In Dutch, “at home” is one word, “thuis”. The first time I met T. was a couple of years ago when I attended something that was termed: “a week of camping out for families.” L. and I travelled up north in the pouring rain and ended up in Den Andel. That’s an old name, stemming from the Middle Ages for a cluster of farms and a grain mill close to the Waddensea coast, in Groningen. Uilenhoeve was one of T.’s permaculture projects, a zoned garden with berry shrubs, strawberries, a pond for aquaculture and the beginnings of a rough zone. It kept raining for the entire week we were there. That week was my first lesson in how to live by making do with what’s available. The area around Den Andel is developing as a strong local economy, based on organic farming and a local currency. The food we ate was all from the area. Another lesson was that abundance is about “just enough” and about attention to all needs, not just some. V., who did most of the cooking, and T. and C. were very comfortable around fire. Handling fire is akin to magic and that’s how it looked to me. I decided that this was such a basic skill that I needed to learn it. And that was my task for the next few months. I wanted to feel at home on earth and fire was my way in. Fires are always started for a reason. With T., fires are almost always part of a ceremony, usually a European version of Lakota sweat lodges. That tradition was started by F., who taught most fire-keepers and water-pourers in the Netherlands. Fire-keeping at sweat lodges was how I learned to be with fire, and once I learned this, I knew I could always live well if I had wood, a flint and some bark. Ceremonies provide focus and an arena for learning in a safe place. In a way, everyone who attends becomes a member of the family, in a nomadic manner of speaking. Everyone is involved, and it is a sustained, communal effort, dealing with the raw materials of existence: fire, wind, earth, water. We try to offer an experience of joy that arises because once we touch the elements directly, at their source, we immediately start feeling more at home on earth. Our current suicidal relationship with our Mother is caused to a large extent because we are so far removed from the stream of life. By this I don’t mean that suffering and death and pain are not in that stream. They are. If we want to eat, we’ll have to kill. But that is different from the wholesale murder we are committing now, without feeling responsible for the lives we take. We are in a forest for a few days, we eat well. We’re with friends who are also family, as everyone on earth is family. We learn and teach practical ways of doing practical things. We do them one step at a time. We connect to each other around the fire and in the lodge. these to me are the healing practices by which we can live respectfully towards each other and towards this temporary shelter that is our earth.