No SHIFT on Saturday, November 25th, owing to the Thanksgiving Holiday. Last session went great…it hurts to take a day off, I know.

Subtitled: My Anti-Literacy Campaign

My mother alerted me to an article in the Nov. 20th, 2006 issue of the New Yorker, “Homer in India: The oral epics of Rajasthan”, by William Dalrymple.

I’ve heard plenty of stories about the amazing feats of “illiterate” storytellers, reciting twelve-thousand stanza epics, lasting days, weeks, months. In this recent article, however, I really found my hair standing on end.

The Mahabharata, a one-hundred-thousand stanza epic, more than six times the length of the bible, stands at the center of a culture of magnificent and overwhelmingly immense epics, carried on the shoulders (and in the heart-minds) of the bhopas, the bard-shamans.

The author asks of one bhopa, during a break after a couple hours of song (belonging to the episode “The Story of the She-Camels”, part of the Pabuji epic), whom he normally performed for

–the local landowners perhaps? No, he said it was usually cowherds and his fellow-villagers. Their motives, as he described them, were less to hear the poetry than to use him as a sort of supernatural veterinary service.

“People call me in whenever their animals fall sick…Pabuji is very powerful at curing sickness in beasts…[or]…any child who is possessed by a djinn…I never forget the words, thanks to Pabuji. As long as I invoke him at the beginning, all will be well. Wherever we perform, the demons run away. No ghosts, no spirits can withstand the power of this story.”

“So you are as much a healer…as a storyteller?” I asked.

“Of course…thanks to Pabuji. It is he who cures. Not me.”

The author then address the problem of literacy.

Illiteracy seems an essential condition for preserving the performance of an oral epic. It was the ability of the bard to read, rather than changes in the tastes of his audience, that sounded the death knell for the oral tradition. Just as the blind can develop a heightened sense of hearing, smell, and touch to compensate for their loss of vision, so it seems that the illiterate have a capacity to remember in a way that the literate simply do not.

To speak in particulars:

This was certainly the conclusion of the Indian folklorist Komal Kothari. In the nineteen-fifties, Kothari came up with idea of sending one of his principal sources, a singer from the Langa caste named Lakha, to adult-edication classes. The idea was that he would learn to read and write, thus making it easier to collect the many songs he had preserved. Soon Kothari noticed that Lakha needed to consult his diary before he began to sing. Yet the rest of the Langa singers were able to remember hundreds of songs–an ability that Lakha had somehow begun to lose as he slowly learned to write.

Truly, the article stunned and inspired me. Read it, if at all possible, if you have any interest in reviving spoken traditions. The bhopas’ techniques and methods hint at so many brilliant methods for holding and releasing story, to heal, transform, and sustain.

To the people in the world, making our daily lives possible, I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our Mother the Earth, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Waters, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Plants, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Animals, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Trees, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Birds, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Four Winds and the Air, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Clouds and the Rain, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our Father the Sun, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our Grandmother the Moon, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Stars, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our relatives the Unseen and Eternal, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To our Ancestors, Elders, and Children, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

To the Unnamed, we don’t forget you, we don’t abandon you, to you I send my thanksgiving greetings. Do we all feel this way?

Our minds now sit as one.

The Thanksgiving Address has nothing to do with the holiday of thanksgiving, though perhaps it directly relates to the source of that holiday…Native American traditions of gratitude.

This tradition comes to us via Jake Swamp, sub-chief of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation, member of the 6 Nations Confederacy, original mentors of the (ill-fated) US Constitution.

Jake Swamp acts as a cultural ambassador, mentoring other cultures and governments in how to have a sustainable way of life, as his people have done for the past 1000 years (or so).

For more information on the Great Law of Peace, and the history of the 6 Nations Confederacy/Iroquois/Haudenosaunee, check out White Roots of Peace, Basic Call to Consciousness, or the Tree of Peace Society (specifically run with the help of Jake Swamp).

Above I started with one of many versions of the Thanksgiving Address that we do here at the College and in our daily lives. We’ve modified it from the one handed to us by Jake Swamp (per his request - he doesn’t want any more Mohawks in the world, he has plenty to handle already, apparently).

You’ll notice many things about the Thanksgiving Address, but the most important:

…it runs from the ground, upwards and outwards.
…it singles out beings to appreciate.
…it asks for affirmation for every statement.

Pretty simple. Have fun with it, and make it your own. Perhaps soon I’ll post a spoken version so you can hear what it can sound like.

If you live in the bioregion of Cascadia (and possibly even if you don’t), you need to learn Chinuk Jargon! I really encourage you to learn your local pidgin, if you can discover it; all the reasons below most likely apply to your area of North America (sorry if you hail from outside of Turtle Island…you’ll have to explore on your own).

Not only do place-names across the region suddenly illuminate themselves once you’ve learned the trade language of Chinuk Jargon, but the language has always served as a cross-cultural talk for those living and working in this area.

Working people here, from northern California to Alaska, and east to Montana, for hundreds of years have spoken this language. If you fished, hunted, crafted, or harvested in any way, and traded, you most likely spoke some form of the Jargon.

As many forms of the Jargon existed as did cultures speaking it; now it contains influences of French, English, Hawaiian, and more, along with the original indigenous foundations of the language.

