If you want to learn the way another culture thinks, listen to their stories. But don’t just listen to any stories; listen to the stories they have about how knowledge is gained. That gives you the key to understanding all of the other stories and teaches you everything you need to know about the experiences you need to have to gain knowledge.
Thinking about the Nuu-chah-nulth methodology of oosumich today which is the way of stilling oneself to listen to the world and enter a dialogue with the unseen. My friend Pawa says that prayer is the act of speaking to the immaterial and meditation is the act of listening. It takes at least that quality and depth of engagement with thoughts to reach beyond the material world to the source level.
Taupouri Tangaro says “access into the inner sanctums of hula knowledge is reliant on a vocal invitation.”. It begins with a murmer, a sound uttered into a void field. As you approach a moment or a place in which you are seeking knowledge, begin with a sound. Introduce yourself to the moment and to the place. Offer a song.
And the journey: I was re-reading Eddie Benton-Banai’s teachings about the little boy that brought the Midwewiwin to the people. Part of his journey was traveling through the dark part of the moon, the part the we know is there but that we can’t see. It is a call to go to the spiritual parts of ourselves that we know exist.
Easy. You can sit still in a beautiful place in the forest but can you sit in the beautiful stillness of a forest? That which you know is there bit which you cannot see. Anishnaabe epistemology relies on our ability to learn from both the seen and the unseen.
Tomorrow is the solstice. It is the longest night illuminated by a full moon that will be in eclipse. Layers of darkness and light. A time for exploring the complex interrelationship of light and dark, yin and yang, male and female, action and structure.
Listen to it. Sing to it. Celebrate!
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I am just returning from a memorial service for my friend and colleague John McBride. John and I worked on a number of Aboriginal economic development projects over the years and he died in October from pancreatic cancer.
Today at his memorial his wife Val read some selections from his journals. One insight that really stuck with me was written in his final days as he was making sense of his death. He wrote that the end is about peeling back all the layers of who we have been to discover who we really are at our core. And he named his core as that of a man who lives with joy and revelled in having just enough.
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- How's the weather?
Pouring rain.
Really?
Yeah. # - The mist on the Sound and the stockings hung with care at #artisaneats on #Bowenisland http://yfrog.com/h4lgtrj #
- Cocoa West http://post.ly/1KLJO #
- When the forest breathes at the end of a Pineapple Express: mild, wet and clearing evening. http://yfrog.com/gzkttvj #
- This morning's rosy tinted dawn. http://yfrog.com/h4ufbojj #
- Cold front passed. The air is crisp and the ground saturated with four days of chilled rain. #
- Finn and friends learning longsword at Academie Duello. #
- Syllable. Grey. Warm. Dry. #
- The view from my office this wet afternoon. http://yfrog.com/h3572bj #
- It is a beautiful day. Clear crisp blue and white. Snow on the mountains and sun on the sea. Just, thank you. #
- Mountains, moon, snow and sea. http://yfrog.com/h3tsahj #
- Sunset and moon rise http://post.ly/1Lpt5 #
- Xmas party, kitchen junket and quietly sitting for 30 mins as the Squamish blew thru a forest lit by the nearly full solstice moon #pagan #
- Mad Mabel at Tir na Nog today! A Bowen Island Christmas classic! Hooray for Kingbaby Productions! #
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Other than blogging, probably the first social networking site I used was delicio.us. When it was launched I was in my traditional “second-to-early adopter” position and I relished it. Now with news that Yahoo is going to shut down the social bookmarking site, I’ve decided to let it go. I’ve downloaded all of my bookmarks in one html page and stored it in Evernote, which is the program I use for note taking.
If you are interested in having a look at my archive, click the “Currently Reading” link on the right or, if you view my blog in a feedreader, have a gander here: salishsea’s Bookmarks on Delicious.
If you need to move your bookmarks, here are a few ways to do that.
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A continuation of my exploration of the past six months.
The goddess who consumes all exhausts herself I myself have witnessed the esoteric language of one under the influence of the goddess This state is profound The release intense — Taupouri Tangoro Lele Kawa: Fire rituals of PeleThe smoke and steam of Kilauea rise from a crater held within a vast caldera many miles across. You can approach the rim of this caldera in various places and see the crater containing lava a few hundred yards away. At night, the steam and smoke glows from the fire within. When we hosted out gathering in Hawai’i we did it with the goddess 300 yards away. The power and origin of the impulse of creation lay beside us, washing us in steam, rain and sun.
