Wealth and Abundance
Wealth and Abundance
“The master can keep giving,” the Tao Te Ching teaches, “because there is no end to her wealth.” What is meant by wealth here? I sometimes struggle with this question. Like most people, I grew up in a society that equates wealth with money and material possessions.
But in an age of environmental devastation and growing inequality between the rich and the poor, I want to rethink what we mean by wealth, and the phrase “there is no end to her wealth” invites examination.
Some of the spiritual teachers I respect, from Byron Katie to Eckhart Tolle, suggest that material wealth and abundance are often a manifestation of internal abundance.
But I worry that these messages overlook the plight of America’s and the world’s poor. I worry, too, that in an age of climate change and environmental destruction, cultivating a “mindset of abundance” is a distraction from the ever-mounting overuse of resources.
So, is it time to be more explicit in what we mean by wealth and abundance? Is it time to unlearn one vision of wealth that we have been carrying in America and the Western world for hundreds of years and re-learn another?
I find it helpful to look back at teachings and mindsets about wealth across traditions and time. Every spiritual tradition, of course, grapples with questions and attitudes towards wealth.
“It is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle,” Jesus famously pronounced, “than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Jesus identified two kinds of richness: that found in material wealth and that found in spiritual wealth. In Luke 12, Jesus suggests that those who enjoy material wealth will be in trouble in the afterlife, but those who have the “richness” of God will be saved. “This,” Jesus says, referring to a difficult end to one’s life, “is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.” Those who store up “things” are not rich in the ways that matter.
Henry David Thoreau, like Jesus, suggests that people mistake what they consider wealth and value, favoring inanimate ‘things’ (to use Jesus’s word) for living relationships. In 1863, in his essay “Life Without Principle,” Thoreau wrote: “If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!”[1]
Thoreau points out that in mid-nineteenth-century America, only in the act of cutting down the tree for its material wealth is someone considered ‘industrious.’ He implies that New England culture does not know how to value the inherent wealth of a living tree and living forest.
As Thoreau suggests in “Life Without Principle,” the Tao Te Ching, written in 4th-century BC China, teaches us that the wise person knows that life is impermanent and cannot be “possessed.” “Things arise and she [the master] lets them come; things disappear and she lets them go. She has but she doesn’t possess.”
Most of our current definitions of wealth tend to be narrowed to an accumulation of material possessions. But this definition of wealth is not inherent to the meaning of the word and, indeed, is largely cultural.
In Joe Kane’s book, Savages, about a trip to the Amazon jungle to visit people whose land was being threatened by oil development, Kane portrays a culture that defines wealth very differently from the way we define it today: material accumulation is a sign of weakness and insecurity, while trusting one’s ability to successfully interact and be in a supportive relationship with the surroundings is a sign of wealth and strength.[2]
In the book, Kane needed to visit another tribe, so he and two other men set out for a three-day walk through the jungle with nothing but a machete and the clothes on their backs. It was assumed that they could get by in the jungle on their own; to carry food and water would only slow them down and was considered a sign of insecurity.
Those who gathered things and kept them for themselves were insecure, weak, and poor, while those who shared the most demonstrated their power and ability to provide for themselves and others. The abundance of this society came from its relationship to the natural world around it.
Can we, as a society, see wealth in terms of relationships?
Environmental thinker Frances Moore Lappe invites us to shift our frame of consciousness around wealth. “Scarcity mind,” to use a term Lappe has coined, comes from a culture that hoards, a culture in which wealth accrues more wealth, and in which wealth is not shared.[3] It is not scarcity, Lappe points out, that keeps people hungry, but inadequate relationships: systems that don’t allow for sufficient distribution of plentiful resources.
Our society, Lappe believes, is dominated by what she calls the three S’s: scarcity, separateness, and stasis. But she encourages us to move toward what she calls the three C’s: connection, continuous change, and co-creation.[4]
Once we embrace the connection with others and the natural world; recognize the continually changing nature of the world and our wavering ability to control it; and co-create with those around us, we then are able to fulfill our greatest potential and access the true, sustainable wealth and abundance of our world.
It is perhaps no surprise that as the gap between the rich and the poor deepens, as people feel increasingly insecure and isolated, and as our environmental crisis worsens, we as a society have been operating from a mindset of scarcity—ultimately, electing a president who represents all the false values of mistaking material hoarding for wealth.
The grasping that this kind of wealth represents is specifically warned against in the Tao Te Ching: “Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench.”
It is time to unlearn this grasping.
I imagine a world in which relationships are seen as wealth; in which education, parenting, art making, bio-conscious farming, and reverence toward the world around us, toward all species, people, and the natural world are most prized in our economic and value systems. This, it seems to me, would be a world that accurately defines wealth and abundance.
It may be true, as contemporary spiritual teachers sometimes say, that internal abundance leads to external abundance, but if A leads to B, it does not logically follow that B is an indicator of A. A large bank account is not alone a sign of strong relationships, happiness, health, or relational wealth.
Similarly, it’s important that our contemporary spiritual teachers continue to remind us that if we have strong relationships and a sense of fulfillment and alignment, if others have our backs even if we may fall down, and if we live in a sustainable relationship with the natural world around us, then this is true abundance and wealth, even if our bank accounts are not very large.
After all, the root of the word ‘wealth’ comes from the middle English word weal which meant happiness, prosperity, health. How we use language matters, and how we define wealth helps us clarify for ourselves the future that we want.
When we unlearn one meaning of wealth and reclaim another, we can move toward a future—both individually and collectively—that is more sustaining and sustainable. And when we redefine wealth, we can better choose the institutions and people we want to help lead us into that future.
References
[1] Thoreau, H.D. (1863). The Atlantic Monthly, A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics, XII pp. 484-95. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
[2] Kane, J. (1996). Savages. New York City: Vintage Books.
[3] https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/scarcity-mind-or-eco-mind-where-do-they-lead/
[4] https://www.thesolutionsjournal.com/article/scarcity-mind-or-eco-mind-where-do-they-lead/
Confessions of a Recovering Catholic
Confessions of a Recovering Catholic
Mother’s Day 1972: It was my First Communion and, like all good Catholic girls, I was decked out in my white dress and veil, hands folded in prayer, and head bowed as a sign of my unworthiness. I stepped forward to receive my first taste of the consecrated host, and I was forever changed. I was no longer Lauri Ann Lumby. I was now the Bride of Christ. I belonged to someone. I had a place I could call my own and, as long as I remained obedient, I would be loved. In my excitement, I was happy to pledge my obedience. As it turns out, obedience is exactly what got me excommunicated from the Catholic Church—the place I used to call home and where I find I am no longer welcome.
What I didn’t know, in the blindness of my faith, is that there are two kinds of obedience—obedience to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and obedience to our own inner truth (that which Jesus called “God”). When the Church asked for obedience, I assumed they meant the latter, so that is what I pursued. Obedience to the Divine within beckoned me to Sunday Mass where I found comfort and peace in the silence within my heart; led me along my educational and vocational path; and called me to enter into ministry training within the Catholic Church, eventually training as a spiritual director. Obedience to this inner voice helped me understand my gifts and how I was being called to use them for the sake of my own fulfillment and in service to the betterment of the world. I listened to this voice as it supported me in guiding others to hear and heed the truth that called to them from within. So far, the Church remained happy with my obedience.
That was until the day that the voice of my truth deviated from what had been “explicitly handed down by the Magisterium,” and which the local Church eventually called “the work of the devil, witchcraft and sorcery.” I had heard the call to study, and then share, Reiki (hands-on-healing) as part of my unfolding ministry. I heard the voice to pursue this training, and I knew I had no choice but to heed it. I saw how it perfectly fit my desire to serve God and do the work that Jesus calls us to do in the world—heal the sick, give comfort to strangers. The Church didn’t see it that way. As it turned out, obedience to God was not the same as obedience to the Church. Like Jesus and the disciples after him, I chose God (the voice within) over the Church (human authority). I have spent the past 15 years recovering from that decision.
Recovery is an appropriate term to describe what happens to one who finds they must leave behind the religion of their youth for a path that more closely aligns with their truth. Having found (conditional) belonging, acceptance, meaning, and purpose within Catholicism, stepping away from my religion was akin to giving up my drug. My heart, my soul, my sense of self, my very identity belonged to the Catholic Church. When my truth forced me to walk away, like an addict in early stages of recovery, I did not know who I was without “my drug,” and I was alone in the world apart from those with whom I had shared my drug. Also similar to the recovery process, I found that I was being hounded by those still in the Church who either sought to demonize me for betraying the status quo or who wanted me to repent so that I could peacefully return to my addiction.
In the past 15 years, my recovery has been a process of unlearning all that bound me to the Catholic Church and to the sense of belonging and acceptance I thought I had found there. I had to release the habit of weekly Mass. I had to let go of the art and architecture that spoke to my soul. I had to wrest myself from the seasonal celebrations and rites of passage that had become my very lifeblood. I had to divorce myself from the hymns that at one time gave my life meaning. Most challenging, I was forced to release my need to belong. Unlearning religion (Catholicism) has been a labyrinthine journey of grieving the loss of what has been (with all the customary phases, faces, and stages of grief—shock and trauma, denial, bargaining, depression, rage, and sorrow); shedding the attachments I had formed around my religion; and going back over the process again and again and again every time the loss was triggered.
While the journey has been excruciating at times, I would not change it for the world. What I have found on the other side of the unlearning has been a faith all my own. In the letting go of another person’s truth, I have uncovered my own. I have found what feeds me spiritually (which ironically, came out of my Catholic upbringing). I have come to understand my gifts and how I am called to share them, for the sake of my own fulfillment and in service to the betterment of our world. I have come to know my own ‘God’—no longer the old-man-in-the-sky god, but something more like what Rumi describes: nameless, faceless, and placeless. Finally, I have found my own sense of belonging—not to some institution or authority outside of myself—but to my own sense of being and belonging that comes from unlearning the separation we are taught so that we can find the wholeness and truth within.