So learn and play with it; allow your culture to shape it, and allow it to shape your culture.

A good beginning place to start:

The Chinook Book.

The College has officially become co-sponsor to the Natural Way Speaker Series, put on by the Earth and Spirit Council, here in Portland, Oregon.

From their website:

The Natural Way: Indigenous Voices begins its ninth season in October, 2007. The mission of this program is to honor all traditions that value the earth. We provide a forum for those who strive to preserve and enhance earth-based, sustainable living to share their traditions, knowledge and beliefs about the earth. A dedicated Natural Way Advisory Board meets monthly to plan programs and to carry the vision forward with the involvement of other interested volunteers.

The Natural Way is held October through December and February through May on the second Friday of the month from 7:00-9:00 p.m., unless otherwise noted.

The Advisory Board welcomes speaker suggestions as well as help in publicizing and fundraising for the Natural Way: Indigenous Voices. If you know of an indigenous elder you’d like to see at the Natural Way, please let us know. One way of doing this is to partner with other organizations that may be bringing elders to Portland for other meetings.

I feel pretty pumped about this - I’ve already referred to, in past articles, the last speaker (in November) Danita Washington of the Lummi Nation in Washington State. She blew me away. Last October, the poet and academic Ofelia Zepeda also had an incredible perspective to share, along with her poetry written in her native Tohono O’Odham language. Rod McAfee, the elder and constant host of the speaker series, himself descends from the Akimel O’Odham (literally “river people”, as opposed to Ofelia’s “desert people”). Tohono O’Odham remains the second most widely-spoken indigenous language in North America.

In any case, co-sponsoring essentially means you’ll find me (and maybe one or two other College folks) at the events, doing something helpful. If you live in the area, I highly recommend you come. Here you’ll find the flyer for the next speaker on December 8th:

Nancy Egan at the Natural Way

And an excerpt from the press release for the text-inclined:

Event: The Natural Way - Indigenous Voices

Featured Presenter: Nancy Egan

Date: December 8, 2006 7:00-9:00 p.m.

Place: Native American Student and Community Center at Portland State University,
SW Broadway and Jackson, Portland, Oregon

Cost: Donation of $10-$20

Co-sponsored by: Earth and Spirit Council and the College of Mythic Cartography

Journey of Life

Nancy Egan is a member of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes of the Duck Valley Reservation in southern Idaho near the Nevada border. She is the great, great, great granddaughter of Chief Egan of the 1878 Bannock-Paiute Indian War in Oregon. Nancy will speak about the journey of life as taught by her grandparents, a brief history of War Chief Egan in the Bannock-Paiute War, and how education compliments her people’s life today.

Nancy holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business/Management, and an Associate of Arts Degree in Social Work. She is a committed leader, an educator, and a firm believer in her community and working together. Her aspirations are to encourage leadership and to prepare the path for generations to pursue their educational endeavors. Dreams become visions as we prepare for every challenge along this journey in life.

The mission of the Natural Way-Indigenous Voices, an Earth & Spirit Council program, is to honor all traditions that value the earth. The Natural Way provides a forum for those who strive to preserve and enhance earth-based, sustainable living to share their traditions, knowledge and beliefs about the earth. More information is available at www.earthandspirit.org or by calling (503) 452-4483.

I’ve thought a lot about this step I plan to take (which I’ll explain in a bit), here on this blog, and I think I plan to go for it. As Derrick Jensen quoted someone else, in his book Walking on Water,

Charles Johnson ­the writer, not the catcher ­said this in an interview: ‘I think a real writer simply has to think in other terms.

Not, ‘Will I get in this magazine? Will I get this NEA next year?’ but whether or not this work is something he would do if a gun was held to his head and somebody was going to pull the trigger as soon as the last word of the last paragraph of the last page was finished. Now if you can write out of the sense that you’re going to die as soon as the work is done, then you will write with urgency, honesty, courage, and without flinching at all, as if this were the last testament in language, the last utterance you could ever make to anybody. If a work is written like that, then I want to read it. If somebody’s writing out of that sense, then I’ll say, “This is serious. This person is not fooling around. This work is not a means to some other end, the work is not just intended for some silly superficial goal, this work is the writer saying something because he or she feels that if it isn’t said, it will never be said.

I have a lot of living to do, that doesn’t involve sitting in front of a computer…and I don’t want to waste your time either. Let’s get honest, we have lives to save, our own not the least of them. Our families, our land, if we dare pull out the psychic ear-plugs we’ve installed in our heads, we better have a plan for when the raucous din of weeping immediately hits us.

So let’s talk about having fun.

I’ve noticed the parallel evolution of the work done by the Anthropik crew on the Fifth World (where they explore the North American Afterculture through the milieu of role-playing games), and that encourages me to open up a bit more about what other purposes the College serves, rather in hints and roundabout.

The idea, that games can change us (or maintain what we have), that games in fact (however innocently) create our reality. Not to get too serious, for that would short-circuit just the effect we want: a care-free, child-like exploration of other ways of interacting, but kids can play serious too. So let’s have some serious, no-holds barred fun.