For me Kilauea was one of the most divinely feminine places I have ever been. The container within the container, that which holds the primal origins of earth itself, a vessel for the creation of everything. It is difficult, or maybe impossible, for me to speak of insights that arose from being there. Instead what I experienced was a jolt, a crack in my consciousness that led to tremendous grief, perhaps a mourning of the missed chances I have had in my life to balance feminine and masculine, perhaps a keen awareness of the cost of not being able to do so. Something intuitive and emotional; the only way to write it would be to employ the esoteric language of the spirit, disjointed images.
Music always travels with me. Snippets of song, melody, poetry and words crowd my head and heart, and flow freely when I am moved, when there is an opening to the outside world. I daresay if you followed my internal soundtrack and charted the songs I sing at certain times and place, you could chart the liturgy of my life. On the volcano that morning, my mind was filled at times with the line from U2’s With or Without You: “And you give yourself away, and you give, and you give, and you give yourself away.” The goddess consumes herself, gives herself away to the flow of life itself. Forms and reforms the container to hold life itself. The sacrifice, the most sacred gift, is to give oneself away. Totally. For me, the moment on the crater when I cracked open felt like a flow was moving through me. When I told my colleague that “defense” had left me, I was saying that the shell that I used to guard myself from the flow of life moving through me was gone. There was no way to defend my tender and open heart, to stop it from breaking, from the heart emerging. To this day, six months later, it feels bruised somehow, as if the forceful cracking through of all I had been holding back had torn and ripped its way to freedom. Belvie at one point took me aside and said “thank you for facilitating us.” She had seen what was coming through me as bigger than myself.
My shadow is narcissism. A self centered reflection, on who I am, who I want to be, how I want you to see me, how I want to be loved and appreciated. This narcissism comes through in my writing, my speech, my embodied actions. It is most alive when I teach. I struggle at times with the sound of my own voice. But on the edge of the volcano I learned that to be full of oneself is not to be full at all. That is an easy kind of fullness, one which fits with the smallest possible container. I can create a container that can hold myself and be small. On the edge of Kilauea, I discovered that this container is so small and weak, that it crumbles the minute it grows to hold other than me. It shatters. It is arrogant to stand beside Kilauea and believe that you can hold big things. The volcano herself trembles and roars and renews herself every day, for the work of TRULY HOLDING is dynamic, difficult, and requires us to die in every moment. Any rigidity in the container causes it to be brittle.
My out of whack masculine impulse strengthens the container, believes the hubris of the story that it is my job to do the holding. When I was filled with the power of what was passing through me, that impulse died. I felt truly in that moment the integration of masculine and feminine: that one co-creates the other. There is no container without fire and no fire without the container.
For six months, I have run into myself. I am at sea in this respect. I am a poor student of the feminine, of the integration between the masculine and the feminine. I have been taught a lesson and I have spent six months trying to understand it, trying to see the way it shows up in daily life, in my work, in my family, with my friends and colleagues. I have met or re-met women like Luana, Ria, Ginny, Mary, Christina, Teresa and my dearly beloved Caitlin who are causing me to re-think and re-feel this edge.
But I am a baby. I sit silently in the forest watching small patterns, seeing the way douglas-fir trunks mimic my life’s journey, watching ravens sing to their futures and their pasts, studying the flow of water around the moss beds and over rocks, listening to the sea washing the island I live upon. I know nothing of this new world. It is a monumental shift to the way I am seeing things, and it has tipped me off my keel. I feel like I am in some form of limbo, like in Hexagram 12 (Pi – Obstruction) of the I Ching, where heaven and earth are moving apart from each other. The masculine and feminine are separated in my mind and my heart seeks their reintegration, hexagram 11 (Tai – Peace). What lies in the way of these two finding one another is my self.
The transformation that happened at Beyond Sustainability was one of seeing anew, and is one that requires much time to properly understand, integrate and embody. My hope for this lifetime is that it will happen. My modality right now is resting in it, letting the feminine teach me in the rare moments when I can be open to her.
I build fires, sit in the woods and hum.
Long, long have I tarried with love In the uplands of Kohola-lele, The wildwood above Ka-papala. To enter, permit me to enter, I pray; Refuse me not recognition; I am he, A traveler offering mead of praise, Just a voice, Only a human voice. Oh, what I suffer out here, Rain, storm, cold, and wet. O sweetheart of mine, Let me come in to you.