Art: ‘She Rises Through Smoke & Song”
🌿 The Wisdom of Their Hands: A Morning with Andy and the Medicines That Remain
July 19th, 2025
by, Samantha Syrnich TLC
© 2025. All rights reserved.
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This morning, I ran into someone I thought I might never see again.
Andy—my three-time, now 74-year-old Native war veteran friend from the Lummi Reservation—stood before me, just as real as the sun breaking through the morning clouds. We had a quick coffee, shared a few words, and my soul lit up. It was like being handed a blessing you didn’t know you still needed. A man like Andy doesn’t just show up by accident—he is a walking story, carved from time, from battle, from spirit. A man of grit and grace.
The last time I saw him, I wrote down what I experienced. I called it The Reason at the Riverside—a truth-not-fiction record of the day our paths first crossed. That piece, still alive online, captures the silence and power of a single conversation that felt like ceremony.
🔗 The Reason at the Riverside: https://echoesandink.art.blog/2024/12/18/the-reason-at-the-riverside/
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I have spent years learning from the medicine keepers and master carvers of the Lummi Nation. What I learned cannot be bought—it must be absorbed. It is transmitted in the hush of sawdust as it settles. It is taught through slowness, patience, reverence.
The master carvers didn’t just shape cedar—they shaped silence. They taught me that every cut is a prayer. Every groove, a story. Their hands, aged and calloused, move with the memory of ancestors. I learned to watch more than I spoke. I learned that to carve is to listen. Not just to the wood—but to the voice behind the veil, the one that speaks when you’re quiet enough to receive it.
Alongside them, I also learned plant medicines—the true pharmacy of the land. I miss the salves made from cottonwood buds and lavender, crafted with care by Lummi grandmothers and teachers who remembered what the Earth gives freely. I miss the teas brewed from stinging nettle and peppermint, the sacred uses of devil’s club for pain and spiritual protection, the nootka rose oils for calm and courage.
Those medicines were never just remedies—they were lifelines. They still are.
And today, standing there with Andy, I felt something come full circle. I’ve been aching lately. For my dog, for my people, for a world that seems so far from healing. And then this song came to me—unexpected, joyful, out of nowhere. It’s not Native, no. But it carries joy, and my soul needed that.
🎵 “Hallow Bone” Alya Nereo
🔗 [https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=kZiE-yPpEeU&si=HIx7akNIUzaxrory]
In that moment, something lifted.
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I dream of the day when I can purchase Native art by the truckload—not as charity, but as honor. As investment. As preservation. I want to fill sacred spaces with carved panels, beadwork, cedar paddles, and stories in every form. These are not souvenirs—they are the soul of a people who never stopped surviving.
I still ache for the return of my dreamcatcher. A small thing, maybe, but deeply symbolic to me. I want it back in my possession because it carries prayers I wove with my own hands. It was a gift and a ritual, and it belongs in my sacred space again.
But more than anything—more than the tea, the salves, the art—I ache for something even deeper:
The day when tribes of every culture can speak openly. When dignity is not requested, but extended. When the U.S. learns to listen—not to tokenize, not to tolerate—but to learn.
This country is cracking under the weight of unspoken truths. Hate crimes rise like tides. The drug epidemic has consumed entire communities. And yet here on this reservation, I’ve seen a different kind of medicine being passed around: wisdom, stillness, fire, song.
It is time to let Indigenous leadership lead—not just in ceremony, but in policy.
It is time for white America to listen—not with defensiveness, but with humility.
It is time to recognize that we are all wounded—and none of us are free until all of us are seen.
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To the Lummi Nation:
Thank you. For your teachings. For your patience. For Andy’s handshake this morning. For the salves I still long to have again. For the lessons in cedar, and spirit, and survival.
To the world:
The medicines you seek are already growing in the ground beneath your feet—and in the hands of the people we were once taught to ignore.
Let us return to one another.
Let us listen.
Let us carve something sacred—together.
With a heart full of fire and gratitude,
samantha syrnich TLC
🕊️🔥🐳❤️
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phoenix
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Art: ‘She Rises Through Smoke and Song”
Author & Artist: Samantha Syrnich TLC 🐦🔥
The Phoenix Quill: Words Born of Fire, Inked in Truth 