Resilience
Resilience
It happened in the summer of 1998. I am alone at home. Home is a little village in the Belgian countryside. The month of August is warm. In the attic, in my study room, I am preparing for a philosophy exam. I have always been fascinated by the phenomenon of life and its ‘meaning.’ That degree in philosophy is supposed to give me answers, to help me understand what life is about. Naively, I had thought that space engineering would bring me closer to the mystery. After a few years of working in that field, it became clear that the reality I wished to explore is here on the earth and now. Not out there, light-years away.
RESILIENCE IS HANDLING PARADOXES. IT IS FINDING SIMPLICITY IN THE MOST COMPLEX SITUATIONS WITHOUT IGNORING THEIR PAINFUL AND DISRUPTIVE SIDES.
Sitting at my desk, I am reading theories about life and death. The whole thing feels a little stuck in my head as if the information is trapped there, in that upper part, without any communication with the rest of my body, or with the birds outside, the sun shining through the clouds and the farmers working in their fields. Around lunchtime, in that slightly confused mood, I leave my study room to fetch the kids. I am a young mother of three children. While I was studying, they were having fun somewhere with friends.
RESILIENCE IS HUMILITY. IT IS ACCEPTING THAT WE ARE NOT IN FULL CONTROL. IT IS SEEING LIFE AS A TEACHER RATHER THAN AS MATERIAL TO SHAPE.
On my way back home, on the highway, something happens. The children are in a state of tension between excitement and tiredness, unable to sit quietly in the back seat. They are two, four, and six years old. The tension amplifies my own state of confusion. I turn to them with the intention to restore calm. My movement is a little too fast, a little too strong and a little too agitated. In that movement, I drop the driving wheel for a second, and that second is enough for the car to change its trajectory.
RESILIENCE IS TRUST. NOT TRUSTING THAT THINGS WILL HAPPEN ACCORDING TO OUR EXPECTATIONS, BUT TRUSTING LIFE SO MUCH THAT WHATEVER HAPPENS, IT IS OK.
I intended to restore calm, but at what cost? I am not driving the car anymore, but the car is driving us, taking the four of us on its own course—a dramatic one. The accident is bound to happen. We can see it coming. We see it happening in front of our eyes. The car pitches slowly from right to left, and left to right. On the highway. At high speed. Until something reaches a limit in the car structure. Until something breaks up, projecting the car in the air. Everything is then darkness, sound, and movement.
RESILIENCE IS A CRACK. LEONARD COHEN SINGS, ‘THERE IS A CRACK IN EVERYTHING, THAT’S HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN.’ WOULD IT ALSO BE A WAY FOR THE LIGHT TO GET OUT?
The car is now standing still. I smell the disaster before I see it. A smell of fuel and burnt steel. Where are the kids? Not in the car. I look for them on the highway. I find their bodies. I take care of them until ambulances arrive. While running from one child to another, I discover strength in me. At that very moment, I feel at the best of my human capacity. I am able to love as I have never loved before. The immense pain seems to be counterbalanced by an immense sense of gratitude. Love for the kids, for the people around me (car drivers who have stopped to help), for the rescue workers. Total dedication.
RESILIENCE IS ABOUT CARING RELATIONSHIPS. IT IS ABOUT A LEVEL OF CARE THAT GOES BEYOND ANY LOGIC. IT IS ABOUT LOVE AS THE GLUE KEEPING HUMAN BEINGS TOGETHER.
One child is missing. Someone shouts, “She is here!” Indeed. She is laying down on the grass away from the road. Someone says, “Don’t worry, her heart is beating, she is alive.” I believe these words of a stranger, although I see no sign of life in that little body. A young woman is standing nearby. She has witnessed the accident. I take her hand, I ask her to come closer. I place her hand in my daughter’s hand. I ask her to keep holding that little hand. “Her name is Anaïs,” I told her. “She is six. Please stay with her, keep talking to her.” Then it is OK for me to leave her and to run back to the other kids.
RESILIENCE IS GRATITUDE. IT IS BEING ABLE TO ASK FOR HELP. IT IS RECOGNIZING WHAT IS GIVEN, WHATEVER IT IS—A SMILE, A LOOK, A HELPING HAND.
That day, we were very close to death. The four of us. Today, we are all alive. Gratitude. It took me years and years to relax, to process the pain, to go through the fears, to heal the injuries. We left the hospital after a few weeks. Anaïs had spent three weeks in a deep coma, between life and death. It took her another two years to fully get ‘back to life.’ It took us a good 10 years to recover. We will never return to ‘normal.’ There is no sense of ‘normality’ after such an event. Our family, our lives, have radically changed.
RESILIENCE IS PATIENCE. IT IS BUILT OVER TIME. LIKE A PLANT GIVING FLOWERS AND FRUITS, THE PROCESS CANNOT BE FORCED. IT HAPPENS ACCORDING TO ITS OWN RHYTHM.
The shock has been such that it has deprived me of a large part of my energy. What was left was to be used mindfully, with a clear focus on essentials. At that moment, it was to support the kids through the crisis. What was the ‘right,’ useful support? Slowly, a story shaped before my eyes in which the notion of ‘respect’ had a core role. Respect as basic consideration for reality, including myself, others, life, situations. Respect as listening deeply and showing regards to inner as much as outer realities.
RESILIENCE IS ABOUT COHERENCE. IT IS A PROCESS OF ALIGNMENT: WHO AM I, HOW DO I SPEND MY TIME, WHAT DO I EAT, HOW DO I TALK, HOW DO I RELATE TO OTHERS?
That day, on the highway, while ambulances were driving the kids to hospitals, I stayed a few more minutes. The landscape was one of desolation. In an instant, the pain struck me. I realized that I was seriously injured. Oxygen was lacking, it was more and more difficult to breathe. Something then happened. Something I can hardly describe with words. It took me years and years before I was able to articulate specifics. Sometimes, I need to go back to my diary to check if it really happened. That day. On the highway.
RESILIENCE IS COURAGE. COURAGE AS THE QUALITY OF ACTIVATING THE HEART. IT IS ABOUT LEARNING TO WORK WITH FEARS, AND BEYOND THOSE FEARS, TO OPEN UP TO THE UNKNOWN.
I simply did not know how to talk about it and who would be able to understand. Such an experience is hardly describable. It includes all opposites and goes beyond the realm of words. It feels unreal and at the same time, it feels like the real stuff. It feels both warm and cold. I was lifted from my body, in a vertical movement, like in a tunnel of tiny particles. Like raindrops reflecting thousands of colors. At a high speed, with a sense of stillness. Thousands of colored particles. Further away, a warm radiating light. Intense but not dazzling. The whole experience is quiet, cool, clean, in contrast with the chaos on the highway.
RESILIENCE IS ABOUT TAKING DISTANCE. IT IS HOLDING DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES, STANDING AT THE EDGE WHERE WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
How can I communicate that sense of integration, fullness, unity, and peace I experienced in that moment? In the tunnel, three times, I moved up. Three times I moved down. When I finally regain normal consciousness, I am in an ambulance with an oxygen mask on my face. Landing is painful, but it doesn’t matter. Years later, after a long healing process, I reconnected with the sense of peace experienced in that very moment. I learned to approach it in the silence of meditation, in nature, in the depth of authentic relationships, in the flow of life.
RESILIENCE IS ABOUT MAKING SENSE. IT IS ABOUT LOOKING AT REALITY WITH A SENSE OF WONDER. IT IS ABOUT ALLOWING A BIGGER PICTURE TO SHAPE.
This notion of ‘peace’ became central in my life. Peace as an art, as a movement of integration of opposites. Peace as a radical opening to a wider picture. I started regarding conflicts as opportunities for transformation. From a personal perspective, I moved naturally to a collective one in which we are all together breathing the same air, illuminated by the same sun, walking on the same earth. I became passionate about relating to people as if this whole experience had brought me closer to fellow human beings. As if my story was a universal one and had brought me into the real phenomenon of life- that phenomenon I initially tried to understand through the theory of space engineering and philosophy.
RESILIENCE IS TRANSFORMATION. IT IS EXPANDING THE FIELD OF EXPERIENCE. IT IS CONTRIBUTING TO A HUMAN SOCIETY AND SERVING A BROADER INTEREST.
About the Images
Claude Theys paired his photos with Nathalie’s essay at her request, using meditation to connect instinctively rather than literally with her words.
Belgian by origin, citizen of the world by heart, Claude is passionate about traveling. For him, photography is the art of capturing the present moment, feeling connected with the environment, the people he encounters, and the colors that attract him. He spent over twenty years in Africa with his family and has spent much of his time in nature and wildlife.
Healing Into Consciousness
Healing Into Consciousness
Witnessing the birth of my grandchild, I was humbled in a very profound way. Looking into her eyes was like having a glimpse into the eyes of the unknown. I wondered where this newly-born child’s soul had been traveling, how her life would unfold, what her trials and tribulations on this planet would be, and what kind of gifts she brought into this world to share.
Every child is born a blank slate. No matter how loving, caring, and conscious the child’s parents are, they cannot predict what their child’s experiences will be, what lessons he/she is here to learn, and what kind of beliefs the soul will adopt from her personal experiences and social conditionings. Like the very fabric of the Universe, our human existence is complex and multidimensional. The exploration of our human condition and the discovery of our true nature is a mysterious and sophisticated journey. As we become conscious of one aspect of our existence, another is revealed to us. We are led into the arms of the unknown over and over again to discover truths about ourselves, others, and the Universe.
As humans, we have been gifted with an ability to question, explore, and discover the Truth of who we are. Though not an easy path, the longing to awaken to our True Self is built into the core of our being. Discovering the ultimate health that resides in our being is each person’s destiny, no matter how much they stray from the path of self-discovery.
I was five years old when I saw my grandfather die after battling cancer. He was in pain and very frustrated. He finally decided it was enough and grabbed a bottle of morphine that was used to ease his pain and drank from it. Shortly after, he died and everything became calm and peaceful.
Watching his lifeless body, I remember thinking that I will die one day, too. The world will continue going, just as it did after my grandfather’s death. I was suddenly taken into a different dimension of reality where I had a bird’s eye view of the impermanence of life. I knew, in that moment, that the most important things for me while I was on this planet would be to discover who I am, where I came from, and where would I go when I die.
