This Valentine’s Day, Smoke a Peace Pipe With Your Enemies.

They miss you.  Why haven’t you called?

In these down and dreary days of the pandemic, time starts to run together like a Willy Wonka river of COVID snot. No shindigs, few people, nothing to do. You’re caught between cabin fever and wishing you’d get invited to a cuddle party — but you know, cooties. 

So you sit on the couch and play back tapes of conversations you’ve had with long last friends — good times, funny stories, whatever stays in Vegas. 

But not all of it’s pretty. Something’s said; somebody gets pissed. Words get taken out of turn, twisted from context, and thrown into silence — a desert of it. Sometimes we lose the ones we love just because we stop talking.

Take Jerry Garcia and David Grisman. They’re old friends. David plays mandolin on “Friend of the Devil” on American Beauty. Jerry and David then team up with Peter Rowan, John Kahn, Vassar Clements and forge Old and in the Way, some of the finest bluegrass ever pressed to vinyl. 

And then there’s a falling out — “some silly business gone awry. …And the longer time goes by, the more embarrassed you are to contact the other,” Monroe Grisman describes his father’s 13 year estrangement from Jerry in the doc Grateful Dawg.

Yet the two meet up years later on a music set and talk like no time has passed. They start playing together again. And thus reconnects one of the most beautiful musical conversations in acoustic music. If you haven’t yet heard the Garcia and Grisman collaborations, you owe yourself a coffee house.

Rebounded friendship just like that. And it too can happen to you — if only you’d call….

Smoke the Peace Pipe With Your Enemies

Whether or not you’ve seen Dances with Wolves, you probably already know about the sacred peace pipe — especially if you’ve been to college. But did you know it could actually stop bloodshed, scalpings, your own genitalia stuffed into your dead mouth like Thanksgiving Stove Top? 

Yep, recalling his travels down the Mississippi River in 1673, Father Jacques Marquette claimed that tribes presenting a peace pipe during battle could halt all warfare. In fact, the Illinois people gifted the priest a peace pipe because simply carrying one was a passport of peace — present it in enemy land and enemies would let you pass unharmed.

Sure, you’d smoke the peace pipe with your family, with the elders of your tribe, but it’s real power came through smoking with your enemies. Smoking in peace could bind tribes, halt a battle, prevent war from even taking place.

Lakota tradition believes the sacred pipe was first presented to humanity by the White Buffalo Calf Woman. She appeared to the Lakota and taught them the seven sacred ceremonies to protect Mother Earth.

In Native traditions, smoking is sacred — not just a 5 minute break from work. Take time to  be mindful of the spirit. Offer up your intention to the herbs. The smoke is a manifestation of the spirit — the herbs giving their essence to the sky. Traditionally, you say a prayer to the four directions — and the smoke of the pipe is believed to carry prayers to the Creator or other powerful spirits as an offering of good will and gratitude. How long does wax pen stay in your urine?

Ho’oponopono & the Sacred Rite of Forgiveness

Smoking the peace pipe can bind and work like the Hawaiian tradition of Ho’oponopono — an ancient method of forgiveness and reconciliation. It’s more than just prayer but a process of making things whole and right in relationships, together with others, ancestors, deities, the Earth, and yourself.

Ho’oponopono is a ritualized process of working it out with your loved ones, even your enemies, by openly expressing feelings and releasing each other. It’s a sacred intention to create and hold a space for gratitude, reflection, and redemption.

The Ho’oponopono prayer is thus:

I am sorry.

Forgive me. 

Thank you.

I love you.

Random Herb Redemption: Who Dis?

In a strange way, COVID brings us all together — it universally sucks eggs like a Charles Bukowski poem in a cheap hotel with the lights out. Life’s already hard enough. Go easy on yourself. Forgive your friends, reconcile the bile: Honestly, the first step to forgiveness is to first forgive yourself.

Take the pine tree out of your own eye before taking the splinter from theirs.

Since you can’t physically smoke a peace pipe together, this Valentine’s Day we invite you to send those long lost friends a tin of Bear Blend. Who wouldn’t love spontaneous herbs like a blast from the past, a peace pipe package to blend time and heal the moment, to come together in this crazy time of COVID isolation?

Call that old friend out of the blue like a long lost car warranty. Somewhere in that desert of silence, they’re longing to talk, to heal, to chat the fat just as much as you do. Sometimes all that needs to be said is: “Who dis?”

Smoke ‘em if you got them: Life’s too short.