Elizabeth Moes asked me to write
a memorial for Cheryl Miller for this publication, but it’s hard to know where
to begin on something like that. Most of you probably never met her. As far as
the physical stuff goes, Cheryl died last December at age 49 from ovarian
cancer, after courageously struggling with it for six years. She described
herself as a naturalist, working on many different projects to improve the
natural environment. Cheryl delighted in the physical skills of survival, but
she was also intensely interested in the spiritual skills that lay behind them.
Besides taking a lot of Tracker School classes (she was especially interested in
the Philosophy and Tracking classes) she also studied the spiritual traditions
of other cultures. She became involved with the plant spirit medicine community
of the Huichol Indians of Mexico and helped raise funds for the Blue Deer
Center, a retreat in New York's Catskill Mountains that is devoted to the
customs of the Huichols. She once went on a vision quest to the top of a
mountain in western Mexico, where a jaguar passed along important knowledge to
her. She was very interested in discovering how a lot of the different
spiritual traditions of the world were at their core the same, and she was well
on her way to walking that single path up the mountain.
Personally, I first met Cheryl
in 1997 when her, Joe Schilling, Carl deMarco, and I started communicating on
the Tracker School discussion list. We decided to get together to meet each
other and work on our skills. That initial meeting grew into the Mid-Atlantic
Primitive Skills Group, of which Cheryl was one of the four founders. After she
was diagnosed with cancer, she disappeared for a few years as she sought to heal
herself, then she came back to us. Even though she couldn’t participate in many
of our activities because of her worsening condition, she sometimes just came
and watched and provided moral support and encouragement. Personally, I counted
her as one of my best friends.
Last year, as Cheryl’s condition
was worsening, Elizabeth was kind enough to devote one of the monthly Philosophy
community meditations to her. I never had the chance to tell Cheryl about that,
but I like to think that it has some positive affect on her, and some folks
reported some moving experiences.
Cheryl attended the Mid-Atlantic
Primitive Skills Meet last year which, as it turned out, was her last MAPS
event. After that, she declined quickly and, on December 9, 2004, quietly and
painlessly passed away in her home surrounded by her loved ones. Earlier this
year, we decided to dedicate this year’s MAPS Meet to Cheryl. That was an easy
decision. However, I struggled with trying to think of the best way to honor
her within the context of this event and wasn’t having much success for the
longest time. Then, a couple of weeks before the Meet, for some reason I
thought of having a pipe ceremony for her and immediately felt that visceral
release of inner vision telling me that was the thing to do.
I asked Bill Kaczor, one of the
instructors at the Meet, to lead the pipe ceremony in Cheryl’s honor and he
graciously consented to do so. The Friday night of the Meet, we had the
ceremony at a place I had selected, an old abandoned fire circle across the
creek deep in the woods. We had gone to the site previously to check it out and
we found a newborn fawn lying motionless in a bed of ferns right in the middle
of the sacred circle! I was speechless. To me, this seemed another sign that
what we were going to do for Cheryl was right. Later that night, about 15
people attended the ceremony, which was very powerful and moving. A downy
woodpecker kept up a strong drum beat throughout most of the ceremony.
If asked to relate the most
important lesson Cheryl conveyed to me in the time I knew her, I would have to
say that it was a profound realization that the simplest of your actions, if
done for the right reasons and with the right mind set, can have far greater
consequences that you could ever imagine at the time. Cheryl never thought she
contributed as much to our group as she wanted to or thought she should, but if
she had not been present in the beginning and we didn’t have her yin to balance
out all of the yang of us three guys, MAPS might never have been born and
certainly wouldn’t exist in the form that it does now. Cheryl’s participation
led to the creation of a large and vibrant community of primitive skills
practitioners that meet regularly, advancing their knowledge of both physical
and spiritual skills. The fabric of this community is strong and tightly
woven. Those nascent gatherings of long ago lead directly to the creation and
continuation of this community as it exists today, including the MAPS Meet,
where this year over 150 people got together for five days, learning innumerable
lessons and making personal connections that they will carry with them for the
rest of their lives. So, as far as I’m concerned and no matter what she
thought, Cheryl’s contributions to “the Cause” are as much, and perhaps more,
than one person could hope to accomplish in a lifetime. Through what she did in
helping to create the MAPS community, and in countless other ways, Cheryl has
touched hundreds of lives. The impact of her actions and her life will endure
for many years. I miss her greatly.
Printed in the Razor's Edge
(publication of the Tracker School Philosophy students) in July, 2005.