Seeding a World that can Hold Other Worlds

We are on day two of our second pre-moving moving trip to the family homestead. Day one felt as long as two days. It is clear that we cannot move in the way things are: with scarcely a free cabinet or drawer. Every nook and cranny is full of decades old junk that our parents cannot seem to simply throw away. Last night we acknowledged to each other that it can't work this way, that we simply need more space and need to have the two rooms that are currently habitable cleared of items that are not ours. This conversation needs to happen.

After sleeping well, in the morning there was a small praying mantis in our all purpose, kitchen/bathroom sink! The first one Zeke had ever seen in his life. The life around us continues to seem to say that we are wanted here, that in spite of the long project it will be to create psychological and physical space for ourselves in the old house, this is right. I am reading Hospicing Modernity on this trip (I left it here a few weeks ago), and it is as if it were planted just for this phase of the transition. Five sentences from the "Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness" exercise that speak directly to me now:

Feel your entanglement with everything, including the ugly, the broken, and the messed up.

Relate beyond desires for coherence, purity, and perfection.

Deactivate your cravings for protagonism, greatness, or legacy.

Mourn your illusions, compost your shit, ferment yourself.

I am the granddaughter of two Holocaust refugees from the AustroHungarian Empire and two midwestern American farmers of earlier provenance from Western Europe; daughter of two hippies who met in a time of great possibility in the fragrant valleys of the Okanagan; mother of a Pakistani-descended child; spouse of a musician who will always have an undomesticated soul. I also have an adopted family that I have accompanied for the past thirty years for greater and shorter spells of time, a family of Tzotzil Mayan Indians living in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. I began to learn their language (Tzotzil) starting at the age of 18. For the last 15 years I have been an interpreter for speakers of this indigenous language in various US courts and some other contexts. I will use stories from my own experiences living with and interpreting for Tzotzil folk to illustrate some of my points as I go.

I am writing this blog because it is clear to me, as Martín Prechtel has said repeatedly, that modern culture has gotten onto a pretty bad track. I have always felt since my preteen years that something is missing from western culture, the “culture” (if we can even call it that) that has now been exported around the world as the pinnacle of progress, development and civilization. I have spent the last 40 years studying cultures, driven especially to learn everything I could about living (or until recently living) indigenous cultures all over the world. That there are now books authored by indigenous and aboriginal writers is a joy and benefit I cannot praise enough. The writers and speakers I love most are not academics, but rather outside of the mainstream as I myself have been, and they are therefore not squeamish about including profound observations about spiritual health and spiritual disease as they see these. I would reference here Pat McCabe, Ilarion Merculieff, Yuria Celidwen, Johnny Moses, Virginia Beavert, and Tyson Yunkaporta, in addition to Martín Prechtel. It is time to bring these ideas into popular awareness, for we can no longer afford to pretend that the spiritual health of our world is not directly connected to the knowledge and lifeways that our indigenous ancestors have always protected, knowing that such practices and ways of being protected, in turn, the source of life herself.