I call Culture, “the games we play, by the rules that we’ve all agreed to”. If we play the boardgame Monopoly, at minimum we can expect a winner and many losers (along with a host of other behaviors). If we play the Human Knot, at minimum, we can expect that everyone will win or lose together. Think about that. As easily as changing the rules of the game, we’ve changed everything about how the players interact. Of course, right?

Well, we can generalize this ability. Theater Games comprise an entire class of games which everyone wins or loses together (in fact, win/lose becomes an obsolete concept, as with the Human Knot). I mentioned them before, in the Lost and the Found.

Let’s talk about them some more. Follow this line of thinking: animism and the idea of belonging to the world, demands you live right now, not tomorrow, not through some future collapse, but right now, today. So what does the world of Today ask of us, as livers of Life, parents, children, and two-leggeds of all kinds? I see in this world, a natural landscape mostly transformed into human flesh. Forests, coyotes, plantlife, rivers, converted (if only temporarily) into literal human form…human bodies, and their dwellings. So we need to learn how to dance elegantly with this human world, to make a living, and to shepherd our families through the social holocaust that looks like modern-day corporate America. Along with this, we have a tool box with skills that posit a future (or rather, a future-present!) without the epidemic human overpopulation.

Back to Theater Games. Depression, despair, distraction from what matters, loneliness - these demons constantly knock at our door, in this urban world. So how do we transcend them, change the rules of the games we play? Screw the rules - let’s change the games themselves. And let’s share our experiences…what games work? What cultures work? What life-giving cultural traditions can we translate into games? I spend all my time thinking about this. I don’t want to become Rom, or Lakota, or Cibecue Apache, or Miqmaq, or Mohawk…I want to know what they do (or did) that makes their lives worth living. And then I want to translate it into something new, something that belongs to us, the refugees from long-ago-annihilated indigenous cultures. Perhaps we can save each other, the surviving indigenous cultures, and us, the new native (small “n”) North Americans, members of the Afterculture that rose from the ashes of a dying civilization.

With one hand against its bark, the sad-faced boy pled with the magnificent one - an old one, towering high above, with fog-kissed limbs and the sweet shroud of incense that cleared the minds of even the long-embittered. For the boy, the young one, the acid-taste of hunger in his throat, the perfume brought him clear-eyed into the moment, dry under the spreading and scaly leaves, shading dark against dark, the sound of mist forming into drops and drops forming into a subtle rain all about him.

He felt his feet wet in his canvas shoes, dirt crusting against his cheek, but he no longer wondered where, or how, or why. He simply sat down in the dry dead mat of cedar leaves forming a bed about the bole of the great dark dripping one. The one with bark as soft as a blanket, furrowed and fissured. The one with so much hidden magic, hiding nothing from the boy, who now apprenticed himself to the silent mastery of the old one.

Silent, and deep. Deep the roots ran, deep they twisted, drank, ate, and held. Two worlds came together there, perhaps three: the underground, the upon-the-earth, and the restless sky.

What would become of the boy, now lost to his past? What style of manhood awaited him, now suckled at the breast of so much towering, pregnant mystery?

Murmuring pleasantly to himself, the boy curled tightly, warming up as he opened into that dry sheltered place, falling far inwards into the unknown and accepted moment, drifting with the tides of a deepening sleep.

The title to this essay comes from the book titled, the Gypsies, by Jan Yoors, a flemish-born man who joined the Lowara Rom at the age of 12 and lived with them for several years, an almost too-good-to-be-true story. One of his Rom adult mentors reminds him gently of the importance of “cultivating” that tenderness mentioned above, when they notice his un-gypsy and clutching behavior.

As I transition more and more into an animist paradigm (not a one-time or easy task, as I’ve written about before), this notion keeps me an almost constant company.

As an inmate of this culture, for years I’ve hungered after instant gratification - to have everything I want whenever I want it. My journey into my body as a center (rather than my center lying in material objects, or future relationships, out there somewhere), and into the fleshing-out of the moment, has caused me to realize that sometimes I simply find myself hungry, dirty, wet, cold, uncomfortable, or (the hardest for me right now) lonely. And I can just sit with it.

I can find my relationship with the world change in the blink of an eye, as I transition from a hungry, grasping predator’s eye, to the savoring of the sweetness of lack, the appreciation of an empty space (or partly-filled space) within.

Without a doubt, the Rom, as a tribal (in Daniel Quinn’s definition of the word) and nomadic people, have developed a culture-wide expertise in the wealth of the moment. In his book, Jan Yoors describes moments which verge on an animistic view of the world. The sheer time-richness the nomadic Rom possess empowers their ability to rehabilitate horses (and make a tidy profit at market), recover from psychological trauma, and raise competent and powerful children into masterful adulthood.

So many pieces of their culture exist to reinforce the continuing presence of the moment, and one’s focus there. “The cultivation of tenderness for incompletely satisfied longings”…almost as if to make a kind of life-art, a sweetness of mood, that translates so easily into the more tangible art of poetry, song, and speech, “the wild, sad, songs” of the Rom.

I recognize this attitude in other animist cultures I interact with, in my friendships with their members. The ease of melancholy to make beauty, and then transition simply into celebration and joy.

