mythic life, the cycles of trial and loss become initiatory, patterned after ancient stories, after the natural world, where fire is not enemy but ally, where death nourishes new growth.

We are a part of nature, not apart. My ecological systems, immune, respiratory, cardiovascular, digestive, are dependent on an infinitude of mysterious processes and beings, connected to a greater story of waterfall, fire, ash and tree. We acknowledge each other, this knowing that is more than I, this truth greater than any contemporary, human awareness. Through the eyes of natural cycles we learn to surrender; with meaning we grow.

In the past years I have begun a journey through the nonlinear, to seeing my illness and its subsequent losses as a death transition, a rite of passage with initiatory power. In death transitions we move out of the known and into the liminal, the underworld, where the work of transformation can occur. Storyteller Martin Shaw says that in order for an initiatory process to be mythic, effective, something has to die in the underworld, an offering to the goddess of death, the dark mother in Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey cycle. So the losses of illness become an offering, and in every myth cycle, a bastion of return.

On return the world is changed. There is absence. And fertility. There is transformation. And new growth.

Good Ecological Fire

“Easily two-thirds or more of the Gorge fire is really good ecological fire.”^[3]

In a world of profane time, we run from death. In a capitalist culture, profiting from fear of death is the norm. Transitions that lead us close to death—the controlled burn of messy, physical transformations like birthing, illness, old age, and the decline to death itself—are hidden from view. Sanitized, unseen, relegated to the underworld, never to emerge.

Denial of death is a kind of fire suppression in the soul of a culture. Looking to the mythologies points the way toward a potential embrace of passage, fire, flood, cataclysm, through ritual. When meaning is made from deaths, an alliance begins. We return to a source on the loom, a warp and woof ever woven: in cyclic time, in natural time, in mythic space, we gain perspective, we re-member.

Denial of death and the attendant fear of anything resembling it puts us on the run. We tamp down flares in the wilderness of our collective consciousness, the tinder builds, with the potential for great destruction.

Do you see where I am headed? Capitalism, rampant consumerism, climate change, all invaded with a persistent, insidious and helpless fear of what is, in fact, a natural part of life.

Most of us in the US will die from some form of chronic illness. Could that be why invisible disabilities are themselves so unpalatable, so easy to disbelieve? By denying illness, we deny our own fates. The threat, extinguished. For a time.

For those of us living with chronic illness we live with what psychologists are just beginning to understand as Enduring Somatic Threat. Much like our grief, which cannot be quantified because it has no end, this threat also is persistent. This is the root of my trauma, embedded deep in my body. That every time I become sick, it is an ember, ready to strike the fire of my immune system again. Ignition can happen at any time, for any reason. Already in this past year of relative health I have experienced symptomatic relapses due to viruses, bacterial infections, environmental toxins and stress. I have wakened with the old ache in head, joints and eyes. I fear starting anything—a job, a project—as I know it is likely I will be unable to complete it due to necessary vigilance around my health. The vigilance is exhausting.

Or is it? In the model of mythic time, aren’t my relapses just another cycle? We know from Campbell’s work that it is possible to be in multiple rites of passage at one time. What if these periodic relapses are somehow essential to my growth, to the new green emerging from my soil, to the habitat in me, so specific, so rare?

What if relapse is, in fact, good ecological fire?

Ancestors

“…researchers speculate that more than 100 million years ago a viral infection in a primitive mammal uploaded a gene that helped the placenta evolve.”^[4]

My illness was caused by viruses.

Viruses evolved billions of years ago. In my meditations and rituals, I have found it useful to see viruses not as adversaries, but as ancestors.

There is a collaborative nature to the ancient myths, a nonbinary complexity of relationship. The goddess Gullveig appears in the Völuspá as a victim, kidnapped by a warring faction of gods, burned three times and stabbed with spears. But she emerges powerful, a survivor, infused with gifts, a healer, a teacher. She brings a magic into the world that is later shared with the same gods that harmed her. Soon the pantheon is interwoven by marriage and shared parentage, the old wrongs forgiven in the service of community growth. In these myths the world is challenging; the natural powers, often embodied as giants, are wild and unpredictable. Yet they are not demonized; their roles are essential to a wholeness, which benefits everyone.

Wholeness. The etymological root of the word healing is heal, meaning whole. In an integrative mythos, all parts are essential to the collective.

In the mythic, we are whole. However the pain, however the infinite losses and enduring threats, the reality is that beneath the scorched earth of our death transitions, another cycle has already begun.

Even now in the burned-out vistas of the west, just weeks after fire, seeds sprout in soil rich with ash.

[1] ljist.com/featured/acknowledging-native-land

[2] Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (1959: CourseWorks Columbia University), chap. I, www.columbia.edu/itc/religion/f2001/edit/docs/Eliade1.html

[3] iafi.org/the-columbia-river-gorge-eagle-creek-fire-ruin-or-renewal

[4] cosmosmagazine.com/biology/what-came-first-cells-or-viruses