Like everyone else, I ‘forgot’ about this important insight as life took me on its spin. Like all of us, I was inundated with conflicting ideas, beliefs, and conditionings and began to identify with them. I accumulated ideas from my parents, personal life experiences, and those that were imposed on me by social and religious structures. By the time I attained two university degrees (education and architecture), I had forgotten about the awareness of what I thought was the most important thing in life. Something inside me kept feeling misplaced, however. I did not want to fit into the structure that my parents and the world expected of me.
Fortunately, no matter how much we stray from our own path, our inner light never can be lost. Sooner or later, we will all revert back to the Truth that is undeniably at the core of our being.
After going in a roundabout way through many hardships, heartaches, and disappointments, I recognized the falsity that was all around me. I began to internally rebel and longed to find my lost inner peace and authentic Self.
I was 24 years old when I was first introduced to the teachings of George Gurdjieff and Osho. Immediately, they resonated with me and I knew that I was back on track. What they called enlightenment was the path to finding my True Self. So, I left behind what the world considered valuable in terms of a career, material success, and prestige, and, with great passion, focused on meditating and looking inward.
Things gradually began to crystalize as I embarked on this uphill path of self-discovery, which essentially meant unlearning everything that I had learned and with which I was conditioned. After several profound experiences through meditation and introspection, I experienced firsthand what dis-identifying from the body, mind, and emotions truly meant. I saw the partnership between my mind and my ego mutually feeding on all the beliefs and conditionings to stay alive.
My curiosity to explore the workings of my ego-mind and observe them as a scientist of my own inner world helped me understand the ego’s fear to die and disappear into the unknown. When I gathered courage to face the fear and passed through the hurricane into its eye, I was left within the simple existence of my being which felt like an “am-ness” without anything written on it. I saw that this am-ness—which also can be called presence—was at the center of everything in the universe, including humans, trees, rocks, oceans, stars, planets, and even things.
Reconnecting to this place of absolute stillness is not an easy task. In order to find and live from this place of innocence and Pure Being, we must unlearn what we have learned. We must peel away the many layers of adopted beliefs and conditionings. We must transform what is false in us and all the games that our ego plays in order to survive. We must understand that awakening can only happen by with integrity and purity of heart.
Beliefs never lead us to self-discovery. Beliefs keep us ignorant of the universal truth of who we truly are. They keep our energy and consciousness imprisoned in anxiety and false fears about survival.
The easiest way to begin the process of unlearning is first to explore:
What are your beliefs and conditionings; how were they formed; and how can you transform them into consciousness so you can fully live your life and contribute your unique gifts to the world?
Answers to these questions cannot be found with the mind or energy work. Just like a computer program, the mind actually is the generator of the beliefs and cannot see or dis-identify from itself. Only consciousness, which is an integral part of the being, can recognize itself and see what is eternal and indestructible and what is impermanent and finite.
Having worked with thousands of people over the past 25 years, I have discovered a fundamentally new way that helps people access and transform their beliefs (which are not just in the brain but in the entire body) without using the mind. Each person can use this self-healing and self-discovery system on their own, to become self-empowered, to discover what is true and false within them, and to heal into consciousness.
These magnificent colour lithographs of the Great Water Lily of America are the work of British-born printer William Sharp. With their bold and stunning depth of colours, these water lily images by Sharp stand out as some of the finest examples of chromolithography, an art which at the time was only in its infancy. (Source: publicdomainreview.org)
The Migrant Quilt
The Migrant Quilt
In the late 1990s, in Northern California, we placed a photo of Liz (my late wife) and me, taken by the renown photographer Annie Leibovitz, onto a quilt. Friends and family members gathered around and hand-sewed keepsakes of their lives with Liz into the cloth: bits of jewelry, ribbons, and personal messages.
By the time the black and white photograph, created for a national “Be Here for the Cure” AIDS campaign, could be seen in magazines and writ large on subway walls, many of the people Leibovitz photographed for the campaign would be dead: the cute guy, the sparky little kid, the strong transgender woman, and the straight teenage girl. Few would make it for the cure.
People died by the thousands while the government turned a blind eye. Families mourned, shrouded in secrecy. The closest friends I will ever have grieved for each other even as they, too, prepared to die.
America as a whole seemed to shake itself awake only when thousands of AIDS Names Project Quilts were laid end-to-end on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., forming a master quilt strewn with names as far as the eye could manage—a seemingly endless landscape of unspeakable loss and undeniable love. Visitors dropped to their knees, humbled by such terrible beauty.
Now, in my backyard, another names project quilt, The Migrant Quilt Project (seen most recently at the Pimeria Alta Museum in the border town of Nogales, AZ), was inspired in large part by the AIDS Quilt. The Migrant Quilt panels will travel across the country and the artist/activist Jody Ipsen (the quilt’s originator) and Peggy Hazard (the project’s curator), along with many volunteer makers, hope for a similar impact on hearts and minds.
Women on the border often have a different take on immigration issues: more of a ‘tend and befriend’ approach, a kind of common sense, needle-to-fabric mend. The responses of women to the Migrant Quilt exhibit define the soft heart of what it means to be human. The day we visited, we watched female visitors leaving in tears.
“Docents had to go out and buy boxes of tissues,” said Jody Ipsen. “You cannot walk away from this without being moved.”
The 17 quilts in the project bear the names of people who have died each year crossing the desert in the Tucson Sector since 2000—the year the county medical examiner’s office began documenting the names of the dead, including unidentified remains). Patched together with denim, work shirts, embroidered cloth, and bandanas left behind on the desert floor, the quilts are scrappy in design and raw with truth.
Many of the bordados (embroidered cloths) stitched into the Migrant Quilts are inscribed with endearments. Contigo en la Distancia (With You Far Away) or Duerme Amor Mio (Sleep My Love) shock the viewer with familial intimacy. These personal embroideries, sometimes used as servilletas to carry food across the desert, are often blessed then sent along with a traveling family member. The embroideries have come a long way. Now they rest alongside the names of the deceased.
Each quilt represents countless lives lost on border ground, a hundred-mile strip of geography spanning two countries. The interstitial border region has morphed into a distinct culture of its own, and the quilts, with their binational contributors, fly its flag.
On the US side of the border, volunteers create each piece according to their own inspiration. Worn material migrates through the quilts and melds in the viewer’s eye. Names of the dead rise off the surface in bas-relief like rogue wildflowers pushing up through the desert floor, commanding the same kind of attention as the white crosses we see strung with wire in and around the slats of the border wall.
“Quilts have traditionally been made to memorialize loved ones who died,” said Curator Hazard. “And also, to raise consciousness.” In the Nineteenth century, women used quilts not only to raise funds for the anti-slavery movement, but to express their feelings about slavery.
Memory is the first form of resistance, and quilt-making—a primary tool of resistance and remembrance—stands the test of time. At QuiltCon 2018, the Modern Quilt Guild’s annual convention, the exhibits were honeycombed with activist quilts. The resurgence in “truth textiles” also carries on at the Social Justice Sewing Academy, which empowers youth activists for social change.
The humblest materials can communicate what cannot be said in dangerous times, can comfort the family, and can mourn the dead. Quilting, embroidery, and applique—arts of hearth and home—remain a language shared.
Two decades ago in Northern California, our fragile but fierce community took turns stitching Liz’s favorite piece of mud cloth onto a quilt. I remember the silence that day as we worked together, united in the province of memory. Craig, Liz’s long-time brother-in-arms, his large brown eyes brimming with tears, leaned over and carefully sewed a cowrie shell onto the fabric. Craig would be the next to die.
Now, on our southern border, our neighbors continue to die crossing culture. The personal is political and the political is spiritual. Rather than ask “How do we build higher walls?” we are best served, as people, to ask, “How do we meet?” and “How do we mourn?”
The root of the word memory stems from the word mourn. The devotional art of making in the service of others allows us on the US side of the border wall to touch the essence of the Other, to offer witness, and to mourn.
The Migrant Quilt Project succeeds where rhetoric fails. Pinning and stitching, working the cloth to make sure the dead are not forgotten, these quilt-makers trust that no one turns a blind eye.
The Migrant Quilts are in an exhibit at the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts, through July 15. After that, they will travel to Michigan and to Illinois. See migrantquiltproject.org fo
All photos | Valarie Lee James
The Connection
The Connection
She follows my footsteps in the luxurious boutique. I turn and face her unexpectedly. Her porcelain, pink skin blushes, shows she’s uncomfortable with people of color. Her fingers interlace tightly in front of her silk white blouse under a black cardigan, her weight shifts from leg to leg in a chic A-line black skirt. She fumbles the words, “Let me know, if you need any help.”
All of my front white teeth flash a vibrant smile. “Thank you,” I say with a burgundy red lipstick on my lips. “The snow is nice here. We have none where I’m from,” I comment on the icy whiteness, looking out the decorated storefront window, with frosted blue and silver snowflakes in all four corners. “Oh yes, it’s beautiful. Where are you from?” she questions with a slow exhale. My surprisingly heavy accent echoes, “I’m from Haiti.” She responds “Haiti?” Her shoulders suddenly slouch backwards, her black right heel extends to the corner of the room, both arms come undone like a pretzel pulled apart by a child. There’s a sudden understanding between us. Both of our bodies become open to receive similar and different languages from each other.
“What a beautiful store! You even carry cashmere socks!” I hand her the soft pair. “They will make a great gift for you or someone else,” she says, her ocean blue eyes shine under the modern crystals of a chandelier light. She walks behind the ivory marble counter, folds the socks in soft, sky blue tissue paper, puts them in a glossy white box, and pulls silver strings to tie it all up neatly.
Margret’s name tag carved in black is now visible to me for the first time on her white blouse, and also the beautiful gap between her two top front teeth. She hands me the adorned box. I take out my red wallet from my purse. “Please enjoy them as a gift from me,” she insists. “I think Haitians are the most courageous people in the world,” a tear runs down her blushing cheek. “Thank you. Thank you, Margret,” I sniffle, wiping the tears welling up from my eyes.