If I played at all with stereotypes, I would say, “hippie” culture differs from “gypsy” culture, in that hippies seem to place an emphasis on positive feelings, on love, peace, and happiness; whereas the “gypsies” seem to value the entire emotional range which a human can express…anger, fear, misery, joy, love, peace, no emotions fall outside it, and tears fall as easily as laughter, down, down to feed the earth.

Why make a distinction between “hippie” and “gypsy”? Obviously, neither label can describe any particular person. But I’ve always felt something hidden, and thus disatisfying, in the “it’s all good” philosophy that seems popularly connected with the subculture of the hippies. Some things don’t feel good…but we can sing about them. And singing feels good. For the Tzutujil Maya (according to Martin Prechtel), “singing” and “weeping” belong to the same word, a word that also can describe the Tzutujil shaman who heals the sick.

Healing, singing, weeping…a tenderness for incompletely satisfied longings.

For a long time I’ve suspected that indigenous martial-arts systems all expressed themselves, somehow, in the dances of their culture; no useful line between dance and martial-art exists.

Many people know Capoeira as the “part-dance, part-martial-art”. But if we look back far enough, back beyond the purely utilitarian philosophies of the civilized era, won’t we always end up in a world of dance: dances of the hunt, dancing one’s vision, the dance of war?

Recently I ran across a reference to the history of dance and the Filipino martial-art of Kali(aka Eskrima), in a book by Dan Inosanto.

Elsewhere, on the web, I found another reference to this same history, at http://filipino-kali.gungfu.com/ :

Dance relates to the culture of the country. A study of the dance forms of the Philippines shows that the kali pattern is ingrained in all the hand gestures and footsteps for agility. None of these kali patterns are seen in the dances of India, Indochina, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, China, Japan, Pacific islanders. Only in the Philippines will you see these dance patterns similar to the kali patterns. So even if there is similarity to the Silat of Indonesia, Kali still developed into its own, in ancient Philippines.

This really blows me away, as Kali has greatly influenced my own boogie-style on the dance floor, and my movement in the woods. This informs how I and my community of trackers teach our bioregional martial-art, SHIFT. How beautiful to discover in history what my body already found out: all indigenous paths lead back to a whole human being.

I believe to excel at a martial-art, you must learn to dance.

Once you learn to dance in any landscape, you’ll find yourself at home everywhere.

A Broken Continuum

In the September 15th, 2006 episode of the public radio show, This American Life, titled “Unconditional Love” you’ll find this story:

Act One. Love is a Battlefield. Alix Spiegel tells the story of a couple, Heidi and Rick Solomon, who adopt a son who was raised in terrible circumstances in a Romanian orphanage, unable to feel attachments to anyone, and what they do about it.

What do they do about it? They rebuild part of the continuum, as expressed by Jean Liedloff in the Continuum Concept. They spend countless hours recreating the in-arms phase that the orphan missed in the abusive orphanage environment. Keep in mind; their son towers above the mom, so it takes some logistical wrangling to get an enormous teenage boy into some semblance of an infant’s experience in the arms of his mother. But they do it. And you’ll have to hear the story to believe the results.

Culture Means the Games We Play, By the Rules To Which We’ve Agreed

Part of my exploration, in teaching animal tracking, mythic cartography, and spoken tradition skills, goes in the direction of teaching them the original way. Nowadays you can find plenty of field guides on animal tracking, plenty of teachers willing to tell you when to whip out your notebook and tape measure. Few of these teachers have any conception of the enormous richness that exists in the indigenous tradition of animal tracking. Even fewer know how to tap that tradition, or to rebirth it.

My fellow forest-miscreants and I have begun experimenting with eloquence, thanksgiving, and familial traditions through the practice of games. Games put us in a place of child-like openness, they re-establish a capacity for superlearning and whole-being involvement, and they allow us to experiment with new “rules” for interacting.

How do you begin to learn how to place the economic/utilitarian dimension below the social one, except by doing it? But how do you cross that awkward social boundary of feelings of awkwardness and insincerity?

My friend Lisa has a long history of facilitating Spolin Theater Games, games that crack open the human psyche to rawness, realness, authenticity, and powerful intuitive modes. But not simply as individuals…the theater games reach their full power in groups, as humans interacting with each other, and getting to a wordless communication of others in the theater troupe.

Through these games we see a possibility dawning, of a way towards real cultural creation, of playful experimentation with rules and traditions as easily created as tossed out the window, but keeping the ones that work. A high-powered process of co-creation emerges, a re-birthing of culture and family. And what happens when you involve the land in these theater games?

Magic

The world wakes up, in the human heart. Plants start speaking, the sky whispers in your ear, the animals nod and wink, as simply as the act of listening and watching for such things. Getting there can take some doing, but once there the earth seems to sigh in relief at your arrival.

Now comes the part where you learn to explore staying there, and adapting to the relentless tug-of-war across the border that separates civilized awareness from a free and familial one.

How do we truly return to the land? How do we break the back of our cultural addiction to machines and soulless systems?

Every time I’ve visited, as an adult, the sandy-soiled and salmonberry-blessed land of my childhood, in Coos Bay on the Southern Oregon Coast, I become overwhelmed with feelings that I even now can hardly articulate.

