I stripped down to my undies and sat across from Carolina on blankets on the floor. The late afternoon light filtered through her garden window, casting shadows that moved with the breeze. The paper I’d written trembled slightly in my hand—three names, three griefs. Natto, my beloved dog, who died tragically. My estranged daughter’s name. The title of my book. Each word had taken effort to write, as if the ink itself carried weight. She read it slowly, her weathered fingers tracing each line, then folded it with deliberate care and set it aside on a small wooden table that looked older than both of us combined.
The room smelled of copal and something earthier I couldn’t name. Carolina moved with practiced precision, gathering small containers from shelves lined with jars of dried herbs, each labeled in her careful handwriting. She knelt beside me, her movements fluid despite her years, and showed me the first medicine.
The Rapé hit first, blown hard through my nostrils through a carved wooden pipe. The shock was immediate—a burning that shot straight to my sinuses. My eyes watered uncontrollably, tears streaming down my face without emotion attached to them. Then, as suddenly as the burn arrived, calm descended. Not the fuzzy calm of sedation, but something crystalline and clear. The room came into sharper focus. I could hear birds I hadn’t noticed before, feel the texture of the blanket beneath me with startling clarity.
She rubbed Ambil on my gums next—bitter, dark, grounding. The taste was ancient, like soil and rain and time itself. My mouth went slightly numb, but my mind felt more present. The Mambe came last, gritty green powder she carefully tucked between cheek and gum with her index finger. It tasted of earth and chlorophyll, sharpening everything without agitation. Each medicine seemed to prepare me for what was coming, opening different doors in my consciousness while keeping me absolutely present.
Carolina began to hum as she worked, arranging damp cloths across my body. They clung to my skin with a coolness that made me hyperaware of my own boundaries, where I ended and the world began. The wet blanket she placed across my stomach was heavier, pressing me gently into the floor. I smelled alcohol—sharp, medical, but also somehow ceremonial. She poured it carefully across the blanket, her movements deliberate as prayer.
Then the scratch of a match.
Blue flames danced inches from my belly, beautiful and terrifying. The heat pressed close—not quite pain, not quite comfort, but something that demanded complete attention. I couldn’t look away from the fire consuming the alcohol, burning without destroying the blanket beneath. Carolina’s voice rose in Nahuatl, a native Aztec tongue, words I didn’t understand but felt in my bones. Her singing was low and rhythmic, sometimes dropping to a whisper, sometimes swelling to fill the room. The flames responded to her voice, or maybe I imagined they did, flickering higher with certain syllables, settling with others.
Time became elastic. I watched the fire and felt myself both completely present and somehow distant, observing my own body from somewhere just above it. The heat penetrated deeper than skin, reaching places I’d been storing things I didn’t know needed storing. My chest, where I’d been holding my breath for three years. My shoulders, carrying conversations with my daughter that never happened. My stomach, twisted with disappointment about my book’s quiet reception.
When the flames finally died, leaving only the smell of smoke and something sweeter, Carolina’s hands found every place I’d been holding tension. For someone so small, barely five feet tall, her fingers possessed shocking strength. She worked methodically, starting at my neck, moving down my spine, pressing into muscles I’d forgotten existed. Each point of pressure seemed to release not just physical tension but something else—memories maybe, or the weight of memories. She pressed into a spot between my shoulder blades and I saw Natto’s face the last morning, his tail wagging as I left for what should have been a quick errand. She worked her thumbs into my lower back and I felt my daughter’s last text, casual and giving no hint of the silence that would follow.
“So much sadness here,” she murmured, pressing into a knot near my ribs. “Your body holds everything you cannot say.”
Ninety minutes passed. It felt like ten. It felt like years.
When she finally helped me sit up, the room spun gently. Not unpleasant, just a reorganization of space. She retrieved my paper from the table and lit a white candle that smelled of beeswax and time. Without ceremony but with infinite care, she held one corner of the paper to the flame. I watched my handwriting catch fire, each name curling black before transforming. The smoke rose toward the bóveda ceiling, a vaulted expanse painted with faded images of saints and stars.
“Your love for Natto stays with you always,” she said, watching the smoke rise. “Love doesn’t need a body to live in. It lives in you now.” The paper crumbled to ash as she continued. “Your daughter has her own path now. You cannot walk it for her. Your anger is just love with nowhere to go.”
The last of the paper disappeared, my book’s title the final thing to burn. “Your words exist,” she said simply. “They found who needed them. The rest is not yours to carry.”
The honey drink she gave me was thick, unfamiliar, with an aftertaste of earth and something green. It coated my throat, warm and slightly numbing. Only later, walking home in a gentle daze, did I learn it contained a microdose of ayahuasca. We embraced before I left, her arms surprisingly strong around me, holding me for longer than casual comfort would dictate. She whispered something in Spanish I didn’t catch, but it sounded like a blessing.
On the street, the world looked different. Not altered in the psychedelic sense, but cleaner somehow, as if someone had wiped dust from glass I’d been looking through. I felt untethered but peaceful, as if I’d set down luggage I hadn’t realized I was carrying. My body felt lighter, my breathing deeper. The sunset was beginning, painting the sky in shades that seemed impossible and absolutely real.
A week earlier, I’d been trying to explain the weight to my occasional therapist over Zoom, my laptop screen the only barrier between me and complete breakdown. How grief had accumulated beyond my capacity to process it. Each morning I still listened for Natto’s breathing, that particular snuffle he made just before waking. I still saved funny things to tell my daughter before remembering she wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t even read them. The book I’d poured my life into, “How John Coltrane Changed Me,” had found its dozen devoted readers, but in a world of millions, a dozen felt like silence.
“Have you considered working with the grief directly?” my therapist had asked. “Maybe finding someone local who does ritual work?”
I thought immediately of Carolina, the Curandera I’d visited years ago as a birthday gift from Sherrie. That first time, I hadn’t been carrying any particular sorrow, but something had shifted during the fire ceremony—layers of ordinary dust swept clean, leaving me feeling more myself than I’d been in years.
Since the grief ritual, everything has been different. Not fixed—that’s too simple a word—but transformed. The sharp edges of loss have softened into something I can hold without bleeding. I’m not sad about Natto anymore, just grateful for the thousand mornings we shared, for the way he taught me about unconditional presence. The anger at my daughter has lifted, replaced by something closer to acceptance. She is living her life on the other side of the world, and that life doesn’t include me. This is a grief, yes, but no longer a weight that crushes breath from my lungs.
The ritual didn’t cure my grief. Instead, it changed how I carry it. What stays with me most is the image of my griefs turning to smoke, rising through Carolina’s garden toward sky. Not gone, but transformed. Not erased, but lifted. The fire taught me that some things need to burn before they can become memory, and memory, unlike grief, weighs nothing at all.
Two days later, I was in a convenience store in El Centro to buy water before what proved to be a very dynamic concert by the Sun Ra Arkestra. A stranger approached me, a young man in his early twenties. He thanked me for how much he’d learned from my Jazz Video Guy channel on YouTube, and how most of the music he listens to came from my recommendations. And then he asked when I was going to translate my Coltrane book in Spanish. Very soon, I told him. You really opened my head up to Coltrane, he said, in broken English, before we parted.
Standing there sipping my water bottle, I understood that Carolina was right: that creative fire finds its own oxygen, and reaches who it needs to reach, even when we’re not looking.
Freedom sings; fire flickers music born of hot light. Beautiful 🙏🏽
A beautiful, heartfelt and insightful piece Bret. There’s lots of wisdom and a healthy dose of authenticity. Hugs and peace from the cool reaches of the pacific northwest.