She walks from behind the counter towards me with arms wide open. We embrace. Our wet cheeks meet. I smell strawberries in her straight blonde hair down to her mid back. We stand in the middle of the boutique, two strangers holding each other for a silent moment.
Forgive: The new practice and mantra for Black Men
Forgive: The new practice and mantra for Black Men
At the fragile age of 12, Ulysses Slaughter listened as his mother Clarice was shot to death by his father Ulysses Grant Slaughter Sr. Emerging from his bedroom, he watched as life flowed out of his mother. Stepping over her body that day was the first act in his amazing odyssey toward forgiveness.
Tamara Smiley Hamilton is a professional speaker dedicated to giving voice to the voiceless. She facilitates workplace conversations on conflict, race, and implicit bias. In this podcast, she and Ulysses discuss the meaning of true justice and explore the collective trauma Black men (and women) in particular face on the journey to reconciliation.
Forgive: the new mantra and practice for Black Men, Ulysses Butch Slaughter (Author), Eric K. Grimes (Foreword), Paperback, Create Space Independent Publishing; First Edition 2016
Excerpt
Ulysses Slaughter: …this year’s the 40th anniversary of the passing of my mother Clarice Slaughter. At the age of 12, growing up in Chicago, I listened as my father shot and killed my mother. I was in the apartment when it happened. I wound up being the lead witness in the criminal trial against my father and literally had to step over my mother’s body to get out of my room the morning that she was shot and killed. And Tamara, I use the term “killed” just to make a connection with people who understand that kind of language. I always tell people that my mother is alive and well, and one of the reasons why I’m here today is because she is alive and well. Her messages to me have made me the man that I am.
When I was 12, it was a profound awakening for me and, oftentimes, I think of that moment and I can see it in my mind’s eye right now. I think in that moment where I was confronted with a visual that always seemed it would be the logical conclusion to years of domestic violence that I witnessed as a child in our home. And so coming into June 25, 1978, I have to say I was not as shocked that my mother would wind up being shot and killed. What was more shocking to me was that 33 years later… that I would get an opportunity to forgive my father was more shocking than what actually happened on June 25, 1978. The only way that I could change that was to create a powerful counterbalance to that moment, and forgiving became that counterbalance.
Tamara Hamilton: I would just like to take a little moment to hold a space in honor of your mother, in a brief moment of silence, because it is the 40th anniversary and because she is Clarice Slaughter, the woman who always taught you to be better. So I’m going to have our listeners also pause for just a few seconds as we honor your mother.
(Silence)
Thank you everyone around the world who took time to honor Clarice Slaughter. So when a young person witnesses such a horrific tragedy, you use the word madness, I know sadness is profound. Tell us, what did you have to unlearn about the reaction to what happened to you and what was happening to you as you say for years as a witness to domestic violence and to have your mother be killed in your home while you were there? What did you have to unlearn in order to move towards forgiveness?
Ulysses Slaughter: I like the way that we’re using the word “unlearn” right now, because Tamara in many ways forgiving is about unlearning.
Forgiving is about transcending. Transcending the kind of everyday, common, usual approaches—social approaches—to what we see as infractions. To what we see as pain. So, it was important for me to unlearn, forgive those kind of preset ideas that I had been taught about what the normal response should be to something like that. You know, we’re brought up in a way that says, if this happens, this is the way you should respond to it. If that happens, this is the way you should respond to it. And the response, oftentimes, is a trap. So you have what we would call a tragedy, and then you have the trap. The potential trap that is the response. And the tragedy is not transformed through a trap.
And so it became important for me to ask myself, “What do I want?” If I could have it my way, “What do I want?” There was no personal choice and no freedom in anyone telling me what I had to do… and the choice that I made was the liberation factor for me. That is where my freedom lies, in the choice to decide how I was going to be—that I did not have to deal with my father through a committee of people. We talk about justice, and I think that justice is a very intimate thing. And my father and I—the work that my father and I were able to do in the 18 months between us reconnecting and his passing away—the work that we were able to do, represented the real justice.
It was a cosmic kind of justice. It was not the kind of justice that people, you know, find in a court. People often ask me, “How long did your father spend in jail?” Well my father spent 39 months in prison. And they go, “Wow, 39 months, how could that happen?” And, “How come he didn’t get more time?” And there are a lot of reasons I now understand why he did not get more time. But in the end, it didn’t matter how much time he did. It didn’t matter how much time he did, because that was not going to be the healing factor in the reconciliation for us.
Read the full transcript.
Forget what you know about forgiving
by Ulysses Slaughter
Forget what you know about forgiving for a while. Just totally forget your past ideas.
Some people say forgiving is a response. Some say a reaction. Some people say forgiving is all about the past.
I disagree. I disagree deeply and strongly. I say forgiving is now.
Forgiving is a choice – a sustainable shift in perspective that will change the thoughts, feelings and actions you are living with right now. Forgiving can only be related to now and can only happen now because we can’t change what happened.
Forgiving is not about the past. Forgiving is not even about the future. Forgiving is about the present. Forgiving is the action of now.
Whenever anything happens it will arrive in a moment called now. When we seek to name the experience, to judge it, it is mostly to our own detriment. When we judge an experience as bad, it becomes bad. We enter into an experience, mix it, remix it and hold it in our minds. We commit to making even the worst moments last a lifetime. We are mesmerized by the moment. We won’t forgive the moments, so the moments don’t forgive us.
Some people insist that their feelings are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. They feel that their truth is the one size truth that fits all. They can’t distinguish what they call truth from their feelings.
But feelings are like clothes. They come in different colors and different styles. We have a choice of what to wear from an unlimited internal wardrobe. But for some reason many of us like to wear the same feelings for a very long time. We like to wear our feelings no matter how much we’ve outgrown them. Imagine a full, grown man – six feet, 200 pounds – wearing clothes he wore at 14. He admits that he’s uncomfortable in the tight garments. He’s constricted. But he insists on wearing the clothes anyway.
People wear feelings too long sometimes. They think their feelings are the only ones available.
Forgiving is like taking off the clothes that you have outgrown. Forgiving happens when we let go of our feelings about the clothes. You don’t judge the clothes because they are too small. You simply take them off now. You can’t take them off yesterday. It’s too late. But you can take them off now. You can say you’ll take them off tomorrow, but when you arrive in tomorrow the new day will be called “now.”
Forgiving is about now. Forgiving is a word that actually tells you what it is. Forgiving is “for giving.”
Consider this: whatever you got in the past is for giving away right now. Whatever you got in the past is forgiven right now. It doesn’t matter the circumstance. Hand it over. Release it. Let it go and it will let you go now.
Social Breakdown and Initiation
Social Breakdown and Initiation
Charles Eisenstein’s New and Ancient Story is a series of conversations, interviews, and talks dedicated to the transformation of self and society. Explorations include technology, spirituality, agriculture, healing, economics, politics, ecology, relationships, education—areas undergoing transition today as our old story nears collapse. Visit CharlesEisenstein.net.
Orland Bishop is the founder of ShadeTree Multicultural Foundation and works in Los Angeles doing peace work with gangs, social healing, youth initiation, as well as research on esoteric and indigenous cosmologies.
Charles:Orland, I flatter myself to see you as a really deep ally in a cause that is so mysterious that I really can’t even say what it is, but there’s a sense of deep alliance. Thank you so much for making the time.
Orland: Absolutely. It’s a real pleasure to be together again, thank you. You’ve been a great source of inspiration for many years, so glad we could spend this time.
Charles: (In our last conversation) …You were talking about Martin Luther King and civil rights. I had this idea that we are in some kind of transition from civil rights to social agreements because the whole concept of rights kind of takes for granted the separate individual in relation to a sovereign state. As we transition, as a civilization, to a more fluid relational self, perhaps that old rubric of individual rights in reference to the state is evolving as well, and I’m curious what you might have to say about that.
Listen to the Conversation
Part 1
Part 2
Orland: I appreciate the framing. I think there is a transition from where someone is empowered to believe more in themselves, to believing in the other just as deeply. A right is not just for me. It’s an acknowledgement that the framework that gives me access to my own potential is the same framework that gives access to someone else’s potential. So this is the idea of civility. Civility is the framework that allows people to communicate in ways that allow the collective potential to be realized and achieved. This process of creating the direction in which an individual joins the collective intention is what a civilization is. It’s hard. The first phase is not rights whereby I think of my own needs, but R-I-T-E. This is where it emerged from, the rite into a relationship with the hierarchies within the deeper conception of society. And society used to be an initiated group, not a group of people trying to do their own thing, but a group that’s trying to realize the collective intention. But that required an R-I-T-E, rite of passage, or rite of leadership into that decision process. When that doesn’t happen, when people just get their rights as they know them to be, the demand is for more, more power.
Charles: So the R-I-G-H-T is kind of a substitute for the sacred R-I-T-E and becomes necessary, maybe only necessary, in the absence of sacred rites of initiation into society or into civility. That’s a really provocative idea because it then leads to the question: In this time of disintegration of all of the social structures that allowed us to be initiated into something, how do we reconstruct a society that is civil in the sense that you’re talking about, in which we have something to be initiated into?
Orland: So this is the framework. The civil rights movement had behind it a spiritual conception that they were not asking for something alone for themselves. They were also bringing something that was missing in the culture. They were bringing civility to the culture which meant: can people acknowledge that power is not withholding, it’s actually sharing? If you want to develop power, you develop it in a collective sense, whereby the highest reaches of human aspiration is in service to something that is sacred. So if I don’t make the other person’s needs sacred, I’m actually debilitating society. I’m creating frameworks of limitations, because the power that I see will remain political, but not become really social. So the higher power in the culture is social. It’s not political or even economic.
So self-interest is actually a betrayal of the self at another level. When I take so much that my own potential gets underdeveloped. Greed is an underdevelopment of the human potential. And in an intellectual society, in which the schooling of the intellect is for achievements for the self, it’s a critical danger when we do not have group aims as part of the exercise of education. Civics must be part of that education. We must realize how to contribute to a greater societal good, in indigenous forms, and indigenous in this sense just means when people who are situated in the particular place realize that the ecology of that place gives each person a unique feeling for what they can contribute to the emergence of what the place could inspire the group to share. An economy doesn’t have to be repressive. There’s enough imagination in this framework for a deeper collaboration and abundance is possible in everything that a group of people can share.
