Post-AmeriCorps: inspired about life, empowered about how to be in it. I sent the following as a mass email that summer I was living out of my van, and every word of it felt like a narration and support of how I wanted to be in the world. Now, three years later, someone just replied to the email (a sort of, "are you still alive?") with the text attached. Reading it, I wonder, where did I go? It's all so foreign to me now. Thank you life for redirecting me to what's important... to the truth that makes my heart nearly burst out of my chest. (And thank you Alan-Kevin for deleting none of your emails.)
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We are on a Journey to know ourselves. The first step is the most demanding, and often the most frustrating, because we don't know what we're looking for. Once found, the sense of self and the Personal Power it engenders makes it easy to become that person. Unfortunately, it also makes it easy to deny that person. The unknown cannot be suppressed; the known can.
The dominant culture feeds on people who have given up (or not discovered) their Personal Power and who have acquiesced to another's. The belts and gears of this giant culture-machine would stop cold if we each began to listen to out hearts. Life as we know it would become life as we dream it.
But they can only allow us to dream; they can't afford to have us follow our Dreams. We are given no support, no encouragement, to be ourselves. Therapy, ostracization, and paranoid wrath await those who try. We are bombarded, saturated, with the message to conform, blend, accept-be like your neighbor who is trying to be like her neighbor. We, as a culture, value the staleness of conformity over the rapture of walking in bliss. We believe the endless commercial that says (with a straight face!) that we can find ourselves, be ourselves, by buying and doing the same thing that everyone else is buying and doing.
This makes it hard for the isolated individual to be true to self. The occasional book, the rare friend, who encourages the spirit within us to come forth is like a freshet against the tide. Even though it is more painful to deny the person we've discovered we are, we endure the pain, as it's so much easier to swim with the tide. With its vast array of diversions, numbing agents, and mindbenders, the culture sees to it that it's a quiet pain.
But how do we know if we are living our Dreamway or not? By a very simple test: if we are living in the present, we are; if we are living for the future, we aren't. If life here, now, is not a Dance, then we are dead to the moment, we are giving our life away to a nebulous future. The life we are living is not ours.
The ever-present message that encourages us to live a disowned life is only heard in contemporary cultures; it does not have more that a fleeting appearance in time as life knows it. All the cultures, all the "-isms," that vie and have vied for the gift of our lives, measure their duration in terms of years, and perhaps centuries, but never in terms beyond the bounds of time and locale that would qualify any of them as intrinsic to the life-experience. There is no reason to believe that any of the present attempts at mass conformity will be any more successful at immortality. If they had beginnings, they will have ends. Is something so finite, so fleeting, worth giving our life to?
So where can we go find ourselves? Some of us have tried the schools of higher education and have found that we must be highly attuned and extremely selective in order to ferret out the rare person of wisdom and the scant crumb of knowledge schools contain. They are the bastions of the culture, the perpetrators of the status-quo, and the trainers of those in positions of power and influence. Academic research is financed mainly by the monolithic industries and crushing armies that are so destructive of The Earth and Her People. The liberal-arts segments of universities are more nurturing and expansive, but still within culturally accepted and defined parameters.
They teach.
They teach language-mostly the language of Conquerors/Exploiters, seldom the language of an Earth People, hardly ever the language of Wolf and Wind. They teach history-mostly the history of the onrush of the great crushing civilizations, hardly ever do they guide us to the history locked in our Ancestral Memories. Those Native cultures that have survived thousands of years in prosperity, heath, and Balance with The Mother are given scanty and surface coverage, while the Civilized cultures that have raised armies and built monuments and survived mere hundreds of years are studied in depth. They offer coursework on the metaphysical-mostly the institutionalized philosophies of the major cultures. The world-view and spiritual wisdoms garbed in the teaching legends of the Native Peoples are presented and passed off as "myths." They teach of Earth as science-that which is quantifiable and analyzable. Seldom do they know The Great Mother to drum Her rhythm and seek Her flow. They teach power-mostly the political, military, and economic ways of power over others, seldom the shared power of Native ways, and hardly ever the Quest for Personal Power. They teach of the workings of the mind, but little time is spent on that part of the brain that we share with our fellow animals. Hardly touched are the recesses where our instincts and intuitions lie, and where the Ancestors' voices dwell.
In this way of learning, we isolate ourselves in a box to study life outside of the box. We add another layer of isolation with the book from which we study, which is some other person's perception of that life. The third layer is the instructor, who filters the book through her perceptions. By objective definition, perceptions in and of themselves are prejudicial.
Perhaps only by intellectual construct can we overcome the inherent contradiction in attempting to know the natural realm by removing ourselves from it. However, there is little contradiction in entering an artificial environment to learn how to survive in an artificial environment.
If we do attend one of these institutions of learning, let us choose our instructors carefully, as they are more important that the area of study or course material. Some instructors have the gift of being able to spark expansiveness and inquisitiveness in their students. Many others are teaching because they are not adept at functioning in their chosen fields. Many began teaching immediately upon finishing school themselves and have no practical experience in their fields. Knowledge may come from study; wisdom comes only with age and time.
A number of prominent inventors, intellectuals, philosophers, and poets of our time have been dubbed as learning impaired, or actually mentally deficient, because they had trouble functioning within the educational system. How many potential innovators, visionaries, and individuals have been-and are being-squelched by an academic career of imposed conformity and stifled creativity?
The shame of the dominant culture is that it's possible to go successfully through life without ever developing physical form, manual dexterity, sensual acuity, innate talents, or, for that matter, spiritual attunement. Upon what strength does a culture draw when it does not inspire its people to seek their Vision, their source of Power, when it does not encourage them to develop to the fullest their physical, sensual, and creative abilities?
Cultural expectations fall into the genre of joining the religion of our parents, living in a house better than our parents, and having a higher paying job than our parents. All we have to do is show up; the rest is figured out for us-how to think, talk, act, consume, recreate. We provide the form-they shape it. It's a quiet death-a slow, sedated, mindless one. No one knows who we could have been-the songs our hearts could have brought forth, the gifts we could have bestowed upon our People.
Our nakedness has never tasted the biting sting in the smallest days of the White Season; we have never pinked to the resin-laced vapor's caress in the Sweat Lodge. Our Grandfathers have never told us stories of our Grandfather's Fathers as far back as Memories go. We have not grown up with clean Waters lapping our feet, with the dances and songs of our non-Human relations to entertain us, with the Voices in the Wind to speak to us. We were not led to seek the Vision that would give us our Song of Being. We were not nurtured on the fruit born of The Great Mother.
We do not know ourselves, because we have not been properly introduced. We do not know our Mother, because we have not been properly nourished. We do not know our Path, because our infant feet have not been placed upon it.
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