As a child I interacted with the landscape in such a directly tactile way, scratched, wet, cold, sun-kissed, wasp-stung, dirt underneath my fingernails. I had not much conception of the forest as a living being, my friends and I chopped wood and soil willy-nilly to build forts. And yet, through my memories, I know I saw the land as if through a golden medium, a strangely welcoming wildscape, stalked darkly by monsters, ghosts, and mysteries, at other times dizzy with sunlight and pine-pollen.

Nowadays the richness of my connection to the land has grown, but I notice a constant ache in the loss of that bodily-connection to the land from my childhood.

Somehow comforts of the modern age have muddled my senses, and I find myself amidst a constant urban battle between couch and copse, between warm box and wet greenscape.

More and more I become convinced of the vitality of other modes of Riddling-solving, beyond the conventional word based or “who-dunit”, but rather the wordless tactile riddles, such as how to climb that particular tree, and how many routes up it one can find. Or to find the source of a particular scent, or knowing when a wandering tickle under a pantleg belongs to the journey of a tick (perhaps they invented the “tickle”?), and when it simply belongs to a twitchy nerve.

Jon Young, the experienced animal tracker, mentor, and first student of Tom Brown, Jr., calls this kind of rediscovery of nature from a youthful perspective, “child’s passions”, and encourages anyone who seeks to reconnect to the land to first honor the repressed needs to reconnect in child-like play with the out-of-doors, in all its glorious discomforts and elations.

In the Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram comments on the oral mapping of place, and indigenous memory, in the following way:

One of the strong claims of this book is that the synaesthetic association of visible topology with auditory recall — the intertwining of earthly place with linguistic memory — is common to almost all indigenous, oral cultures.

I’d go even farther to say it goes beyond simple linguistic memory or auditory recall, i.e. an association with words and sounds, and goes to the root of that language: the personalities, metaphors, associations, resemblances, and experiences of the landscape. To clarify: a boulder that doesn’t just remind one of the “word” grandfather, but where one can actually see the face moving in the stone, each mole and freckle marked out as a feature, the expressive habits of the face, the unique sound of its voice. A fully envisioned reality, independent of language, and yet still a language, but one of deep reality. Though certainly mapped using songlines, ballads, and epic poetry, this languaging just serves as another hook upon which to hang the deep nature of the Flesh reality.

Indeed, even within European culture there is a celebrated example of this propensity, albeit in a throughly altered form…[in] the mnemonic technique utilized by the classical orators of Greece and Rome to remember their long speeches (a technique regularly practiced by rhetoricians up until the spread of typographic texts during the late Renaissance). The orator would imagine an elaborate palace, filled with diverse halls and rooms and intricate structural details. He would then envision himself walking through this palace, and would deposit at various places within the rooms a sequence of imagined objects associated with the different parts of his planned speech. Thereafter, to recall the entire speech in its correct sequence and detail, the orator had only to envision himself once again walking the same route through the halls and rooms of the memory palace: each locus encountered on his walk would remind him of the specific phrase to be spoken or the particular topic to be addressed at that point during the discourse. Rather than striving to memorize the composed speech on its own, the orator found it much easier, and certainly much safer, to correlate the diverse parts of the speech to diverse places within an imaginary structure, within an envisioned topology through which he could imaginatively stroll. Yet while the classical orators had to construct and move through such topological matrices in their private imagination, the native peoples of Australia found themselves corporeally immersed in just such a linguistic-topological field, walking through a material landscape whose every feature was already resonant with speech and song!

In this you can see the true nature of the Wild Library; each being of the landscape speaking wisdom about itself, a repository of knowledge about its perspective and habits, waiting for the one to strike up a conversation with it; a conversation that moves naturally beyond words, and yet those same words provide us with an opportunity to layer even more richness to the Storied Earth.

I’ve bound you from within
and while you yet recline
with that chair against your spine
I’ll speak to you of history

You’ll forgive my lack of tact
a tactic inexact
Yet both hurried and unworried
I’ll spin a story without lack

For ideas I care not
you can have the sorry lot
but for dreamers and believers
I’ll sell everything I’ve got
(yes, for dreaming and believing
I’ve done things I once could not
yes, for dancing and romancing
for story
and for glory
yes, for all of that and more
I’ve rushed far beyond the door
that stood right between
both me and righteous gleam
of dreaming
evermore)

So this story it begins
without virtues
without sins
It begins inside a heart
(you’ll know it from the start)
a heart that beats
and never cheats
that often cries
and does not lie
Yes this heart does begin
this tale somewhat grim
within a wounded breast
and we will put it to the test

We have hurt it
true indeed
and it weeps
and it bleeds
but will it do the same to us?
will it curse?
will it cut?

If only we can convince it
we will win
and we will show it
that by not feeling
or revealing
any signal or sign
of bleeding
only then
will it start winning
any battle worth one dying

yes by lying
and not crying
the heart will win the fighting

and it will curse
and it will cut
and it will die without regret
having nothing
knowing no-one

who has won?
well now you have me
I conspire
and I satire
against joy
against levity
I’ve told you insincere
what I would not want to hear
but I rather
would see you gladder
with a heart with both grief
and laughter
knowing someone
having all
but nothing bought
nor nothing sold

(yes by crying
and never lying
the heart will abandon fighting
by weeping
and by bleeding
it will give the Earth a greeting:
you may touch me
and inspire me
you may wound me
you may tire me
but I’ll always keep on beating
because you have born within me
what I call: a perfect free thing).