Charles: Today we live in a time where, for many reasons, we are deaf to promptings of land, of place that could coordinate us into a common endeavor and a common aim and earth agreements that situate each one of us in our gifts, in contribution to that aim. We don’t have ways to ‘hear’ the land, partly just because of an ideology that holds nature as a bunch of random forces and also because of a commodity economy that sources everything from distant places and obliterates the uniqueness of things and keeps us indoors in front of screens and so forth. What is the next evolutionary step to cohere again on a level that’s bigger than just the level of a place, but to cohere as a people?
Orland: Yes, you describe very carefully this gap between object and subject. We have, in our societies, objectives. We want to achieve certain goals, certain distinctions in the culture, and then we limit the capacities that are necessary for that development by isolating ourselves from the good that our aims must also inspire. Human being must ‘do good.’ We must embrace beauty. We must embrace truth. These are intrinsic qualities for a kind of moral memory, that we’re not just pursuing achievements in the outer sense. We’re also developing inner capacities to realize, ‘when I achieve something it’s actually good for the world.’ So what I’m pointing to here, is that in the objective reach in the human will, we have an inner subjective awareness that comes with it. Is this thing that I’m acting on creative enough to transform my life? If it’s only objective is the degree to which I get it done but I don’t have an inner experience of goodness for it, then I’ve actually not done anything. So the society becomes mechanistic in the goals it sets because it could just be done without consciousness.
Charles: I’m imagining, though, that you’re not advising people to disengage from action in the world to heal racial and class inequities, and just to come and work on self-consciousness instead. I imagine that’s probably not what you’re saying.
Orland: So it’s not either/or anymore. It’s both simultaneously, what I call objective subjectivity. I’m working on myself as I’m working on the world at the same time. There’s no other way to do it and this process requires a careful observation that, as one of the poets put it, ‘I’m not a workman in the world, I’m a prophetic being. I can see into things and I can see into myself.’ So why not do both?
Charles: There’s no alternative. When you say okay, yes, I need to work on myself but how do I do that, I think it’s through the things that become visible when one is in relationship to something in the world.
Orland: Right. The world has become myself. There’s no self because I am holding the world in it. My world view is the world, so however I see things is really me and the world at the same time. My perception is no longer separate from the world. It includes and holds the world in it. My cognition holds the world in it, so every time i act, I’m actually acting on the world and myself at the same time. It used to be that I could only see one and then look at the other, but consciousness has evolved to be able to hold both simultaneously.
I think we become more real, as well, as we get older in the sense that more of my spiritual capacities become accessible to me in this mid-age range. It’s called a second adolescence, where the chemistry of life gets back into the deeper spiritual body we call the astral body. This is the part of the self that, in a sense, holds the future sense of me. If I want to stay in my old habits, I’m actually going to create illness for myself by a certain age if I don’t release my creative. But this is also true for the whole culture. If we don’t embrace our future potential, the social aims, the cultural aims, the political aims and such will break down because this is actually a representation of the inner life of the human being.
Charles: It looks like it’s happening right now, this breakdown in our culture.
Orland: Right, and because we live in a technological age, we may want to substitute everything with technology, but the need would never be substituted. The need that we have is fundamental for the R-I-T-E part of our lives, the rite of passage part of our lives, the initiation part of our lives has to continue to be developed. There’s no substitute for that because it is actually an intrinsic feeling. No one can give us that unless we are working on something that is actually truthful in our will.
Charles: I’m just digesting that and thinking about the dramatic increase in suicides among middle-aged people, especially men, and I wonder if there’s a connection—when on the soul level you know that something is supposed to happen, initiation is supposed to happen, a new phase of life is supposed to happen, an orientation toward, on a deeper level, an orientation toward what you’re born to serve. And then it doesn’t happen. The initiation doesn’t happen and one feels confined in this obsolete life, this shell, that cannot accommodate who I really want to be.
Orland: The esoteric probably will become more realized in our society as we go along. Esoteric means ‘what’s hidden’. What’s hidden often in the motive of life is to have the knowledge of what is actually generating the questions that I’m having. If a person can’t answer the questions they’re having, with the knowledge society provides, they can only go one place: into themselves. Initiation is often a brush with death.
The human being is always dying. This is the esoteric part of the human life. We’re always dying, but we also are always living and the question is: what experience will pull us to one or the other? The human being is always in a balance between life and death. Some practices tell us to pay attention to one or the other and learn which one tells us the deeper truth. Initiation questions really must take in both. The deeper philosophy of life takes in both. The deeper religions of life takes in both. The contemplation of life and death, it’s not one or the other.
Charles:I’m thinking now, on collective level, that we are probably in a phase where we are drawn to the contemplation of death and to the reality of the death that is present in life because of climate change, perhaps, because of these crises that are putting in front of our face that our entire civilization is mortal.
I think we are having a collective initiation that started with the bomb, which was the first time that it became inescapably obvious that war is not the answer. It became no longer a viable option to defeat the enemy through total war. For the first time in human history, that was no longer an option. Instead, we had ‘mutually assured destruction’ and that gave us a quickening in the evolution toward what I call the story of interbeing—that what we do to the other, we do to ourselves in some form. Now, we have climate change. I think that the dominant narrative of climate change is really problematic, but still its effect on us is to drive home the point that what we do to nature, what we do to other beings, not just human beings but what we do to any being also will affect ourselves. Maybe you have a further comment about that?
Orland: I appreciate you framing it further. We’ve been in a cult of death for a long time—our modern civilization, from colonialism, in which cultures have died. We’ve actually extinguished a lot of significant cultures from the world in the last five- to six-hundred years. So the atomic age is actually not the first of really seeing massive loss of potential. We’ve also eliminated a lot of species from the world.
What has been evolving in those 500 years in modernity is this objective subjectivity, that if I destroy the world, I destroy myself. That’s hidden in the initiation we can call ‘the atomic age,’ but it’s still a rite of passage of humanity, from the ages where electricity and magnetism and fire would only limit destruction to a certain point, now it’s global. This level of destruction has put our contemplation of death at a higher level and we don’t want that. So what do we do? We started to learn how to negotiate the atomic energy age.
Charles: Yes.
Orland: But this is, again, when we put ourselves at risk, we put ourselves in the opportunity of development at the same time.
Charles: Yeah. I’m just wondering if there’s even any other way. I think about the extinction of cultures, languages, stories, not to mention species, and I wonder: is there some gods’-eye-view of the whole thing from which I can understand that actually these extinctions were a necessary sacrifice to complete an evolutionary journey that we are collectively on? Is there another way to understand these extinctions in some other way besides that they were just horrific tragedies? I’m not saying as a substitute for feeling them as a horrific tragedy, but I’m saying like another lens through which to understand them?
Orland: This brings us back to the esoteric question. Some of the areas of research that we are engaged with is to understand what is on the other side of death. What happens in the release of the life forces from the form we call our body, of any body? What happens with the energy once we leave?
Ultimately, most of us will have to become esotericists if we are to make sense of the losses that we have already endured in our culture. Why? Because the energy is still trying to communicate with consciousness. So the bodies are gone, but the beings that inhabit those bodies are still active on different planes of reality, causing environmental changes because it’s still constituted within the framework of what we call reality.
Charles:So I collect stories and I hold circles sometimes where people share stories that involve death, involve communications with loved ones after they died in very dramatic ways. I think that these can be very useful to take in because they subvert the dominant conception of what a self is and ‘who I am’ and open us to other conceptions. I think that some of those people will then jump too quickly to kind of a simplified transmigration of souls from one lifetime to the next, to the next, to the next, which still kind of preserves a sense of a separate self.
These stories really make me curious and they inflame various skeptical parts of myself and wounded parts of myself, parts that maybe want to believe these experiences are authentic and I’m afraid to believe they’re authentic. I will become I wouldn’t say cynical or skeptical even, but it’s more I kind of hold it at a bit of an intellectual distance. I feel a call, though, toward a deeper understanding. Maybe all this is just a long-winded way to say, Orland, what happens after we die?
Orland:What happens to my thoughts when I forget something? Where does my knowing go when I forget something? Before we even get to the death part, when I forget something, it’s still available in some level of consciousness, and if I concentrate my attention I can recover what I forgot. We call it remembering. So remembering is the first process in the step to clarification of this higher practical development. if I choose to remember, my consciousness actually becomes much more complex than if I try to learn something because I will resist learning, but I can’t resist remembering. In early childhood, that’s who I was. I was trying to remember, not learn, and I was hoping that those who were older than me had remembered everything.
Back to perception. Our natural perception is to be open to mystery, but having learned that mysteries actually create strong paradoxes in consciousness—meaning no one can always explain what I’m perceiving—then I have to really advance my cognition. And we have a society that’s saying, ‘do not advance your cognition too far or you will be considered weird.’ You know, we ostracize people that advance themselves. Or, if we can utilize their knowledge we call them geniuses. If they play good music or they create good mathematics, we then make space for them.
Charles:We have these capacities that we, in some semiconscious or unconscious way limit in order to remain in coherency with the times in which we live, to ‘not be weird’, or it could also just be that the particular flavor of genius that would become available to us isn’t necessary or doesn’t even have a home right now. The genius has a purpose of service to what the next evolutionary step of that society is to be. It still feels, though, a bit tragic. Some people, they get to exercise their genius. They get to be a musician, a mathematician. They get to do it and others, sorry, your genius is not what’s needed right now so you just get to be a janitor. That can’t be right. There’s something else here.
Orland: This is the subtle thing about karma and destiny: it’s interwoven. So part of the karmic factor is that there will be some condition that limits my creativity that is beyond the society, but also hidden in the society. This is an agreement that a circumstance will limit my destiny and I have to figure out the rite—R-I-T-E—of passage through that. It’s not just that everyone will have everything they need. Even if you provide everything they need, they will still require something that makes consciousness a deeper effort.
