The Libation of Tears: Part IV

The Oldest boy, an Inuit Story

Photo by Phoenix Han on Unsplash.

Dear Readers,

This week we add an Inuit story, The Oldest Boy, to our exploration of the healing powers of empathy and compassion, which I’ve come to believe are the only true way for an individual or a culture to move beyond the scars of shame.

So far we’ve looked at these stories: Skeleton Woman (Inuit), The Descent of Inanna (Sumerian), and Fox Woman (Siberian). I’ll place links to these posts at the bottom of this post for those who’d like to catch up.

I must admit to extreme fatigue at the moment that’s precluding much intellectual commentary on this story. What I can say is that my individual body is currently experiencing a flare-up of an autoimmune disease, thus the physical fatigue, but it’s more than that. All my bodies are tired: my mind is exhausted by constantly trying to figure out how to survive in a society that requires individuals to constantly produce, difficult in a healthy body, and my emotional body is wrung out from all the feels I’m constantly feeling as an empath planted on Earth to help us shift to a more sane way of being.

In Western Culture, we are conditioned to see ourselves as individuals in charge of our own fate, and held solely responsible for it. I can’t tell you how many times people have told me if I just changed my thoughts, my body would miraculously heal. Up until recently, I believed them, which added to the already heavy burden of shame I carried as an empath who has thought since childhood it was her job to fix everything by whatever means she could: soothing, fawning, even taking on an autoimmune disease like ulcerative colitis. Mind you, nobody told me that. I didn’t get an instruction manual or even recognition that’s what I was doing. What I got was a boatload of judgment and shame from why I couldn’t just suck it up and fit in to the broken system. I had to figure it all out myself. My soul is tired.

When I first got sick 14 years ago I was fortunate to be able to see my disease metaphorically. I had done enough spiritual work that I could view my body’s struggle through a broader lens than what both the traditional medical world or the new age alternative health movement offered. The former told me there was no known cause of my disease and no cure. My only hope were medications that might work or surgery to remove my colon. The latter said I was responsible for creating my disease and that if I could change my thoughts and purge my negative emotions I would be healed.

As an animist, setting aside the lack of compassion and empathy, I am more in alignment with the new age prognosis. However, I don’t believe I am the one solely responsible for my disease or for curing it.

Sophie Strand

, writer of the Substack Make Me Good Soil, has written much more lucidly than I feel capable of at the moment, or perhaps ever, of how the body is a mycelial network. In other words, we are not individual bodies. We are networks connected through constant exchange on the biological level to everything around us.

Bayo Akomolafé, in the most recent episode of The Emerald: The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized, Part 2, refers to the body as a palimpsest. Both of these views see the body as a process. We are not closed loops. On the most fundamental level—the physical—we are connected to everything.

What is an autoimmune disease? According to medical science, it’s a process that occurs when, for reasons not yet discovered, the body turns against itself and starts to harm it in some way. The premise is that the attack occurs because the body is trying to defend itself from some invader. Sound familiar? Think of all the extreme weather events in recent years. They could be part of some larger cycle of time that we can’t calculate from our limited relationship to time, but they could also be Earth, the matrix that enfolds our individual bodies, attacking the invader—us— that’s threatening her body in an attempt to come back to homeostasis.

That makes it sound really impersonal, which I don’t think is the case. I don’t think Earth is trying to shake us off her back. We are not parasites. We are meant to be here and make a contribution that will evolve life, not devolve it. In pua’aehuehu, the ferns tell us the purpose of life is to journey through emotional experiences. At the end of the journey is aloha mā, self-reflective love. Love is not an emotion. It’s our purpose.

Fourteen years ago when I was first diagnosed there was not much talk of climate change, and if there was it was called global warming. But I knew Earth was in pain long before any pundit told me. I was born knowing.

What happens to a child who can feel so much suffering beyond her small frame? I’ve asked this so many times watching friends or community members die from addiction or suicide.

I am not responsible for my illness. We are.

The Oldest Boy is a story from a hunter-gatherer culture and shows a way of being in relationship to the elements of creation earth freely provides—fire, water, soil, air—that is much different than what we see in agricultural societies, even ancient ones.

In the beginning of Western civilization, people remembered they had to make offerings to Earth in order to atone for what they were taking, which is what we see in The Descent of Inanna. These are cultures where sacrifice is key.

Today, indigenous cultures hold onto the holy ways of killing and harvesting despite Western civilization’s best attempts to wipe them off the Earth so they can exploit their land and cultures as resources for industrialization or tourism.

Sacrifice is key.

Somewhere, some cells in a dark corner of my body heard that and stepped up with the best intentions to do the good work of making the exchange between humans and Earth holy again.

