SHIFT starts up again on January 13th, 2007

SHIFT starts up again on January 13th, 2007

Join us for SHIFT every 3:30pm Saturday at the Peace Full Soul, 4940 NE 16th, just south off Alberta street, in Portland, Oregon.

At SHIFT we move as animals, as mountains, as rivers, as trees, we learn to use our bodies powerfully and gracefully, whether in self-defense, or in moving like ghosts in the wilderness (urban or otherwise). SHIFT happens both indoors and outdoors; for the rainy season we feel happy to have an indoor space to move in part of the time.

We dance and play as otter.
We gruffly stamp as bear.
We stand immovable as mountain.
We breathe and shelter like cedar.
We drum our rhythm like ocean.

We SHIFT into the wild.

At SHIFT you play intuitive theater games, you find and use your center to become immovable (and easily move others), you practice the filipino martial-art of escrima/kali, you dance, you play, so you can take your skills out onto the street and into the woods to keep yourself safe and having fun.

To help pay for the space, we ask for a $5 to $10 donation.

On Saturday, December 16th, at 3:30pm (see event calendar) we’ll have the last session of SHIFT (our feral movement and protector art) at the Peace Full Soul. Thanks so much to Annealisse for hosting us there over the past couple months.

After the holidays, in the first week of January, we’ll start back up again, this time concentrating on locations outside, in greenspaces around the city. I think the time has arrived to get a little wet and muddy in the name of rewilding, don’t you?

Hope to see you Saturday!

Alright. A mixed bag today.

First a quote to remind us all the flux of observation, and the fallibility of any final conclusion:

A memory from a hike on the south coast of Java: It is a sweltering hot day, yet a strong wind is clearly stirring the branches and leaves of some trees across the field. As I step toward those trees, the wind rustling the leaves abruptly metamorphoses into a bunch of monkeys foraging for food among the branches. -David Abram

So deal with it. And get more dirt-time, Trackers!

Jeanette Armstrong of the Okanagan people in B.C. wrote a ridiculously wonderful piece on language, family, and land (all my favorite topics – thanks to Curt for the head’s up). Read it!

Some excerpts:

The Okanagan word for “our place on the land” and “our language” is the same. We think of our language as the language of the land. The way we survived is to speak the language that the land offered us as its teachings. To know all the plants, animals, seasons, and geography is to construct language for them.

Sound familiar?

We also refer to the land and our bodies with the same root syllable. The soil, the water, the air, and all the other life forms contributed parts to be our flesh. We are our land/place. Not to know and to celebrate this is to be without language and without land. It is to be displaced.

To speak then means to embody the land.

I see how family is subverted by the scattering of members over the face of the globe. I cannot imagine how this could be family, and I ask what replaces it if the generations do not anchor to each other. I see that my being is present in this generation and in our future ones, just as the generations of the past speak to me through stories. I know that community is made up of extended families moving together over the landscape of time, through generations converging and dividing like a cell while remaining essentially the same as community. I see that in sustainable societies, extended family and community are inseparable.

Family doesn’t just mean some virtuous idea, or thing we should do; Family means our very survival. We die without Family. Painfully. Suicidially.

I know what it feels like to be an endangered species on my land, to see the land dying with us. It is my body that is being torn, deforested, and poisoned by “development.” Every fish, plant, insect, bird, and animal that disappears is part of me dying. I know all their names, and I touch them with my spirit. I feel it every day, as my grandmother and my father did.

For those of you who don’t understand Derrick Jensen’s message, this should clarify it: do not abstract your relationship with the land you live on right now. Someone who poisons it, poisons you, as surely as putting cyanide in your cup of tea. Someone who tears it, to build or to quarry stone, tears you just as surely as someone knifing your body.

I hear sometimes from people who think seeing the land as one’s own body means creating or breathing life into an abstraction, something that doesn’t exist. I demand that we see it differently, grounded in reality; we abstract when we disconnect, not when we connect. We cannot live without air. We cannot live without water. The living land succumbs to a gangrenous wasting, wherever civilization touches it. Thus destroying us.

Cast out the idea that a connection to the land means something unreal; cast out the idea of it as an other. The inseparability of your body, my body, from the land and each other, could not possibly have more weighty physical reality than it already does. It creates reality.

We can do no more powerful act than maintaining a conscious awareness of living and dying with the land and our families, and taking this fully into our bodies.

Join us for SHIFT every 3:30pm Saturday at the Peace Full Soul, 4940 NE 16th, just south off Alberta street, in Portland, Oregon.

At SHIFT we move as animals, as mountains, as rivers, as trees, we learn to use our bodies powerfully and gracefully, whether in self-defense, or in moving like ghosts in the wilderness (urban or otherwise). SHIFT happens both indoors and outdoors; for the rainy season we feel happy to have an indoor space to move in part of the time.

We dance and play as otter.
We gruffly stamp as bear.
We stand immovable as mountain.
We breathe and shelter like cedar.
We drum our rhythm like ocean.

We SHIFT into the wild.

At SHIFT you play intuitive theater games, you find and use your center to become immovable (and easily move others), you practice the filipino martial-art of escrima/kali, you dance, you play, so you can take your skills out onto the street and into the woods to keep yourself safe and having fun.

To help pay for the space, we ask for a $5 to $10 donation.

In Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram writes at length about the ways in which the Horizon Circle (meaning, the world around you, bounded by the horizon, ground, and sky above) contains the present moment. By containing the ongoing reality of the living world, it also encourages the presence of the moment.