Some people will even self-sabotage their own potential because that is just part of the make-up of what initiation is. The human being must be initiated, regardless of how much society provides the conditions necessary for achievement. It’s really not about achievement, it’s about transformation.
Charles: It seems like there’s two things that might require an initiatory rite. One of them would be to be initiated into society as you were saying, into a useful function that engages the gifts that you come with, and the other is the initiation into the activation of the gifts themselves. If you have one without the other, if you have the social initiation without the activation of the gift, then your utility is limited because you’re only operating from what is automatically available to you. If you have the initiation of your genius without initiation into society, you become kind of the lone genius or even the psychotic.
Orland:We’ve lost the context of the genius. The genius is guided by the muse and so there’s always a sense that the inspiration for the genius to become active is the fact that there are entities or intelligences that are the source of what the genius utilizes to express this unique capacity. Music is not just in the person’s capacity to play, it’s in the spheres, in the harmony of the spheres. It’s already there and it’s discovered and played.
Charles:Yeah, Mozart would just write it down.
Orland:Yes. Right, exactly. So these frequencies are distributed throughout the cosmos so to speak. It’s within the environment in nature and the deep superconscious of the collective. So part of it is that we’re always drawing from something through our perception.
Charles:That’s why initiation is necessary because it’s an attunement to something that’s already there.
Orland:Yes, and when the spirit self-separates from the physical body, there’s a recapitulation, a remembering, of the primary agreement of what the self brought to the world and a witnessing of: did I fulfill it, did I live into this intention? It’s not a moral thing of beliefs. It’s whether I truly made the effort to overcome self-interest and deposit into the world my will, leaving my signature with it that’s free from ‘me.’
Charles:It seems like a bit of a stringent standard that you’re setting up here. You know, when I ask, when I meet somebody and they have incredible potential and I ask well why aren’t they fulfilling that potential and then I hear, well they were abused as children, they went through all kinds of things, no wonder. You’re not saying at the moment of death that they’re going to evaluate that they have failed because, I think really, sometimes when I offer something to people who are deeply wounded like that, I say, “you know, if you accomplish nothing else but to heal 10% of that, then you’ve actually had a really good life.” How does that fit in?
Orland:Yeah, I would agree with that and that’s why I went back to remembering, because anyone who is in a crisis, what they’re trying to do is remember a time when they were not. They want to go back to a time before the abuse. They want to go back to a time before the trauma. The body tries to remember this earlier stage when it was not yet wounded or when it did not forget its higher purpose. We call it healing, and you just mentioned it again. This is the natural first process of the self. It wants to overcome the conditions that limit its conditions to be self-conscious. If it doesn’t happen in remembering, it will try to happen in sleep. If it doesn’t happen in sleep, the only other option it has to happen in society, in waking consciousness. Someone has to insist that there’s an opportunity to heal. Someone has to provide the context. This is society’s work. We should not leave people in their wound. This is why people explore all kinds of therapy because we know it’s possible for that breakthrough. If it doesn’t happen then, then it’s left for these other levels of the mystery which would include that.
Charles:I think that you’ve articulated the most important requisite of successful therapy of any kind, which is that the therapist whether it’s a person or a group has to know that the other person can heal and has to be able to hold that knowing strongly enough that they can hold the other person in that knowing until they can know it themselves. That’s almost the only thing necessary. I guess there are skills and things and learnings that are useful on top of that, but without that there’s nothing.
Orland:Because the highest level of the self-need is belonging. Even if I don’t accomplish anything significant, belonging is most important to the human being. No one wants to just be exiled in a wound by themselves.
Charles:It kind of comes full-circle, because the particular gifts and genius that are especially called for in our times and called forth by our times are precisely the ones that enable us to create conditions for this healing to happen for other people. Everybody’s gift is to serve the healing of somebody else.
Orland:I would definitely say yes to that. Something we share becomes more abundant, not only to me and to us in this time, but it becomes the substance for future times as well. It becomes the criteria for some other soul that is going to be born into the world to say, “this is the right time, this condition is set.” We set the conditions upon which the karma of other people’s lives gets identified.
Charles:Returning to the death moment here, is that okay?
Orland:Yes.
Charles:So there’s this kind of evaluation and then what happens?
Orland:Well, when one goes back into the deeper story, which there’s a memory in the astral body that has to be transformed. This life is a memory. It becomes a memory that has to be transformed to prepare free energy for the soul to possibly reincarnate, for possible futures. It has to dissolve this content and context of life itself. That is the work for those on the other side: dissolving who they had become and allowing the soul to return to a state of creative freedom, to be reincarnated again.
Charles:That doesn’t only happen with death. That happens in life transitions, too. It’s necessary to dissolve who you’ve become.
Orland:Right. So when we don’t complete all of that … that’s why I said in the living experience, we have the same functional capacities that we have in death. We just have to do it in a body, we have to do it within the framework of perception and cognition. The perception and cognition has to pass through the living organs of our individual existence. This is one part of initiation. If it doesn’t happen there, it has to happen on the other side of the body.
Charles: Right. If it happens on this side, then capacities become available.
Orland: Spiritual capacities become available here that we normally would only experience on the other side.
This is the stage in all consciousness development whereby we must contemplate. The will wants to aspire for something to do, but I can only aspire to the level of the contemplative will first, whereby I don’t have to feel the push, but the pull to wait for the inspiration, because the inspiration comes with a kind of initiation as well. The one thing that we don’t want to do is intellectualize it to the degree that I want to make an achievement of it and not a realization of it. When I realize it to be true, what is in me will naturally awake.
Charles: I’m so grateful, Orland. I hesitate often to reach out to you because I just know that you’re doing such important, beautiful work that I don’t want to take you away from it.
Orland: No, this is good to do. This is a source of inspiration for me too.
Charles: Great. Okay, well thank you so much and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
Orland:Talk to you tomorrow. Take care.
Listen to the complete conversation here.
The Wanderer's Preparation in the Death Lodge
The Wanderer’s Preparation in the Death Lodge
A candidate for soul initiation knows what she has taken on. She’s preparing to die in order to be reborn. She must abandon her old home to set out for her new home. She longs for the journey but is understandably terrified by the prospect. To help her approach the edge, her guides might suggest some time in the “death lodge.” 1
The Death Lodge I
The death lodge is a symbolic and/or literal place, separate from the ongoing life of the community, to which the Wanderer retires to say goodbye to what her life has been. She may dwell there a full month or more, or, during the course of a year, an hour or two every day, or several long weekends. Some of her death lodge work will take place in the cauldron of her imagination and emotions, while other work will occur face-to-face with friends, family, and lovers. She will wrap up unfinished emotional and worldly business to help release herself from her past.
In her death lodge, she will see that the life she is leaving has contained both joy and pain, success and failure, love and the absence of love. Some of the central people in her life have played the roles of villains or victims, others of heroes. No matter. Now all the paths of possibilities within her former life are going to converge at a single inevitable point up ahead: the ending of her old way of belonging to the world.
In the death lodge she will say goodbye to her accustomed ways of loving and hating, to the places that have felt most like home, to the social roles that gave her pleasure and self-definition, to the organizations and institutions that both shaped and limited her growth, and also to her parents or caregivers who birthed her and raised her and who will soon, in a way, be losing a daughter.
She might choose to end her involvement with some people, places, and roles. In other cases, she might only need to shift her relationship to them. Although she must surrender her old way of belonging to the world, she need not violate sacred contracts. Some contracts might have to be renewed at a deeper level. It is essential she does not fool herself: embarking on the underworld journey is not a legitimate justification for abdicating preexisting agreements or responsibilities to others.
Whether ending or shifting relationships, she will feel and express her gratitude, love, forgiveness, her goodbyes. She will say the difficult and important things previously unsaid. She may or may not visit with each person in the flesh, but she will certainly have many poignant and emotional encounters.
If her parents were not criminally abusive, she will forgive them for not being who she wanted them to be. If they are still alive, she will attempt this in person. This may be the most important and difficult part of her death lodge. She knows by now no parents are perfect nurturers and all have their own wounds. She knows that surrendering her former identity requires her to heal her own wounds to the point she no longer harbors the fantasy that her human parents will somehow become perfect (or merely healthy or responsible) or that she will find someone else—a lover or therapist—to be her perfect parent. As in her Loyal Soldier work, she must learn to relate to herself as a healthy parent to a child.
In her death lodge, the Wanderer also mourns. She grieves her personal losses and the collective losses of war, race, or gender oppression; environmental destruction; community and family disintegration; or spiritual emptiness. Not only does she cease to push the painful memories away but she invites them into her lodge and looks them in the eye. She allows her body to be seized by those griefs, surrendering to the gestures, postures, and cries of sorrow. She grieves in order to let her heart open fully again. She knows at the bottom of those grief waters lies a treasure: the source of her greater life. David Whyte writes:
Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief
turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for something else. 2
Each of us has been, at times, the one who stood above a dark well and “wished for something else”—namely, that we ourselves wouldn’t have to descend into the waters of grief, that our wishes would come true without our having to suffer in the process. During the descent to soul, we surrender our comfortable lives above the waters. We enter depths so dark we fear we will die, and in a way, we will.
The Death Lodge II
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
— T.S. Eliot 3
Most people enact a vision fast with an intention, or at least a need, to grieve significant losses. The death lodge is an essential preparatory practice.
A man in his mid-twenties came to grieve his father’s death that occurred when the young man was eighteen. Thomas, who himself became a father at seventeen, had many questions about what it meant to be a man. He grieved his father’s premature death, his uncertainties about his own fatherhood, and his sense of being deprived of the cultural rituals that might have helped him become a man earlier and more completely. Like everyone, his time in the death lodge included sorrow for what might have been.
Many people embark on a vision fast or on the descent to soul, more generally, in part to say goodbye to an identity they have outgrown, in a sense to attend their own funeral. Some write a eulogy for themselves, a farewell to the old story. Although the new story stirs inside them, they know the old one must first be laid to rest.
Anita, a professional and mother in her forties, came to formally mark her empty nest as her youngest entered college. She wanted to honor the end of twenty-one years of soul work, the labor of love of raising two fine young men. And then there were the two failed marriages, an alcoholic father, and a mother who died when Anita was four. In the death lodge, she also said goodbye to her way of being a psychotherapist; she knew a more creative and artistic path awaited her.