Do I want to be a sacrifice? No. Do I believe I can change this? Right now I have to say I don’t. After fourteen years of hard spiritual labor, I have too much evidence to the contrary. Am I giving up hope? No. But I’m also not delusional. Sometimes the greatest progress comes from surrendering to the fact that we are not in control of anything.

One thing I can do is ask for compassion, not judgment, for empathy, which we witness The Oldest Boy give to the sea goddess Sedna who appears in this story.

Shall we dive under the waves?

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The Oldest Boy

A long time ago, when people were figuring out how to live in this world, nobody slept in air-tight houses or bought their family’s food in a grocery store. People built their homes from whatever the earth gave them. In the far north there was a village where the people lived together in one stone lodge, gathering close together in winter to keep warm.

One winter when it was time for everyone to seal themselves in the lodge to weather the bitter cold, the elders looked around and realized they didn’t have enough food to survive the entire winter. They made a decision. In order to conserve resources and their energy, they would sleep most of the day, leaving most of the food for the children.

Now the children didn’t think much of the adults sleeping all day like hibernating bears. They actually thought it was pretty fun. They played games all day and enjoyed nobody telling them what to do. The adults would wake up around dusk to eat a little soup and check on everyone. Most of the time the oldest boy was in charge. He was one of those boys that came to leadership naturally, brash and a little bossy. He organized games for the little kids and when the adults woke up they were glad to see nobody was alarmed at their long slumber.

One day the oldest boy gathered all the kids to him and said, “I’ve thought of a new game. Wanna play?” Of course the kids said yes. “What’s the game called?” The oldest boy puffed up his chest like a preening bird and said, “The game is called calling in the spirits.” The little kids looked up at him in awe. The Oldest Boy liked this feeling. He began to sing:

“Oh spirit, come to me. Oh spirit, come to me. I call upon the spirit of the soul of the sea.”

“Oh spirit, come to me. Oh spirit, come to me. I call upon the spirit of the soul of the sea.”

“Oh spirit, come to me. Oh spirit, come to me. I call upon the spirit of the soul of the sea.”

As soon as he was stopped the stones on the ground began to levitate, whirling around the ice lodge. All of the kids were impressed and a little terrified. The oldest boy told them, “Don’t tell the grown ups what happened when they wake up. This is our secret.”

“We won’t tell,” they all agreed, but of course they couldn’t keep such a huge secret. All it took was one question from a grownup, “What do you do all day while we’re asleep?” and they all spilled the beans.

Now the adults at that time took things like levitating stones seriously. They called the oldest boy to them and asked him what was going on. “Show us this game,” they said with some concern, and the oldest boy repeated his song, three times:

“Oh spirit, come to me. Oh, spirit, come to me. I call upon the spirit of the soul of the sea.”

“Oh spirit, come to me. Oh, spirit, come to me. I call upon the spirit of the soul of the sea.”

“Oh spirit, come to me. Oh, spirit, come to me. I call upon the spirit of the soul of the sea.”

The Oldest Boy was excited to impress the elders. But nothing happened. The stones on the lodge floor stayed put. As the oldest boy stood there in front of the adults, feeling pretty foolish, they all heard a great bellowing outside the lodge. Without even thinking about it, the adults scooped up the oldest boy and tossed him out toward that awful sound. Before he could even hit the ice he was caught in a polar bear’s paw, who smacked him through the air to a walrus, who caught him on a tusk. The polar bear and walrus took off with him into the white wilderness, playing catch with the oldest boy: paw to tusk, polar beat to walrus, back and forth and back and forth until they reached the place where the bone-crunching ocean met the ice, and dove right in. Polar bear to walrus, walrus to polar bear, they smacked him back and forth as they swam down, down, down, all the way to the bottom of the sea, and when they reached the bottom they passed into the land beneath the ocean where a river carried them, all the time playing toss with the oldest boy, paw to tusk, tusk to paw. Finally they left the oldest boy on the riverbank at a bend in the river.

After a long time the oldest boy woke up, alone in the land beneath the ocean. When he got to his knees he noticed a small hut, and because there was nothing else to do, he walked toward it and entered. There was nothing in the first room, but then he noticed a door on the back wall. He opened that door and stepped into another room, and sitting at a table facing him with a blank gaze was an old, old woman. She was so old her white hair touched the floor and her face was so deeply creviced auks could have nested in it. Most terrifying of all, she had no hands. Suddenly the oldest boy understand why her hair was so matted.

On the table next to her were three things: an ivory comb, a sealskin ribbon, and an obsidian bowl filled with water. She stared at the oldest boy as if she could see right through him. She probably could. He was speechless. Out of an unfathomable silence, the old woman spoke:

“What can you do for me?”

