Conrad SatalaAugust 20, 2025

20 August 2025 - Wednesday The Fire That Remembers the Land - Part 6 A Ceremony of Perception, Memory, and Renewal within Kimoon K’uxlaal

Conrad SatalaAugust 20, 2025

20 August 2025 - Wednesday

The Fire That Remembers the Land - Part 6

A Ceremony of Perception, Memory,

and Renewal within Kimoon K’uxlaal

“I Carry the Mountain in My Breath”

A Ceremonial Introduction to Living Within Two Lands

from the Earth Remembers Series

The Fire That Remembers the Land

A Ceremony of Perception, Memory,

and Renewal within Kimoon K’uxlaal

Opening Blessing

Come as you are.

Bring the heaviness you carry in your thoughts.

Bring the fatigue you feel in your bones.

Bring the longing you have kept hidden in the quiet corners of your chest.

You do not need to arrive ready.

You do not need to have answers.

You only need to come willing to stand in the light that has never left you.

Here, we honor the heart within all things —

the heart within the land,

the heart within the soil,

the heart within the animals,

the heart within the buildings,

the heart within the humans,

the heart within human possessions,

the heart within the crops,

the heart within the forests,

the heart within the Fire.

Here, we remember the fire that the land once knew —

not as enemy,

but as kin and caretaker.

Here, we open to the light of unknown possibilities,

and offer it to every place where fire now touches the earth,

that it may fulfill its largest purpose:

to restore wholeness for all.

We welcome Nawal Mosbel Joloom,

the Sweeper of the Skull,

the Liberator of Memory,

walking with the Bundle of the Martin

and the elder wisdom of the Rilaj Maam.

May her presence weave our memories back into the One Heart.

⸻

Ceremonial Introduction

The Fire That Remembers the Land is a ceremony of perception, memory, and renewal.

It is rooted in the truth that the landscapes of California — and many fire-evolved places on Earth — once thrived with fire as an ally, a partner in biodiversity, a keeper of balance.

For more than ten thousand years, Indigenous peoples here tended the land with fire — not as destruction, but as medicine.

Fire opened seeds, renewed soil, cleared pests from acorns, drew deer to meadows, and kept forests healthy.

Every fire was a conversation between the people, the plants, the animals, and the soil.

When settlers came, they feared this fire. They outlawed its tending.

They criminalized Indigenous burning and dismantled the food systems it sustained.

They called the people’s wisdom childish, and they called the land “wilderness,” ignoring that it had always been a woven, living garden.

This ceremony walks into that history — not to dwell in loss, but to awaken the Heart Within Voice 1.

Here, the light of our own inner cellular memory meets the land’s memory, guided by Nawal Mosbel Joloom.

Here, we learn to see with all nine senses, to hear the land’s permission for fire, to taste the harvest after the flames, to feel the ground’s warm breath, to balance between loss and renewal.

It is a journey of remembering:

that fire can be a restorer,

that fire can be a healer,

that we are part of the tending.

⸻

The Fire That Remembers the Land

A Ceremony of Perception, Memory,

and Renewal within Kimoon K’uxlaal

Long before the settlers came,

long before the white fences,

long before the laws that outlawed the old ways,

California was a land that knew fire as a friend.

Not the random fire of lightning alone,

but the fire carried in human hands —

the fire that was guided, fed,

and asked to dance in certain places,

in certain seasons,

for certain purposes.

For more than ten thousand years,

the Indigenous peoples of this place —

the Chumash, the Yurok, the Miwok, the Wintun, and many more —

lit fires to shape the plants they needed,

to feed the soil,

to keep the acorns free of pests,

to open the wild rye and chia,

to call the deer into the meadows,

to keep the oak groves healthy,

to tend soap root for fish harvests,

to release seeds from cones sealed shut.

Each fire was a promise —

between people and land,

between plants and animals,

between the living and the yet-to-be-born.

The land grew in fire’s language.

The soil was fed by its ash.

The forests breathed in its space.

The harvests came stronger,

and the animals returned.

The people knew this:

Pyrodiversity is tied to biodiversity.

A land needs many kinds of fire,

just as it needs many kinds of rain and wind.

⸻

Then the newcomers came.

And with them came fear of fire.

They outlawed the burning.

They outlawed the food systems.

They called the fire-setters childish.

They called the meadows wasteful.

They called the people savage.

They did not see

that when you take fire from a fire-evolved land,

you make the land sick.

Without fire,

the duff grew thick,

the insects multiplied,

the trees crowded too close together,

the soil grew tired.

The people were punished for tending the land.

The first Spanish governor in 1793 banned their burning,

not to protect the land,

but to weaken the people —

to take away their food,

their independence,

their way of living.

Later, the U.S. government took up the same plan.

The Forest Service put its seal on fire suppression,

and the logging companies saw their chance.

A tamed forest was easier to cut.

And so the sickness deepened.

The land that once knew when to burn and when to rest

was smothered in a silence not of peace,

but of forgetting.

⸻

Voice 1 Speaks First

“I don’t know how to live in this world anymore.

I see too much.

I feel the cruelty like thorns in my skin.

I see the forests burning now,

not with the old tending-fires,

but with the rage of decades of suppression.

The smoke is heavy in my chest.

I taste ash on my tongue.

My skull is heavy.

My thoughts are like vines that trap the sky.

Nothing I do seems to help.

I try to speak, but the words fall apart.

I want to hope — but hope feels like a story too far away.

I hear them say ‘fire is the enemy.’

I hear them say ‘put it out, put it out.’

But inside me I know:

It wasn’t always this way.

And that knowing… it hurts.”

⸻

Enter Nawal Mosbel Joloom

And so she comes —

not with fire,

but with silence.

She does not silence you.

She sits beside your Voice 1.

She places one hand

on the back of your skull.

A wind enters.

Not a storm —

but a soft flowing breath

through the inner corridors of your mind.

“Let your breath enter the back of your skull,”

she whispers.

“Let it soften the stone of despair.

You do not need to believe in hope.

You only need to open.”

And as the skull breathes,

the light behind your eyes begins to pulse.

Not with belief —

but with remembering.

A memory of who you are

beyond politics,

beyond anguish,

beyond the illusion of powerlessness.

She carries with her the Bundle of the Martin

and walks in the lineage of the Rilaj Maam,

their threads woven into her own,

so that the sweep of her hand

is not only your memory returning —

but the land’s memory as well.

You feel something awaken —

not a solution,

but a center.

It is The Heart Within Voice 1.

⸻

The Heart Within Voice 1 Speaks

“Even as I feel broken,

even as I ache,

even as I see what should never be done to another human being,

or to the land,

there is something inside me

that is still whole.

There is a light behind my eyes

that has never dimmed.

I don’t have the answers —

but I am willing

to receive the light of the land,

to remember fire as it once was,

to feel again the way the forest knew

how and when to burn,

and how to rest.

I will remember fire’s many voices,

and not only its scream.”

⸻

Conrad Satala