In the two years before his first vision fast, Steve, a young psychiatrist, lost his mother and brother, his career fell apart, and he, at long last, severed his abusive relationship with alcohol. He came to formally end his decade or more of what he called “being dead,” staggering through a lonely life of despair. In his death lodge, he finally experienced his rage at his dad for the years of brutal criticism and ridicule- and all the grief waiting in line just behind the rage.
Tom, a Harvard M.B.A. in his forties, made millions as a successful (and ruthless) corporate mercenary. He found himself with a trophy home and boat, a second ruined marriage, no idea of who he really was, and his only son suicidal at the end of high school. Stunned to find himself bereft of the American dream, he came to his vision fast recognizing he and his son were facing the same crisis of meaning, one at the threshold of emancipation, the other at midlife, but both with the opportunity for true freedom. Tom, who was beginning to discover the fine human being beneath his former corporate persona, had much to surrender in his death lodge: buckets of tears and everything he once thought life was about.
In the death lodge, you loosen your grip on your former identity and world. You cut the cords, then gingerly step along the narrow ledge above the abyss, your back to the crag. At last, you turn and extend your arms against the half-truths of the old life, your fingers lightly pushing away.
To relinquish your former identity is to sacrifice the story you had been living—the one that defined you, empowered you socially, and limited you. This sacrifice captures the essence of “leaving home.”
Once you have in earnest entered the journey of soul initiation, you begin to live as if in a fugue state. Imagine: after developing an adequate and functional identity, you now have become as if amnesic, dissociated from your prior life. But, unlike the victim of amnesia, your goal is not to discover who you used to be, but rather who you really are.
Your time in the death lodge grants freedom. Untied from the past, you dwell more fully in the present, more able to savor the gifts of the world. You find yourself projecting less and seeing the world more clearly and passionately. You experience a deepened gratitude for the richness of life, for the many opportunities that await you.
Confronting Your Own Death I
The courageous encounter with the unalterable fact of mortality supplements and extends the activities of the death lodge. In the death lodge, you made peace with your past and prepared to leave behind an old way of belonging to the world; you prepared for a “small death.” Now you have the opportunity to prepare for your inevitable and final death, look your mortality in the eye, and make peace with the brutal fact that, ultimately, you will have to loosen your grip on all of life, not just a life stage.
On September 11, 2001, Ann Debaldo was leading a journey in a remote corner of Tibet, unaware of the events unfolding in the United States. But like most Americans that day, Ann had the opportunity to become more intimately acquainted with death. At 14,000 feet in the Himalayas, Ann witnessed the extraordinary Buddhist ceremony of sky burial while, elsewhere in the world, people witnessed another kind of sky burial in the air over New York City.
We were camped near Drigung Til Monastery. The evening before the sky burial, we attended the powa practice. A specially trained lama sat in front of the four corpses, each of which was folded into a small bundle and wrapped with blankets tied with ropes. Offerings to the monks—bags of flour and other staples—were taken off the horses by family members who had carried the bodies here, a journey of many days, perhaps weeks. The lama went into a profound meditation and at regular intervals made a loud sound- phat!– to open the crown chakras of the corpses, allowing any remaining life force to depart. We sat in silence as the offerings were casually divided among the monks and the lama performed his task.
Very early the next morning, we walked silently and slowly up to the hilltop where the sky burial would take place. I walked with an elderly man whom I had earlier tried to discourage from coming to Drigung Til. He was ill-prepared to handle both the altitude and the primitive camping, yet in Lhasa it became clear to me that attending the sky burial was what his journey was all about. The group moved ahead and we took the less steep pathway, his labored breathing increasing with each step. As we reached the top, a monk gently untied the ropes on one of the bundles and removed the blankets, revealing a very old woman with limbs lying at impossible angles to her torso. A great calm came over me. The old man gasped and almost fell. To prepare the food for the vultures, the monk flayed the meat and then crushed the bones into grain on a great round stone. We were so close that bits of flesh landed on our clothes. The old man was unable to stand, and so we moved even closer to lean upon the stone wall next to the monk. I felt a warm strength as I supported my companion’s weight, understanding how close he was to his time of departing this life. I could feel his heart beating and his heavy breathing as the huge golden vultures edged nearer to their breakfast.
Each corpse was similarly handled. Wave after wave of vultures descended upon the meat and grain until abruptly, there was nothing left. I watched, filled with a strange joy as the great birds lumbered down the hill before jumping into the sky and soared away over the valley toward the snow peaks in the distance. Oh, to fly freely—man becoming bird! What is death but an opening of a door?
We walked in silence down the steep hill toward the monastery where the monks began parading and chanting to the sounds of their great long horns and drums. As I sat in the hot sun, I shivered so hard I almost fell off the wall, my mind reeling. It was difficult to think and perhaps consciousness was briefly lost. Then, in my belly, I felt the presence for the first time of a great mountain of peace and silence—a feeling of solidity and calm strength, quite new to me. We left the monastery, each of us affected in our individual ways, but certainly forever changed by our visit to the burial grounds.
Confronting your own mortality, intimately and bravely, imagined or vicariously witnessed in graphic detail, is a powerful soulcraft practice, possibly an essential one. The embodiment of soul that you seek is not going to go far if you are living as if your ego is immortal. Put more positively, your soul initiation will be rich to the extent you can ground yourself in the sober but liberating awareness of limited time. This very moment may be your last.
Confronting Your Own Death II
The confrontation with death is an unrivaled perspective enhancer. In the company of death, most desires of adolescence and the first adulthood fall away. What are the deepest longings that remain? What are the surviving intentions with which you might enter your second, soul-initiated adulthood? The confrontation with death will empty you of everything but that kernel of love in your heart and your sincerest questions. It is in such a state of emptiness and openness that we hope to approach the central mysteries of our life.
As a Wanderer, it is a good practice to look Death in the eye. Contemplate your unavoidable aging and inevitable demise, “the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat,” as David Whyte puts it. During your wandering time, you might visit cemeteries or mortuaries, and sit there for hours or days and really look and listen and feel and breathe the thick air in those places. You might learn the traditional and sacred practices of those who prepare a body for burial or cremation.
Perhaps you will volunteer for hospice and spend hours gazing into the eyes of those who lie at death’s door, your heart stretching ever wider, both your eyes and your companion’s peering over the edge of life’s cliff. In hospice, you will witness the dying process, life ebbing away, and the moment of death itself. You will see people die well and not so well. You will see how families deal with death or refuse to deal with it. You will see some people embrace their deaths and celebrate their lives, and others die bitter and angry, never having acknowledged they were dying.
Discuss death with your guides and fellow Wanderers. Sit in councils specifically dedicated to talk of death. While alone, wonder about death, wander with it, wrestle with it. Feel its presence, both emotionally and physically. Ask yourself and others questions about death and share your feelings and speculations. Along with Mary Oliver, rhetorically ask, “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”
Should you suffer the loss of a loved one, permit the force of that death to transform you with its weight, fully feeling and expressing the immense grief, allowing it to irrevocably alter the world and your place in it. And should your people suffer an unthinkable loss at the hands of others (as on September 11, 2001), surrender to your anger and grief, but also look for the enemy of life within, the elements of self not in alignment with life. Find where death lives inside.
When you progress from one stage of life to another, celebrate the promises and possibilities of the new, but do not shirk from grieving the little deaths inevitably accompanying these shifts—the death of youth, unrealized dreams, cherished hopes, bedrock illusions.
Gradually, you will come to live in the light of death, not morbidly but with an increasingly joyful appreciation for this moment and your presence in it. You will cling less and less to who you are and how you are and become more attuned to your destiny, with allegiance to neither your social past nor the current accommodations of your personality.
As Carlos Castaneda was taught by his teacher, the Yaqui sorcerer don Juan, ask death to be your ally, to remind you, especially at times of difficult choices, what is important in the face of your mortality. Imagine death as ever present, accompanying you everywhere just out of sight behind your left shoulder.
In these ways, make peace with your mortality. One day you will find you are not so attached to your life being just one certain way. Then you will be better prepared to converse with soul and its outrageous requests for radical change.
With any soulcraft practice, the Wanderer seeks to put his ego in a double bind, a checkmate that makes it impossible to continue the old story. Confronting the inevitability and ever-presence of his death loosens his grip on his routines, dislodges his old way of obtaining his bearings, ushers him to the threshold beyond which lies the unknown. Horrified, he discovers he must give up everything in order to get what he really wants, with no guarantee of success or even of surviving his quest.
He is like a dog playing fetch when someone suddenly throws the stick into a bonfire. Stunned, the dog stares into the flames with big eyes. The soul wants the Wanderer to jump into that fire. The Wanderer’s deepest instinct for survival is counterbalanced by his passion for the quest. What will he do?
By confronting the truths held by death, the Wanderer gradually relinquishes his illusion of immortality and finds himself with a new hope for the world. He sees all things must change to evolve. He sees that death and impermanence provide hope for an evolving universe.
References
1 Steven Foster and Meredith Little introduced me to the death lodge as a practice in preparing for a vision fast. See Roaring of the Sacred River: The Wilderness Quest for Vision and Self-Healing (Big Pine, Calif.: Lost Borders Press, 1997), p. 34.
2 David Whyte, “The Well of Grief,” in Where Many Rivers Meet (Langley, Wash.: Many Rivers Press, 1990), p. 35.
3 From “East Coker,” in T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1977), p. 28.
Adapted from Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (New World Library, 2003).
About the images:
By William Blake, selected from: Europe: a Prophecy, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Milton: a Poem, To Justify the Ways of God to Men.
Indigenous Worldview Is a Source We Now Urgently Need
Indigenous Worldview Is a Source We Now Urgently Need
COVER: Arhuaco Elder & 1Earth Institute Inc. Director, Calixto Suarez Villafane, © 1Earth Institute Inc. 2018
Our global reality is one of a depleted Earth, the consequence of the havoc we have inflicted through our economies onto our living support system. Are we going to live like lemmings, racing toward self-destruction? Or are we going to sensibly re-learn how to sustainably survive and thrive?
