The Birth of Bright Sky

Though the experience renovated much of my inner landscape, the thing that has stuck with me most is my name.

One way of engaging the Ojibwe community was to participate in a sweat lodge – a traditional healing and purification ceremony where 20+ people sit in a tiny pitch black structure where water is poured over hot stones while the participants sing and chant. This was no sauna – the heat was uncomfortable and it was hard to breathe and at the end something came out. I fell out of the structure weeping, clutching the dirt and letting the earth absorb my tears. There had recently been a traumatic death in the family and I could feel all the tension and sadness flowing out of me, releasing itself from my muscles and cells and mind.

We had been asked to fast for the day preceding the lodge. That meant no food or water for 24 hours. After the lodge, each participant offered a handful of tobacco to our lodge leader, a Midewewin (medicine man) named Richard. He put it in his pipe, lit it, and waited. Each of us received a name, guide, and colors.

My colors were red, blue, and yellow. My animal was the deer. My name was wasogiizhig., which means ‘light of day.’ Or, Bright Sky.

The first time I actively used the name was to change my Facebook account. My pictures had been previously stolen when I was involved in a legal proceeding. I had been arresting streaking for the traditional year-end finals week run and been stopped unexpectedly by the police. I was acquitted after a six hour trial. The next year, I heard no one was arrested during the run.

Still, the experience made me wary of how indelicately my online information is protected. Bright Sky premiered on Facebook.

Story of My Life (Part 5) – The Road South

 

“College”

I attended Pennsylvania State University at the insistence of my parents. My plan involving community college (due to not having a clue what I wanted to do with my life), was inadaquete, and anyway I could start as an Undeclared. I finished my Bachelor’s degree in English in three years and graduated in the summer of August 2009.

The first two years were relatively uneventful. Heavy class load, good grades, and I discovered the unlikely bonding that came out of smoking herb, rather than the chaotic and dangerous ritual of nightly binge drinking.

My third and final year was the most adventurous by far.

In the fall, I spent a semester in Rome with ten other students. It was my first quasi-community living experience. We lived in the same hallway and shared a bathroom. Rome itself was provocative, ancient. I was in constant wonder at the contrast between the old and the new, in architecture, in relationships, in my own self to constantly evolve. Also having to cook for myself was a large life change.

In the summer semester I took a cultural studies course, which involved a month living in Bemidji, Minnesota, in the midst of three of the largest Indian reservations in North America, occupied by the Ojibwe tribe. The trip was completely transformative. Meeting with tribal leaders, both political and spiritual, learning about current conditions on many reservations, alcoholism, the struggle to retain their language, poverty, trash, contradiction at every turn, the guilt about my own ancestor’s/culture’s behavior, genocide, the resilience and kindness of people despite these enormous challenges, the embarrassment of giving a gift, how quickly a loving community may form, the deliciousness of the sugarbush, the wisdom and generosity and healing powers of the midewewin, the outlawing of sweat lodges even up until the 1990s… all these things I cannot tell in a linear fashion because this was my introduction to a world that was connected at many levels – above and below, and to each other.

It turned my hierarchy upside down; instead of seeing man as the most complex or highly evolved, lording over the plants and animals, they showed me a hierarchy of dependency where man depended on all things around him to survive, just as the animals depended on the plants, just as the plants depended on the earth, and it was the planet herself that deserved the utmost respect for sustaining all life.

Story of My Life (Part 4) – The Birth of Bright Sky

 

Early Life

I was, as previously stated, born and educated in the great state of Pennsylvania. Homeschooled in my former years, Mom took me and my younger brother William and my younger sister Kathryn on outings to science museums and historical sights, skating rinks and community parks, friends’ houses and 4-H. She let us set our own book work hours during the week, and encouraged us in whatever we wanted to do, as long as it was safe. My early education was dotted with achievements, such as a championship in a regional Future City competition, where we were asked to design every aspect of a future city, from energy to transportation to a building a city block model. At 12, I was running a multi-thousand dollar business selling beanie baby leashes, which saw my already extensive vocabulary grow to include words like ‘wholesale’ and ‘commission.’

Then the time came for me to re-enter the mainstream. With some prompting from a friend’s mom, I began 8^th grade at the local middle school.

My first day at public school I declared myself King Bob and walked backwards through the hallways. Shocked at the incapacity of the other students to play and humiliated that they found me so strange, I focused my attention on my unconscious, or rather, the surprising capacity to sleep in a desk. Marching band kept me engaged through high school, but mostly my creative energy was focused on a percussion group called United, an intense mostly college-age group that traveled the country performing and competing through complex musical narratives. The instructors were unforgiving, the music was mercilessly difficult and I cannot recall a time in my life where I was ever pushed harder, physically or mentally. I loved every moment.

I graduated high school a quarter early in 2006 under the pretense that I was going to march all summer in a drum corp. I never did.

Story of My Life (Part 3) – “College”