The Paths Shall Nevertheless Converge
On Carrying the Load for the Eighth Fire
“What does it mean to be the people of the seventh fire, to walk back along the ancestral road and pick up what was left behind? How do we recognize what we should reclaim and what is dangerous refuse? What is truly medicine for the living earth and what is a drug of deception? None of us can recognize every piece, let alone carry it all. We need each other, to take a song, a word, a story, a tool, a ceremony and put it in our bundles. Not for ourselves, but for the ones yet to be born, for all our relations. Collectively, we assemble from the wisdom of the past a vision for the future, a worldview shaped by mutual flourishing.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
Ever since reading Braiding Sweetgrass1 in the summer of 2020, weeping in a lush Oregon inlet and feeling my world turn right-side-up as I read Kimmerer’s words, I’ve had a recurrent image of the fork in the road she describes that comes from the Anishnaabe prophecy of The Seventh Fire.2
As she describes it, we live in the age of the Seventh Fire, and those born during this time are tasked with remembering the knowledges that have been snuffed out and conquered through colonization, the spread of industry, and the spread of the global monoculture which reduces all animacy to machine. There is a fork ahead — or perhaps behind us — where on one side we have a green path and the other a scorched, perilous path which leads to the doom of all life on earth. If we are wise enough to have eyes to see these two converging paths, we can carry the seeds of a new way of being to plant the gardens and spark the Eighth Fire, following the green path. The Eighth Fire is a world of balance, reciprocity, and renewed harmony on Earth. However, if we are blind, or drunk, or dazed in a mindless oblivion, we will unconsciously follow the scorched path, and the Eighth Fire will be lost to us.
In my mind, the green path requires more of us — it leads up a hill toward a mountain with tricky terrain and numerous switchbacks, and we have to retrace our steps to first make sure we haven’t forgotten anything before heading for the summit. It takes time, attention, and energy. The scorched path, by contrast, is a downward slope. It is paved and easily navigable by vehicles. There’s little work that needs to be done by us to reach its nadir. We don’t even have to think to arrive there.
Kimmerer explains that the spiritual leaders “interpret this prophecy as the choice between the deadly road of materialism that threatens the land and the people, and the soft path of wisdom, respect, and reciprocity.”3 This is not to “return to some atavistic utopia,” she writes, but to have the tools which allow us to “walk into the future.”
“So much has been forgotten, but it is not lost as a long as the land endures and we cultivate people who have the humility and ability to listen and learn. And the people are not alone. All along the path, nonhuman people help. What knowledge the people have forgotten is remembered by the land. The others want to live, too.”4
We can close our eyes and imagine this path — all the greenery of the forests, plains, meadows, and wetlands of this beautiful world covered in a sparkling dew, the smell of sweet earth permeating the air as we walk barefooted toward the summit. We can likewise imagine the scorched path with a sour odor that stings deep into our nasal cavities, and the ground is covered in broken glass and sharp scraps of metal — you must wear shoes here.
The trouble we face is that the scorched path is deceptively attractive, laid by deceivers. In the distance, they say, down deep into the valley floor, is where our utopia shall be built. They pave the roads toward it with the promise that once we progress far enough, once we learn to cheat death, optimize life, reach the stars, and build the world in our superior image, we’ll reach the most incredible sunrise the world has ever seen — and it can all be done now if only we make haste. We must rush toward this sunrise, drunk-drive toward it, and actually, they say, you don’t need to do anything at all: just sit back, put on your VR goggles, and enjoy the ride.
It’s a complicated world we live in. I personally see the scorched path all around me at all times — the blood of my kin is baked into the computer on which I type. The way that our system is set up is to encourage our lazy, unconscious descent into that valley, and we’re actively encouraged to ignore the stench. I would even say that the system has been created to make it nearly impossible for us to behave any differently. It’s as if gravity is pulling us toward it — it is a black hole and we have accidentally crossed the event horizon long ago. This adds another layer of effort to the already upward climb toward the green path.
What we struggle to understand is that the promised sunrise in the deepest point of the valley is actually obscured by noxious, gray smog, and the sunrise is actually best viewed from the summit — I believe this is something we all know to be true, but the other story is so tantalizing. “You can have it all with convenience and efficiency, and you will want for nothing - just sit back and enjoy the ride. We’ll be there before you know it. You will see that sunrise.” The green path, by contrast, does not offer the promise that we will see that sunrise — only that we’ll play our part in our lifetimes to bring the others to the summit. Our duty is to help carry the load nevertheless.
It may be, and is likely the case, that we have passed the fork in the road, we have crossed the event horizon. The acceleration of technology and the chaotic instability of culture in my own lifetime evokes the image of a drunken bus driver barreling downward, and we are the VR clad, numbed-out passengers. What I’ve also witnessed in my life is that, though this path is laid out smoothly, the erratic behavior of the driver leads to tremendous bumping and jostling — enough for the goggles to fall off, and for some of us to look out the window, not only at what we are hurtling toward, but what lays behind us. We can see the others upon the hill, carrying the fire, surrounded by trees and life. All we need to do is be brave enough to jump off the bus.