This connects to a universal indigenous practice, that of alignment to the Four Directions. Of course you won’t always hear or see it represented as “four” directions…some say 6, or 7, or (if memory serves) the Mayan’s 260 directions (in their case, to paraphrase Martin Prechtel, “they’ve just delineated all of them”).

Also, some only have two directions. Which reminds me of a story.

Beginning with Benjamin Hoff’s “Tao of Pooh”, I felt the growing realization that the Chinese folk conception of the Tao had something in common with what I had learned of indigenous paradigms, specifically relating to the teachings of Stalking Wolf, as transmitted by Tom Brown at the Tracker School.

In the Fall and Winter of 2004 I worked as a Ranger in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, for a private land trust. In the middle of a season of deep snows and 18 degrees below zero, I found on the shelf of my cabin a tiny copy of the “Tao Te Ching”, translation by Stephen Mitchell. The words of the author, Lao Tse, sounded so familiar. As I wrote, back then:

Why would a two millenia-old Chinese text be speaking almost the same things as a Native American elder? Here’s one line from it: “Good walking leaves no track behind it”.

A couple days ago, walking by our little round pond, barely big enough to swim laps in, frozen over and covered with a light dusting of snow, I saw where Coyote tracks led onto the frozen surface, turned left here, turned right there, in strange little cautious arcs, exiting on the far side. That’s when, expanding my vision, I saw that the mischievous canine had, with its track line, turned the pond into an almost perfect yin-yang symbol, by walking through its middle.

Who invented this universe anyway?

What could I do with this information? What did Coyote want me to know? I didn’t give up. I kept pursuing.

More to come…

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.

Two MythMedia staff members will join me in a talk at Portland’s Cleveland High School, by invitiation of the faculty teaching the Theories of Knowledge class.

So I watched the japanese award-winning anime Pom Poko the other week.

The movie concerns the efforts of a group of Tanuki, aka japanese raccoon-dogs, (not raccoons, but they look very similar and belong to the dog family) to stop housing developers from destroying their forest (the Tama Hills countryside on the edge of Tokyo).

It really underscored how a folk culture evolves alongside the land it inhabits, and how the converse happens too; a rapaciously expanding culture evolves in a kind of ignorance of the land it rolls over…not out of some lack of green values, but perhaps simply because it moves too fast to grow that relationship.

Japanese folkore celebrates the Tanuki for many things; such as their ability to transform into different guises (ranging from people to iron pots), their gullibility (some term it stupidity), and their enormous testicles.

Yep. In fact, some american viewers of Pom Poko have complained about their children’s unexpected exposure to raccoon-dog testicles.

In our culture (a culture I believe that still enacts the values of Puritanism, its founders, thus a culture of secular puritans), nudity and sexual organs (primary and secondary) can only mean one thing: sex. Thus breast-feeding mothers struggle in many different parts of the country to hold on to (or regain) their right to breast-feed in public.

In Japan, the Tanuki’s testicles, known as “the Golden Balls” (Kin-tama), mean fertility and good fortune. The Tanuki drum on them, use them for self-defense, and transform them into a variety of useful objects.

To an american viewer, the display of the Tanuki’s reputable anatomy can seem bizarre, almost otherworldly. What strange people, these Japanese! Yet modern America has developed little relationship to the animals that live here. We borrow heavily from Native American folklore if we want to tell fantastic tales about Coyote, owing to the simple fact that we don’t bother to build our own relationship with Coyote. Much less his testicles.

Ironic note, from Wikipedia:

A common schoolyard song in Japan…makes explicit reference to the tanuki’s anatomy:

Tan Tan Tanuki no kintama wa,
Kaze mo nai no ni,
Bura bura

(Roughly translated, this means “Tan-tan-tanuki’s testicles, there isn’t even any wind but still go swing-swing”.It then proceeds to continue for several verses, with many regional variations. It is sung to the melody of an American Baptist hymn called Shall We Gather At The River?.)

[my emphasis]

I can appreciate a little debasement of Puritanism for the sake of Tanuki nuts. I hope you can too.

I don’t mean to imply that we have zero tradition at all of mythologizing/folklorizing american wildlife; clearly we have some amount of popular culture investment in such things, even if just through Walt Disney, Inc.

Our modern dilemma consists of the fact that we have no meaningful history here with the land, no relationship with it (except as a culture of occupation). Bambi has taught us little of how to coexist with her; we simply make her into the Noble Mammal, or an annoying scourge (when we find her inconvenient), much like we do with all indigenous and tribal peoples (Gypsies included).

The Puritans came here to establish an ideal world, a Utopia (u – topia, “no – place”). I think they succeeded.

But now, our turn has arrived. What kind of stories does the land demand we tell? Let’s continue to find out together.

Join us for SHIFT every 3:30pm Saturday at the Peace Full Soul, 4940 NE 16th, just south off Alberta street, in Portland, Oregon.

At SHIFT we move as animals, as mountains, as rivers, as trees, we learn to use our bodies powerfully and gracefully, whether in self-defense, or in moving like ghosts in the wilderness (urban or otherwise). SHIFT happens both indoors and outdoors; for the rainy season we feel happy to have an indoor space to move in part of the time.

We dance and play as otter.
We gruffly stamp as bear.
We stand immovable as mountain.
We breathe and shelter like cedar.
We drum our rhythm like ocean.

We SHIFT into the wild.

At SHIFT you play intuitive theater games, you find and use your center to become immovable (and easily move others), you practice the filipino martial-art of escrima/kali, you dance, you play, so you can take your skills out onto the street and into the woods to keep yourself safe and having fun.

To help pay for the space, we ask for a $5 to $10 donation.