For fans of Daniel Quinn…an old posting stemming from a contention over the difference between Leaver paradigms and Taker ones, a long time ago, at Ishcon. Kudos to Julie Cramer for writing it, and apologies to Daniel Quinn.

in The Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy, paragraph 80:
When the Confederate Council of the Five Nations has for its object the establishment of the Great Peace among the people of an outside nation and that nation refuses to accept the Great Peace, then by such refusal they bring a declaration of war upon themselves from the Five Nations. Then shall the Five Nations seek to establish the Great Peace by a conquest of the rebellious nation.

Some non-Iroquois folks interpret this to mean: Those who do not accept the Peacemaker’s Great Law of Peace will be conquered by the Iroquois Confederacy and subjected to it by force, as it is the One Right Way for everyone to live, and it is the Confederacy’s sacred duty to spread it across the whole world.

Me: Ishmael, how can the Iroquois possibly be Leavers, according to paragraph 80 of their constitution?

Ish [grumbles and shifts]: I can see we’re going to have to start this one from the beginning.

Me: What do you mean?

Ish: Well, why don’t you tell me what Mother Culture tells you this piece of the Iroquois Constitution is saying?

Me: Mother Culture? What does she have to do with any of this?

Ish: Well, she’s the one who has taught you what is obvious, correct? She’s the one who has convinced you that it’s obvious Iroquois are Takers…so if I’m going to prove any different, I’ll have to speak with her directly.

Me: Okay

Ish: So, in Mother Culture’s words, if you please.

Me: Well, let me see. “When the Confederate Council of the Five Nations has for its object the establishment of the Great Peace among the people of an outside nation”…That means, if the Iroquois see another nation that is not the way that it should be…

Ish: I’m sorry, what do you mean, “not the way that it should be”?

Me: I don’t know. I guess, they aren’t living the right way. Maybe they are too cruel to their women or something, or aren’t living as peacefully as they should.

Ish: Okay, I just wanted to get that more clear. Continue.

Me: Okay. ” and that nation refuses to accept the Great Peace, then by such refusal they bring a declaration of war upon themselves from the Five Nations. Then shall the Five Nations seek to establish the Great Peace by a conquest of the rebellious nation.” That means that, if the wayward nation doesn’t comply, doesn’t see the error of their ways, the Iroquois will be forced to make them see how great peace is…by being forced into it…through war…I guess.

Ish: I guess? Why do you guess?

Me: Well. That just doesn’t make any sense. How could you preach “The Great Law of Peace” and spread the word by conquering, warring, forcing others to accept it? That doesn’t sound very peaceful.

Ish: I agree.

Me: Well, it doesn’t make any sense, but I guess that’s exactly what makes them Takers. That’s just what our country does. We say, you really need to have democracy…and even if you think you don’t want it, even if you were to vote not to have it, we would help you see the error of your ways by demanding you adopt it! Ridiculous! But, I guess that’s what a Taker is. But still, I guess I have trouble imagining the Iroquois not noticing how foolish that sounds…right in their constitution!

Ish: Again, I agree. And it does sound foolish. But, we have already established Mother Culture is guilty of the occasional doublespeak. Lets thank her for her opinion and try moving on. Now, you’re accusing the Iroquois of being Takers, but certainly not of being fools, right.

Me: No, I guess not.

Ish: So, lets start off by assuming they are not fools.

Me: Okay.

Ish: Lets start off by assuming that, somehow, this statement can be made with full sincerity, no hypocricy.

Me: Okay.

Ish: Heck, lets just try reading that quote again, from an entirely different point of view. No Mother Culture this time. This time, you’re going to read it from the point of view of a Leaver. Pretend a Leaver wrote that quote.

Me: I don’t see how that would change anything.

Ish: What?! My goodness, I’m a lot further behind than I thought I was! Do you think a Taker would see the same thing when they looked out on the open prairie as a Leaver would?

Me: Well, no.

Ish: What would be different?

Me: Well, a Leaver would see grasses, homes for various animals, probably all sorts of things like that. The Leaver would see all sorts of relationships, interacting with each other, a place full with abundant Life.

Ish: And the Taker?

Me: Empty space, I guess.

Ish: Perfect for 1,000 acres of potatoes, or a mini mall or something, right? Just empty space good for the taking.

Me: That’s right.

Ish: Okay, so we’ve reestablished that Takers and Leavers have a completely different frame of reference for perceiving the world, and that would lead that when they expressed what they perceived, even using the same words, it would mean something different, wouldn’t it?

Me: I suppose it would. I don’t completely understand.

Ish: Just give it a go.

Me: Okay, I’ll try.

Ish: [grumbling a bit] Now, try again. Read that quote from a Leaver point of view.

Me: Okay, here goes nothin’. “When the Confederate Council of the Five Nations has for its object the establishment of the Great Peace among the people of an outside nation” Well, that’s a tough one. A Leaver would never do that! A Leaver nation would never have for its object ANYTHING for another nation. Its, live and let live. As long as you don’t bother me, I won’t bother you.

