Nonfiction

Between Dark and Dawn, Our Ancestors Await.

A story of curved walls, flames, presence.

Find Part 1 of this story here and Part 2 here.

And that brings us back to Khövsgöl and the end of a jarring ride through Mongolian countryside. Arriving at the edge of the vast lake, I exhaled. Things would be okay. I would be okay.

I settled into one of the traditional yurts, or gers, rented to occasional adventure travellers passing through an expanse otherwise inhabited only by locals (and sparsely at that).

The space was all wood, flames, presence.

Alone yet held, I curled under thick, bright blankets on a low-sagging cot. A wood stove squatted solidly at the centre of rounded walls and my world. Warming, protecting, restoring.

Even in summer, nights turned bitter cold. Still, the dawn draft nudging me awake through a circular smoke hole in the domed ceiling was tender. A gentle whisper escaping the Mongolian countryside as it stirred, stretched, and awakened with spreading light.

In this place, each day in the transition between dark and dawn, I’d watch my thoughts and my breath.

I practiced noticing when they’d slipped away again, each time registering a loss. One manifest as moments missed, untouched…vanished forever in the space between noticing and remembering to notice again.

This space fell sometime after awakening in the grey hours to the metallic clink of the stove hatch opening, as a young woman came to light the fire.

This space waited between dreams and the sounds of kindling tumbling into the stove’s belly, the flames’ first catch, larger pieces of timber falling into place.

This space rested silently, where breath and thoughts touched lightly on the being of things. This space was Home.

Yet, part of me was impatient. My light touch on each breath, each thought, each moment, grew needy, gripping one thought, one feeling, one plan, one projection.

This is being human. But also, there’s loss in it.

In the doing, thinking, spinning. In our obsession with the ten thousand things. With where they were and might eventually be. Meanwhile, each moment moves on. Lost in the space between then and now. Never to be recovered.

Rolling onto my back to stare at the cloth-covered ceiling, I scanned its worn, rough face for wisdom.

What is that? Why do it? Why not touch lightly on each thing? Just here. Right here. Not grasping and clasping and losing the most precious of all. Losing the one moment we will ever have.

No answers. Just presence. So I began again.

Thus went each morning between dark and dawn. Sometimes my grandmother was there too. The stubborn one. The one I hadn’t seen in years and wasn’t on great terms with at the time.

Her resilience and the resilience of her mother and her mother’s mother and our strong female line. All there, with me somehow. Their fortitude. Their will to survive.

Even though I did not summon or expect them, there they were. When the pain in my abdomen throbbed, there they were again.

I was them. Somehow, we continue.

I carried this with me, after my Mongolia trip. Surrendering to the possibility that my body might always be broken was the first step in getting better.

Not collapsing in despair…but rather, opening to broader vision. Supported by an Inheritance I didn’t know I had. Finding strength that came before and, through me, lived on.

Only after reaching this place could physical healing begin. It unfolded slowly, slowly in the coming years.

And it started in this far-off land, on a low-hanging cot at dawn.

Note: I’m in the process of rewriting material as part of a larger work on Inheritance, Medicine, Madness, and Prophecy.

The above excerpt is part of a chapter pulling surrender into sharp relief…exploring acceptance of brokenness, leaping into the abyss, and finding solace in Nature and ancestral connection.

Find the first and second parts of this chapter, here:

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Thank you for reading. I’m a doctor of Chinese Medicine and write about sobriety and soulful living. Find all my links here: