My Blog
« Magic Mushrooms
|
main
Bioregional Catechism
Sun, January 6, 2008 - 2:33 PM
This'll be an ongoing topic. It comes from a thread in Bioregional Animism, and I want to explore it more fully over the next several months. I am trying to sketch out my beliefs regarding dreams, ancestors, land, and traditions. I will present my conclusions in Montreal this year at the 25th Annual International Association for the Study of Dreams Conference: Dreams Without Borders.
Our ancestors are alive and waiting for us to reach out to them. We can dream back the rituals and recontextualize them on this land. As my friend Fishbowl says, this has been happening in an automatic way since Europeans arrived here. Appalachia country gave rise to the expression of bluegrass, a combination of Irish and Scottish music with African Slave culture and Native American tribes of the region. Fur trapping cultures of the Russians, French, and English collide in the Northwest. The Chinese rail workers brought pieces of China with them to the Plateau and Pacific Coastal Native cultures. All of this is Northwest Americana.
I also believe that cultural pods of people who have done work to recover the indigenous mind are capable of dreaming back--as a community--the traditions that bloom through a sacred tribe. I have witnessed this happening as my dream circle strengthens and grows. We dream with Spirit, and with the ancestors, for each other in an indigenous way.
Personally, walking on Celtic soil (Ireland) reminded me who I am on a level I would not have experienced on any other land. The stone circles enlivened my ancestors through me and caused an overhaul of my insecurity of a woman with white skin. I am trying to call my heart back to California and make roots away from Ireland. But I cannot deny the impact that the land of my bones had on me. I'd not be capable of bioregional animism without first knowing where I come from. My experience there lasted only 3 months, but it was enough to metabolize cultural shadows, boons, lessons, and wisdom of the Celtic land and people. Only those rocks could have taught me what I brought back to Oakland.
Is it possible to engage in the land in a true way without having first walked on one's ancestral soil?
How can we recover the traditions of our ancestors and implement them in proper context?
What roles do our ancestral stories and mythologies play in our lives?
How do we bring the past to the present with consciousness and balance?
What do dreams have to do with all of this?
Feedback welcome.
Sun, January 6, 2008 - 2:33 PM -
permalink -
6 Comments
6 Comments |
add a comment |
|
Sun, January 6, 2008 - 3:34 PM
"Is it possible to engage in the land in a true way without having first walked on one's ancestral soil?"
Yes - I've done this. I think ancestry is inportant in connecting with the land, but in the end it is the land where we live we need to connect to - walking on the soil of one's ancestors can have tremendous insight and impact, I don't doubt - but it is not what are ancestors did that we should be looking at, but why the did it. And many of us Americans are of a mixed heritage and claiming one ancestral land is inpracticle, and many simple can't know that much. However, in America people of all backgrounds have walked on the soil of many our regions and have become a part of that regions history and identity and that is how we can connect to our ancestors and the land. the people who walk and have walked on the land we become a part of are equally our ancestors. I believe the idea of ancestors for Americans seeking a bio-regional spiritual connection should keep that in mind. "How can we recover the traditions of our ancestors and implement them in proper context?" Like I said above, it is not in what people did to connect to their enviroment but why - what motivations, how did they manifest their communication with the land not what they manifested. "What roles do our ancestral stories and mythologies play in our lives?" I've experianced them as a guide book to becoming "native" or "Indigionous" in the lands we live . . . don't look at what they are saying, but why they are saying it - look at the meaning of charecter names and the way charecters interact with eachother and how the geography where they came from corisponds to the mythology. "How do we bring the past to the present with consciousness and balance?" Mindfullness - the strugles of today and our society I feel are a reflection of our disconectioness with the land, and our social trauma is the lands trauma our pain is one with our enviroment. with that we can learn to heal "What do dreams have to do with all of this?" this one, I'm not sure of, but find the idea fascinating. Sometimes a dream is just a dream - I beleive that, but other times it is more then a dream and the trick, as i see it, is determining when it is just a dream and not getting carried away with projecting our wants into our dreams and blocking out the true message that is being said. Well those are just my opinion having contemplated many of the same things . . . |
|
Sun, January 6, 2008 - 5:20 PM
you might enjoy a novel addressing some of these issues called "american gods" by neil gaiman.
|
|
Tue, January 29, 2008 - 1:25 AM
bioregional catechism
Is it possible to engage in the land in a true way without having first walked on one's ancestral soil?
This presumes a number of questions and definitions - what is "a true way"? If one finds a deeper level to engage upon, and the experience still holds true for the self, then that must be a true engagement. How do any of us know how deep this shit can go? From what direction do we approach the relative nature of the internal experience? If yours is deep, is mine wide? I think that when one approaches a deep rooted connection of any sort, like the one that you found in Erin, it enhances any further relationship (connection). The world is no different - connection to the earth is beneficial to any future connection, be it dog, tree, rock, or person. The opposite is also true - any previous connection benefits (enhances) the one which will follow. Your experience of ancestral soil triggers your connection to the earth, perhaps in some part because you hold direct ancestry back to that specific realm. Others in this day and age may be more muddy - I think of my ancestry, which seems to be quite migratory and intermarried. I'm a mutt, albeit a white one. I also feel a high degree of spiritual union with the world at large, and I connect to different elements, depending on where I am. The more I experience connection, the deeper I connect with everything around me. I hope it is possible to truly connect without returning to ancestral soil, but I feel I walk it each day, everywhere I have been. How can we recover the traditions of our ancestors and implement them in proper context? The only answer I know sounds glib, but you know it too: celebrate life. Ritual, storytelling, love, music, art, fire, food, poetry, lovemaking, holding babies, tending the sick, honoring the dead - these things celebrate life, and the further into them one engages the deeper once experiences celebration. Ironically, the more we preach or convert others into a specific behavior we cease to celebrate it, because we invite a small death of their creation, whatever it would have been. To celebrate life is to create it. I don't know if everyone needs to recover the traditions, or if it's important that they know that they are participating in thousand-year-old rituals. Just that they need to get done, and there is work being done to get them out there. What roles do our ancestral stories and mythologies play in our lives? Ancestral like the stories my grandma told, or mythologies like what I heard in church growing up? Roles like the typecast Greek tragedies that are set up like sitcoms, or like the Days of Our Lives that I see walking down the street? Stories like Sex in the City every time I go to work, or like the ones that formed my belief in magic that started when I was little reading a book in a tree? Our minds are nothing but stories. How do we bring the past to the present with consciousness and balance? First the present begins to achieve consciousness and balance - the consciousness is expansive, and broadens the horizon that must be balanced between the past and the present. Perspective is constantly limited by the parameters of the spectator - in other words, the further back we can step from the scene the more we can see. To integrate the past with the present is to step back from the picture, and to see human history in context. However, the ancestral past of which you speak is much more broad (and deep - it's hard when you're using linear words to talk in 3-dimensional metaphors) than what can be splayed with something like a linear timeline. That brings back another point - the further we get into this mess, the less objective time seems to be. Since that's the case, there is no longer a difficulty in balancing the past and the present. Each time you experience the past, it is important simply to exist in the present - to be fully aware of it. Holding that awareness keeps the perspective as wide as possible, but now we're back to consciousness - so there's that circular logic again. What do dreams have to do with all of this? There's the 10-million-dollar question. That's the junction of existence, there. Why is half of our life spent in sleep, in a world that is equally as real as the one that we share together, but only in our head? Wisdom is transferred from person to person, experiences are shared in waking life to validate what happens when we sleep, but why is half so very awake and the other half... different? What is the junction between our waking life and our dream? I guess my question presumes my belief that a reconnection with the earth is part of the destination in our waking life. Our dreams are more connected with the whole, and the subconscious/superconscious nature of the self. Our waking life is connected with the ego. It seems analogous to the nature of the past and the present - if the past, collectively, is our dreams, then isn't it easy to see our waking life as our present? Different tools lead to the same solution, but the eternal problem is how to become one with it all - how to solve the separation - how to get enlightened- or - how to find jesus, depending on who you ask. Somehow dreams are a shortcut, because they allow you to experience more without the boundaries of the physical world, including time. There is a lot that could be extrapolated about the nature of the soul, but that's another ball of wax. Also, why are some people's experiences of life so different? |
|
Unsu...
|
Sun, March 23, 2008 - 6:39 PM
“The Parasites:
I believe Western European culture will never endure in the Americas. I believe it is only a passing phase like the hoola hoop or the skate board. I also believe that the peoples living in the Americas will become American; that they will have to in order to survive in America. That means that a truly American culture will evolve-is evolving-in the Americas, a culture which is not a European import, nor an adaptation of an European import. That means that the sons and daughters of immigrants who strove for over four hundred years to posses the Americas will be possessed by the Americas; the descendants of those who tried to conquer and subdue the Americas will be conquered and subdued by the Americas. It means that the stubborn land pioneers cleared and cursed will be loved, respected, and revered by the great grandchildren of pioneers. And the native creatures of that land will also be loved and fostered, including the original American Human: the Indian.” -Wilfred Pelletier and Ted Poole, from No Foreign Land: The Biography of a North American Indian. |
|
Sat, April 5, 2008 - 8:26 PM
Dreaming the Land
Erin, I really like your ideas about ancestral land connections for us Americans who may be of European or other descent. I too have been pondering these things (I'm English-Scottish-Irish). I've never been to the Old World, and personally don't think you have to, to get a connection to your local land.
I was reading the stories of Medieval Icelandic settlers in the Landnamabok, boating from Scandinavia to that uninhabited island where no people were "native" yet. What I found interesting was how the settlers immediately made connection to their ancestors and gods in the first generation. One farmer set up a local mountain as sacred, where no hunting was allowed, and he declared that he would enter the hill upon his death to join his ancestors. It was as if these Europeans had a ready-made connection through the local Earth-portals, back to their ancestral home. I live in the Great Basin desert, and like to think I can get a similar connection, even though I'm not "native." I had a dream recently where I was walking into our backyard, into the desert, and a man who seemed to know me, be related to me, started talking to me. He told me he wanted to show me where he lived. I followed him past some junk piles, but then suddenly lost him as I walked up a slight rise. I saw that he had walked right down into a tunnel into a low mound in the ground. I followed him down the tunnel, and it opened up into a room covered with beautiful turquoise, cave-like. I kept walking after him down another corridor, then woke up. The junk and area of desert where he walked to really exists in back of my house, and I walk about there often now (and trying to clean up the junk). Perhaps fairy mounds can exist anywhere if we are sensitive to studying the land where we live, and caring for it. |
« Magic Mushrooms
|
main