Ish: Exactly. So, from that point of view, why would a Leaver take it for its object the establishment of their international policy of Peace on an outside nation? If they are only concerned about being able to live their own relatively peaceful lifestyle?

Me: Well, I guess, they would do that if they weren’t able to live that peaceful lifestyle…

Ish: Yes…and what would infringe on a peaceful lifestyle?

Me: War?

Ish: Yes! Pretty simple, huh?

Me: Oh! I see. So, for a Leaver, its not that they would see that others were living in a way that was wrong and not seeing their own errors. A Leaver would be concerned that another nation’s warring lifestyle was making it impossible for them to live their lifestyle of peace!!!

Ish: Excellent. [after settling down and nibbling on a branch for a bit, he resumes]: So, do you think they would go to all of this trouble over some stolen horses?

Me: No, it seems like it would have to be a bigger deal.

Ish: Not some missing bushels of corn?

Me: No.

Ish: Not some philosophical differences of opinion?

Me: As I said, it seems like if they were going to commit to war, which is expressly against the whole point of the Great Law of Peace, and since we are assuming they are not fools, and would only do that when they had no other option, it would have to be something much much worse. Something worth dying over. Full out attack against them. It would have to be violence, not just a missing horse or bushel of corn. It would have to be the kind of violence they worked so hard to move away from in their own history.

Ish: So what is at stake here?

Me: Something a Leaver would value.

Ish: Which exempts…?

Me: Well, they wouldn’t value the annihilation of a competitor. I imagine they would value an improvement in quality of life…more peace. So, I guess, that’s why they give them the option of adopting the Great Peace, which basically means, not fighting the Iroquois, and leaving them to live their peaceful lives.

Ish: Exactly! Not so foolish, eh?

Me: No. But.

Ish: What?

Me: Well. Even so, even if they said to their aggressors, Hey, we’re trying to be peaceful over here. Would you mind just playing nice with us? It makes sense that they would then be forced to use war if their offer were refused, simply for self defense…but, it sounds like they plan to engage in a borg-like assimilation of the outside nation as a result of that war. That doesn’t sound like a Leaver thing to me.

Ish: Me neither. A Borg-like assimilation sounds very Taker, indeed. Lets find how you came to that conclusion.

Me: Well, it says, “Then shall the Five Nations seek to establish the Great Peace by a conquest of the rebellious nation.” They intend to CONQUER the other nation and force their One Right Way of peace on them! Even after they have won the war and gotten them to stop fighting. If they were truly a Leaver culture, they wouldn’t try to conquer another nation at all.

Ish: Well, there’s two bits in there. Firstly, how does erratic retaliation work?

Me: You fight me to show how strong you are, kill one of our sons or something, and then we show you how strong we are by killing one of yours, and so on and so forth.

Ish: So, it continues. You don’t end erratic retaliation by winning a squabble.

Me: No, I suppose you don’t.

Ish: So, just winning a war does not preserve your peace does it?

Me: Well, I guess not.

Ish: Okay, so now you’ve decided to conquer, and include them in the confederacy. What does conquest look like?

Me: Mother Culture says it means you take over the land of those you conquer and make them adopt your worldview, your lifestyle…and give up all of their resources to your tithe.

Ish: I thought we were done with Mother Culture. What does a Leaver’s conquest look like?

Me: I didn’t think Leaver’s had such a thing.

Ish: What do you suppose conquest might mean to a Leaver? Keep in mind, this is a Leaver who values the “Great Law of Peace”.

Me: Well, involvement, I suppose.

Ish: What do you mean by that?

Me: Well, if the confederacy is a coming together of nations to solve matters peacefully in council, to avoid losing so many sons, conquest would simply mean being involved in that.

Ish: Interesting. Lets take a look at what the Iroquois thought of as conquest. Read paragraph 84 of the Iroquois constitution, which reveals their evil plans.

Me: Paragraph 84?

Ish: Yes. You have read the whole thing, haven’t you?

Me: Well…

Ish: You didn’t just excerpt one paragraph out of context of the whole?

Me: Well, someone else told me about it.

Ish: Well, lets give you something to tell THEM about! Read paragraph 84.

Me: Ahem. “84. Whenever a foreign nation is conquered or has by their own will accepted the Great Peace their own system of internal government may continue, but they must cease all warfare against other nations.” What…Is that all? That’s the consequences of being “conquered” by the Iroquois?

Ish: It gets even more Machiavellian. Read 99.

Me: “99. The rites and festivals of each nation shall remain undisturbed and shall continue as before because they were given by the people of old times as useful and necessary for the good of men.”

Ish: This isn’t to say there were no other consequences of resisting “the Great Peace”. In another paragraph you will read :”The conquered nation shall have no voice in the councils of the Confederacy in the body of the Lords.” So, conquest does not necessarily mean full involvement, simply compliance. This may simply have been leverage to encourage nonviolent participation from the outset, however. Essentially saying, listen, sooner or later, your going to have to stop fighting us, and if you go along willingly, we can all play together. That sort of thing.

Me: Wait…

Ish: Yes?

Me: So, if they keep their government, they keep their culture, what exactly are they “losing” by joining the Confederacy? They must lose something.