In his article on the coming revolution, “Life After Patriarchy,” Alnoor Ladha thoughtfully wrote: “Climate change, increasing inequality and rampant poverty are not ‘externalities’ of a well-functioning system, as the economists would have us believe, but rather the logical outcome of a set of rules, norms and cultural practices.”[1]
We have programmed our economic operating system with more: more extraction, more consumption, more of everything… What a misapprehension it is to believe that the economy can grow forever when our home and our support systems are finite.
Like every species on this earth, humanity must abide by the rules of the ecosystem that sustains us. As much as we might like to think it, Nature’s laws and feedback cycles have not been suspended on our behalf.
But, if we want to reprogram our economic operating system and bring in wholesale change, we need to address the root of our problems: our thinking.
This is a perfect example of the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And, needless to say, we cannot solve problems in the same frame of mind in which we created them.
We have accepted as our prevailing worldview that economics is some kind of infallible ‘force of nature.’ But we need to remember that our worldviews stem from beliefs that we have learned and have chosen to live by. We can adjust or un-choose.
Learning from Original Instructions
Who can teach us a way of thinking distinct from the prevailing concepts? Though there is not one prescribed way, perhaps we should consider that the answer may lie with our traditional cultures.
An Earth-centered worldview is what has always guided our indigenous cultures around the world. Does it matter that indigenous peoples have lived sustainably for millennia and have treated the Earth with profound respect and acted as Her custodians? Yes. The United Nations estimates that indigenous territories cover approximately 20 percent of the Earth’s landmass. This 20 percent landmass stewarded by indigenous peoples amazingly contains 80 percent of the world’s remaining biodiversity.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer states so succinctly:
The indigenous worldview has been marginalized for generations because it was seen as antiquated and unscientific and its ethics of respect for Mother Earth were in conflict with the Industrial worldview, bent on treatment of the Earth as if what native people call gifts were nothing more than resources destined for consumption by humans. But now, in this time of climate change and massive loss of biodiversity, we understand that the indigenous worldview is neither unscientific nor antiquated but is, in fact, a source of wisdom that we urgently need. [2] [emphasis added]
Reprogramming Our Operating System
We are collectively experiencing profound disintegration and breakdown of our old structures and beliefs; we want our world to make sense again and allow decency to prevail. Our present worldviews no longer serve us. Consequently, we need to adopt a different intelligence, a different worldview, in order to adjust our operating system from the inside out.
Consider the wisdom of Chief Phil Lane:
We are all part of the ancient Sacred Circle of Life, and therefore we are all Indigenous Peoples of Mother Earth…. To embrace and reclaim our Indigenous relationship to all Life is to remember and lovingly celebrate our sacred relationship with our Mother Earth, all relatives of our One Human Family and our kinship with all Life. [3]
This reprogramming of our operating system contains two causally consistent ground rules common to the beliefs of all traditional societies.
Adjustment Instruction 1 | We Are Not Superior
Let us drop the delusion of the universe revolving around us humans. We are learning with surprise and humility that we do not own the Earth. We owe Her our survival.
It is logical, therefore, that if we want to survive, we need to reclaim intuitive ways of knowing and align our thinking with life, not against it.
Let us re-evaluate the worldview that we are the superior sentient master species on Earth and, instead, establish a relation and kinship with nature and spirit. Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us of “…the fallacy of human exceptionalism, that we are fundamentally different and somehow better, more deserving of the wealth and services of the Earth than other species.” [4]
Make no mistake; this is as revolutionary a shift in collective thinking as when Galileo debunked the geocentric model with the sun and the moon revolving around Earth. Just as our sun does not revolve around the Earth, neither does the Earth revolve around humanity. Because we are not masters, but, rather, interdependent members in a world that includes non–human beings, what hurts them will hurt us.
Adjustment Instruction 2 | We Are Not Separate
“Why does much of the world not comprehend our sacred interrelationship with Nature and Spirit?” This is what Calixto Suarez Villafañe, an Arhuaco elder from the Sierra Nevada De Santa Marta, Colombia, is often asked by his elders.
© Seth Roffman. 2017
Calixto is a director of 1Earth Institute. He also is an emissary for the Mamos majores, or chief Elders of the Arhuaco and Kogi peoples, who rarely descend from their high mountain sanctuaries and are the spiritual leaders and knowledge keepers of the people of the Sierra.
They are the descendants of the Tairona civilization, from which the Inca and Aztec also descended.
The peoples of the Sierra survived the onslaught of the conquistadors by retreating into mountainous sanctuaries in the Sierra and controlling the access routes to their retreats. Nowadays, these high sanctuaries no longer offer safety from deadly paramilitaries and the avaricious grasping of companies and landowners.
According to Calixto:
Until now, what human beings have reached for is self-destruction, the destruction of Mother Earth, of the mountains, the poisoning of the sea, of the rivers, of the lakes, and the reduction of the flora and fauna. We are seeing how we are impoverishing the planet and those who live there. Humans have strayed from their path and are accelerating their self-destruction. [5]
Calixto is signaling a call for action through 1Earth Institute: “As Mamos, we are harmonizers and guidance counselors. The Mamos are calling for a radical change, a transformation.”
Whenever he returns from his travels, Calixto drives for three hours up the Sierra and walks or rides a horse for another 16 hours to report back to the Mamos majores and receive his instructions.
You would not know by meeting them who they are, they present themselves as such humble beings. They are simply dressed: men, women, and children all in white—plus or minus a number of stripes, representative of their region of origin.
They have the distinctive indigenous features of the Tairona, some have quite sharp, angular faces. Outstanding are their eyes. They are the most beautiful, warm, dark eyes, which gaze at and through you—gentle, clear, and yet, you sense the sharp intellect and the slumbering, fierce fire of their souls. They prefer not to look at you directly.
Both sexes wear their dark hair long. Apparently it never goes white with age. The distinctive white caps worn by the Arhuaco men symbolize the snowfields of the mountain peaks of the Sierra.
The Mamos want the world to hear their warning and their deep concerns about the precarious state of all life on Mother Earth:
Our ancestors left us in this space, caring for and harmonizing the Earth and Humanity. We live in harmony with all natures beings: water, earth, fire, wind, the sun, humans, and also animals and plants, which are essence of the divine.
All life on Earth is intrinsically intertwined and interconnected, and we humans are no exception. But how do we see ourselves? As separate entities outside the web of life that surrounds us. This is reflected in Western science, which uses analysis by objective separation through dispassionate observation.
This intentional separation of the ‘knower from the known’ is pervasive throughout our economic logic and ecosystem management in industrialized nations, and therein lies the misbelief which informs our economic activities.
By comparison, most traditional knowledge systems are founded on intuitive and spiritual relatedness. There is no separation in such traditional knowledge systems: time-honored observations are firmly grounded in the knowing that all is related and interconnected, and the observer is a vital part of the system observed.
Once we accept this ‘disconnect myth’ for what it is—an erroneous belief and worldview—we will re-connect with our family of non-human beings and find our way back home. Have we not been lost and felt an inexplicable deep yearning for knowing—a reflective sense of the sacredness of creation—its cohesiveness and absolute interrelationship? “Western civilization, despite its phenomenal achievements, developed on the foundation of this fundamental split between Spirit and nature—between creator and creation.” [6]
The natural law is simple: humility to take from nature, to give back and to maintain balance spiritually and physically. For us, the Arhuaco, humility is a sign of wisdom. That is what we want to pass on to future generations. The Mamos invite us to discover again our truthful identity, our ancestors, our roots and taking care of these roots, and of the knowledge of the Mamos. In this way, we can arrive into the deepest aspects of this knowledge and transmit it to others. – Calixto Suarez Villafañe
Isn’t it extraordinary and comforting for all of us to know that the Mamos care for the Sierra, for Mother Earth, for them, for us, and that their lives are dedicated to maintaining balance? By contrast, are we aware of the forces we are unleashing? Realise, there is a hard reality edge to this for the Mamos: it has become harder and harder for them to continue their work. They need to recover their land and their Kankurwas (sacred temples). They believe we are close to reaching a point of no return.
How then can we reclaim our ‘Indigenous relationship to all Life?’ Together with the Mamos and Indigenous elders from around the world we are preparing a set of indigenous instructions on what we need to do – “to remember and lovingly celebrate our sacred relationship with our Mother Earth, all relatives of our One Human Family and our kinship with all Life.”
1Earth Institute is a global indigenous-nonindigenous partnership and believes that the rethinking of our economies involves integrating traditional wisdom ways to reconnect us to land, country, and spirit. Our view is that the traditional stories are not just tales from other worlds and artifacts from the past, but hold the instructions for our survival and our future.
Behar (Advisory Board member & CEO As You Sow)
© 1Earth Institute Inc. 2018
Gratitude
I would like to acknowledge my debt and gratitude to my dear friend and co-director Calixto Suarez Villafañe; to the inspirational Robin Wall Kimmerer; to all my elders and indigenous elders who have patiently taught me; and to all of our nonhuman teachers and family.
References
[1] Ladha, A. (2018). Life After Patriarchy: Three Reflections on the Coming Revolution, Kosmos Online, available at https://www.kosmosjournal.org/news/life-after-patriarchy-three-reflections-on-the-coming-revolution.
[2] Kimmerer, R. (2016). Harmony with Nature: Fifth Annual Conference at the United Nations, April 2015, Kosmos Journal, Spring/Summer, available at: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/harmony-with-nature.
[3] Chief Phil Lane of the Ihanktonwan Dakota and Chickasaw Nations, Indigenous Wisdom for Compassionate Living and Unified Action, available at http://indigenouswisdomcourse.com.
[4] Kimmerer, R. (2014). Returning the Gift, Minding Nature Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2, available at https://www.humansandnature.org/returning-the-gift-article-177.php.
[5] Quotes from Calixto Suarez Villafañe are based on my personal communication with him.
[6] Baring, A. The Real Challenge of Our Times: The Need for a New Worldview, available at http://www.annebaring.com/anbar09_philosophy.htm.