Without hesitation, the oldest boy walked toward the table and picked up the ivory comb. Starting at the bottom of the long, white cascade so as not to hurt her, he began to comb the old woman’s hair. As he combed sea creatures spilled out onto the hut floor, shrimp and sea lice and tiny, darting fish. The oldest boy was patient and thorough. After a time the old woman’s hair began to shine as he unraveled and smoothed all the knots. But he wasn’t done. He began to braid the old woman’s hair, just the way his mother braided his sister’s back in the lodge, and when the plait was finished he tied it off with the sealskin ribbon, and then the oldest boy held the obsidian bowl so the old woman could look at her reflection in the water. When she saw herself, just the slightest smile passed over her face. She turned and pointed to another door on the back wall and all of a sudden it opened and sea creatures spilled forth, swimming across the room into the next room and out into the river, swimming up from the land beneath the sea to fill the ocean. Seals and walruses and whales and every kind of fish you could imagine.

Before he left the old woman instructed him on how to honor an animal’s spirit. The hunter must offer the dying animal a drink of sweet water—not salt—so that it could pass over into the next world knowing the sweetness of life and come back again to feed the people. And the people must not let the dogs play with the seal’s bones. They must bury them.

With this knowledge, the oldest boy left the old woman’s hut. He had no idea how he was going to get home, but as soon as he stepped out of her lodge guess who appeared-polar bear and walrus. Again they swooped him up with paw and tusk, tossing him back and forth as they navigated the underground river back to the ocean, toying with him all the way to the surface. In one leap they were on the ice again and running-polar bear to walrus, walrus to polar bear. Polar bear to walrus, walrus to polar bear-until they reached the village lodge where they dumped him at the closed door and disappeared into the white horizon.

The oldest boy lay there for a long time before the villagers discovered him. When the adults, close to starving themselves now, found him, they didn’t think he’d make it, but they dragged him in and set him on a sealskin next to the fire. All they had left to eat was a thin soup that could barely sustain them, but they took some of that soup to the oldest boy and held a spoonful of it to his lips, and when the soup touched his tongue he awoke. Without speaking he stood up and walked outside the lodge. He closed his eyes and reached his arms to the sky like a great tree. Out of the sky came hundreds of birds to land on his arms like they would on branches. Covered in birds, the oldest boy felt the sun on his face, and was grateful, and then he snapped the birds’ necks, giving them to his people so they could break their long fast. When all the birds were eaten he made himself a gigantic harpoon, so large most men wouldn’t have been able to lift it, but the oldest boy could, and with one thrust he speared a whole shoal of seals, remembering to give each one a drink of sweet water before it expired. He brought the seals back to feed the village, and he taught the villagers what the old woman had told him, how to give each seal a drink of fresh, sweet water so that it could journey to the next world remembering the sweetness of life, and to keep the bones away from the dogs. From then on the villagers buried the bones on a hill overlooking the sea.

Now I don’t know if the people of that time remembered what they learned from the oldest boy or if they forgot, but I do know it was said that if a time came when the people forgot how to harvest the life of land and sea with respect, an oldest boy would have to make the journey down to the land beneath the sea once more to comb the old woman’s hair.

This story lived for a long time in the earth where it lodged in an arctic vole, who kept it safe under the ice for many years, until one day the vole met its end in the teeth of a weasel. The weasel scampered off with the story as weasels do, until one day the weasel got a hankering for a fish it could hear splashing around through a hole in the ice. The weasel wanted that fish so bad it leaned over the edge hoping it could yank it up with its lightning quick paw, but alas leaned over too far and fell into the arctic water. The weasel struggled for a long time, but the ice was too slick for it to climb out of the hole and eventually it drifted off to sleep, a merciful way to die, in the cold, cold water. Slowly, the weasel sank, and when it reached the bottom it met a great scavenger of the sea, a crab, and was eaten up. Nobody knows how long that story lived in the crab, but eventually it was caught and ended up in Pike Place Market in Seattle, Washington, and from there made its way into a crab bisque that was served to the storyteller Danny Deardorff, who told the story to Walton Stanley in the Minnesota woods, and Walt told the story to Jay Leeming, who told it to me. And now here I am telling it to you, and I ask you, what will you do with this story?

Notes:

Links to previous articles in this series:

The Libation of Tears Part I: Skeleton Woman

Part II: The Descent of Inanna

Part III: Fox Woman

And a post on Sedna:

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night: Sedna and the Necessity of Feminine Rage

I’d also like to encourage you to support storyteller Jay Leeming, who first brought this story to my ear through his wonderful podcast The Crane Bag, which you can check out at this link on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light