Ish: It’s not what the outside nation is losing. Again, you keep going back to Mother Culture. That’s what war is about for Mother Culture, fight ’til someone loses, and winner take all. Leavers just want to live. That’s all. For the Iroquois, it was about what they would be gaining. Think of it yourself…what exactly is all this “Great Peace” and “Iroquois Constitution” fuss about…what exactly is it all driving at? Keeping in mind that we are assuming it was invented by Leavers.

Me: Well, it was established because of an intense ongoing cycle of blood feuds that no-one could stop - erratic retaliation gone amuck, I’d think. And if the Confederacy itself consists of little more than agreeing to a “Great Peace”, with no loss of culture or religion or self-government, and if done willingly provides full participation in the Confederacy government, then…holy shit…

Ish: And, just to add, notice they mentioned that adopting the Great Peace ONLY means you swear not to fight with the nations of the confederacy. You can fight with others all you want! So, are the Iroquois telling anyone how to live?

Me: No, I suppose they are just telling them how they insist on being treated themselves.

Ish: Sounds pretty Leaver to me.

Me: Me too!:

Ish: It sounds like you have it.

Me: Well…I first should say that I’ve never been completely happy with the concept of erratic retaliation. That’s not it exactly…it’s not the concept, I know it works for Leaver cultures, it’s just that, I always thought that there could be a better way.

Ish: “Better?”

Me: Well, by “better” I mean, a more nonviolent way. A peaceful way.

Ish: It sounds like you’re about to make a leap.

Me. Yes! I mean, my god, obviously I’m not the first one to think that erratic retaliation is not the only way to relate to other native nations. If the Iroquois Constitution is the product of a Leaver culture, a culture dissatisfied with their current experience of erratic retaliation, and they wanted an alternative to violence, raiding, and chest beating as ways to maintain cultural boundaries, then this was the result of it!

Ish: You’ve got it. The Iroquois are not “one” culture either, they were a Confederacy of cultures - Mohawks, Onandagas, Senecas, Cayugas, etc. Each is a distinct culture with its own language and traditions, which can be easily seen today, as the Confederacy has been through the grinder. If anyone doubted the lack of interest in assimilation of the Confederacy nation-members, the proof is that each culture even after 300+ years of European extermination is still distinct. Would this be possible if Takers had written this document?

Me: No, the Takers would have quickly begun hierarchical infighting between each other, and needed a way for everyone to live - they would have had to invent laws that applied to everyone, to force workers to support the internal hierarchy. But the Iroquois Constitution seems to mainly apply to relations between nations, not within. It really is a Leaver anti-dote to the unpleasant side effects of erratic retaliation. Amazing.

Ish: So, would you say that this paragraph, then, could have been written by Leavers?

Me: No.

Ish: Excuse me? Come again?

Me: I would say it HAS to be written by Leavers. Thats the only way that it makes any sense!

I almost died today. Which got me thinking.

If we became human, through ages of evolution, following the call of our bodies, as wild beings, than what have we lost by relegating the body to notions of “base animal natures”, “primitive urges”, “the weakness of the flesh”?

What if most of our confusion stems from our thorough cultural conditioning in ignoring the wisdom of the flesh?

When I feel cold, and I resist it, I feel colder. By ignoring the message of the cold, and its insistent song, I create my own suffering. When I stay in my body, and feel the cold completely, it releases me.

I’ve had the same experience in conversation with other human beings. When someone feel angry, but I think they “shouldn’t”, the crisis swells, but when I say “ok, absolutely, you feel angry”, and I accept it, the crisis de-escalates and disappears.

One denies the flesh (while fleeing to a mental world of what “should” happen), the other embraces the flesh, the living reality at hand.

I almost got hit by an SUV today; in the driving rain, after sundown, dressed in dark clothes, I walked across a crosswalk. I have a philosophy, that the world only wants me to pay attention, to notice and honor its wildness, and in return it will always take care of me. So, with my vision spread wide, I noticed coming up from behind me an SUV with blinding headlights racing for my right side. With a bunny-hop I stepped out of the way, and it screetched to a halt after jerking a little past where I had stood a moment before.

I couldn’t see the driver, but the passenger, an old white woman, stared wide-eyed at me through the rain-smeared window. I could feel my heart racing, my adrenaline singing. The car continued on, I crossed to the far sidewalk, and I felt a swirl of voices in my head. They wanted to know who to blame, what to do, who did what wrong, to point fingers, to shame.

And I realized, that nothing wrong had happened - one person could not see another in the rain, nothing more. In a culture free of insanity, my death would have indebted the driver to my family in some fashion. We don’t live in that culture; in any case I felt happy because the universe told me:

Even though I don’t always say so, you make me happy when you pay attention. Accept this little goose in the rear as a token of my gratitude.

Imagine the madness of resisting the need to pay attention, because “drivers should just watch out for pedestrians”. In this case, it could have caused my own death or horrible injury. But I don’t think drivers should just watch out, because I know sometimes they don’t. Simple.

When you live in “the Flesh”, honoring the gods of the Flesh with your care and sensitivity, this becomes an everyday occurrence. Living in the hands of the gods starts to feel a lot like an embrace.