The Man on the Shore
A shamanic journey, a fever, and what help can look like
"This is part one of two. Part two is the letter I couldn't write until this one existed."
A dear friend, a facilitator, a men’s work leader I trust, invited me to follow a thread that was alive in the room after a ceremony we’d shared together. My heart was open. The images came in on their own.
This is what came.
I was led to the inmost shore of a remote Scandinavian fjord. Autumn sky, grey and heavy. I walked ashore from a frigid sea.
Although I was a visitor to this land, it felt like home.
A man stood not far from the rocky beach, facing away from me. His gaze, despite the steep cliffs before him, was cast downward. He was in grief. He stood to lose something precious. In his desperation, he had prayed for help.
I began to understand myself to be his descendant, sent from some distant century, unsuspectingly, to answer.
Without acknowledging me, he turned and walked toward a stone house a few hundred meters away. I followed. I seemed to be floating rather than walking.
A saddened woman sat outside the low door.
Inside, embers in a fireplace dimly lit a breathing creature on the bed. A boy of eight or ten, beneath a bear skin. Pale. Feverish. Shaking.
All at once my role revealed itself. They wanted their boy to live. For whatever reason, I was the one who had shown up.
I added wood to the fire. Set the small window ajar. Closed the door. Offered water to the boy, who drank some. The low house heated up like a sauna.
I have little medical training. But I sensed that the boy’s body was fighting infection, and I knew that for most of human history, that was often a death sentence. Lacking knowledge of herbs or other remedies, I took a chance on heat helping the fever do its work.
I sat in the fire with him for a long time.
Eventually, perhaps miraculously, the fever broke.
The man went inside as I left. The woman, now standing, bowed her head slightly to me.
I returned to the shoreline and walked slowly back into the sea.
When I opened my eyes, I understood something that had never occurred to me before, not even during powerful psychedelic journeys.
Our ancestors are not the only ones available to us in times of need.
We spend a lot of time in ancestral work asking those who came before us for guidance. Praying to the wise and well amongst the dead. Consulting what was left behind. It’s good work. I’ve done it myself and felt something real shift in response.
But the journey showed me a different direction of travel. The man on the shore didn’t look backward. He prayed forward. He called out across time toward someone who hadn’t been born yet. And something came.
I didn’t arrive with answers. I arrived with a fire, some water, and the willingness to stay.
That was enough.
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What a vision. Love this.