And this many of us have done, and continue to do. We find a way to cut back up the hill, and we pray we’ll be welcomed and given the lessons we need to be of use. But one thing I can’t shake is that the path down is somehow constructed with the seeds of its own destruction, like there is an unintentional balancing mechanism within our society’s suicidal trajectory. As the world becomes more ugly, stark, artificial, and soulless, I witness all around me a longing for the real. As we outsource our creativity, our critical thinking, and our basic connection-making to AI machinery and we see the dull, meaningless void it produces, more and more people are being jostled awake, learning to value the unique beauty that can only emerge from the human spirit. As more information becomes available about the toxicity of our food and the materials we’ve constructed our society with, the more people yearn to escape the poison. As we finally begin to pay attention to the reality that humanity has created an endless, perpetual string of experiments upon the human mind, body, and soul for the past 10,000 years, we can finally attain the requisite discernment needed for our own sovereignty. I could go on and on — each of us having our own unique moment where the goggles get knocked off. All the time we are being joined, and the load to carry becomes lighter.
Tantalizing promises lay at the valley floor. They promise godliness, wealth, and power — and above all, deathlessness. These are the lies of architects who have also been deceived. The world they believed they were creating in their own image was really made in the image of Windigo — a monster of scarcity, hunger, and want that ravages the lands and peoples in the legends of the Anishnaabe. “The Windigo is a human being who has become a cannibal monster,” Kimmerer writes.5 They are not born — they are made. Like a zombie, the hunger is spread through its bite. “Consumed by consumption, it lays waste to mankind.”
Kimmerer explains that the Windigo is a mythic, extreme expression of the urge within us that aims to survive at all costs, even as what it means to survive becomes perverted by the artificial scarcity that runs our economy. It represents the insatiability of our culture, the pathetic drive of the Trump’s, Musk’s, the Zuckerberg’s, and the Bezos’ of the world to continue eating well after they are full. It is the ultimate representation of an atomized individuality, unmoored from connection, meaning, and life. As Kimmerer writes, the footprints are all around us so long as we know what to look for. Windigo’s footprints cover the scorched path, invisible to so many of us — and we, in our inattention, are all complicit in their proliferation.
“They’re everywhere you look. They stomp in the industrial sludge of Onondaga Lake. And over a savagely clear-cut slope in the Oregon Coast Range where the earth is slumping into the river. You can see them where coal mines rip off mountaintops in West Virginia and in oil-slick footprints on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. A square mile of industrial soybeans. A diamond mine in Rwanda. A closet stuffed with clothes. Windigo footprints all, they are the tracks of insatiable consumption. So many have been bitten. You can see them walking the malls, eying your farm for a housing development, running for Congress.”6
Windigo has tricked us all into believing the story of the scorched path, and we are his food. We should be thankful that the scorched path becomes so inhospitable and disgusting that eventually we want to try to escape it. We are starving in our abundance. The human spirit can only be stifled and oppressed for so long.
Kimmerer writes that there is debate on what is to be done about Windigo. Should we battle him and kill him? Or should we let himself consume the world until nothing is left to consume, letting him finally starve? She writes, “Some folks argue that we need do nothing at all— that the unholy coupling of greed and growth and carbon will make the world hot enough to melt the Windigo heart once and for all. Climate change will unequivocally defeat economies that are based on constant taking without giving in return.” The cost of doing nothing at all, however, she writes, is far too high. Windigo will take too much with him on his way toward death.
In the penultimate chapter, Defeating Windigo, Kimmerer describes how he may be defeated7 — not through brute force or murder, but through a different sort of transformation: perhaps the transformation we all may face down in the toxic nadir of that valley, the promised sunrise blocked by the gray, stifling haze. Perhaps we need to go that far down the wrong path to realize the extent of our error, hubris, and ignorance. Perhaps, by the time that nadir is reached, the people on the green path will have found their footing, working out how to stave off the rot which spreads from the scorched path, waiting for the refugees to emerge from the smog-cloud with medicines in hand.
I have faith in people, and the intelligence of nature. So long as we continue to do the work to head toward the summit: so long as each day we do our part to see the footprints of Windigo, to remove our blinders and grow through the pain of witnessing, I have faith that the paths will nevertheless converge.
Written by Maren Morgan
This book is one of the truest gifts to the Earth, and if you haven’t read it, you must. Here’s a free-version.
Kimmerer credits Edward Benton-Banai, The Mishomis Book, for helping to spread this important story.
p. 448, Kimmerer, R.W. (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
Ibid, p. 444
Ibid, p.366
Ibid, p. 370
I refuse to spoil this part for people who haven’t read the book because it is truly one of the most moving chapters I’ve ever read in my life.