So I’ve spent a long time trying to develop a culture of storytelling amongst friends, students, family, and so on. Recently I’ve stumbled across a whole little movement, the world of small press and independently published, owner-created role-playing games. I blame Jason Godesky.

I’ve gotten excited about them enough to start having playtest days, where we see what makes these games tick, use them to work our storytelling muscles, and possibly develop our own games.

WHAT: Indie role playing game day, where we playtest games that work our storytelling muscles in new and exciting ways.
WHO: You or someone like you. Including people you know who would really enjoy it.
WHEN: Sunday Jan 13th at 1pm
WHERE: The Scout Pit, 5040 SE Milwaukie, around back next to the parking lot.
WHY: To explore new tools for stretching our storytelling muscles, to innovate methods of teaching these skills, to help design possible tracker and animist-oriented story games.

COST: Free, but we welcome donations for sustaining the Scout Pit, a community center on the lip of Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge.

Natural Way: Indigenous Voices is Honored to Present

The Iroquois Great Law of Peace:

A Millennium of Continuous Democracy

What are the indigenous roots of our democracy? Are there other traditions

that point the way to a satisfying and sustainable future of peace and consensus?
Lecture: Friday, October 12, 2007, 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

Jake Swamp, ‘Tekaronianeken’, will appear at the Natural Way-Indigenous Voices on Friday evening, October 12, to discuss the traditions of peace and democracy originating amongst his people, the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy. As the role models for the Founding Fathers in the writing of the US Constitution, the Haudenosaunee have much experience to share with younger, struggling democracies.

Jake Swamp has been a Mohawk Sub-Chief and representative on the Grand Council of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and is an internationally renowned speaker on indigenous, environmental and social issues. He was directly involved in the creation of the Akwesasne Freedom School – a Mohawk language immersion school of critical acclaim that has been an inspiration to many First Nation peoples in the United States and Canada.

He is the author of the children’s book Giving Thanks: A Native American Good Morning Message, which has been translated into five languages and was featured on the PBS television show Reading Rainbow. Other projects include The Peacemaker’s Journey audiocassette produced by Parabola Magazine (1996), The U.S. Constitution & The Great Law of Peace: A Comparison (2004) and the film Dreamkeeper by Hallmark Entertainment (2003), for which he was a consultant.

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

Cost: $10-$20 donation requested for speaker’s honorarium
Workshop: Saturday, October 13, 2007, 12:00 to 2:00 p.m.

Jake Swamp will preside over a ‘Tree of Peace’ Planting Ceremony. Over a thousand years ago, the Peacemaker and Aiionwatha (Hiawatha) brought the Great Law of Peace (Kaianerekowa) to the warring Indian nations of what is now New York State. The message of Peace, Power, and the Good Mind resulted in the forming of the Haudenosaunee Iroquois Confederacy. These nations were instructed to bury their weapons of war under the Great Tree of Peace. The Tree Planting Ceremony that Chief Swamp shares is an effort to bring awareness to environmental and social concerns. A potluck feast will follow the ceremony.

Location: Fawnwood at Deer Island (near St. Helens).

Directions: Take Highway 30 West towards St. Helens,
Apx. 45 minutes or less from downtown Portland you will come to the
town of Deer Island. Deer Island is about five miles past St. Helens.
As you pass the Deer Island Store on your left, reset mileage gage.
Continue on hwy 30 west 1.6 miles
Take left up Butterfield Road towards rust colored house.
(DO NOT TAKE SHARP LEFT UP STEEP DRIVEWAY THAT SAYS NO TRESPASSING)
Continue up gravel road past rust colored house, GO SLOW PLEASE
In 100 yards or so you will come to a modular home on left.
At modular home, turn left and pass through their driveway to gate.
(If you miss this turn you will come to a gate and have to turn
around. You will note the Yurt in the distance on your left. That is
where we are.)
GO EXTRA SLOW PLEASE
Go through gate and continue up driveway.
Travel time is approximately one 45 minutes or less from Portland.

What to Bring: Dress for outdoors and weather, folding chair, non-alcoholic beverages/water, picnic plate and eating utensils, and a potluck dish with serving utensil for the feast.

Cost: $5-$20 donation requested for speaker’s honorarium. Registration is on-site.
Co-sponsors: Earth & Spirit Council at www.earthandspirit.org, The College of Mythic Cartography at www.mythic-cartography.org and Deerdance at www.deerdance.org. Contact: contactus@earthandspirit.org

Years ago I ran across an online art installation, vision, and ongoing project of artist Michael Green.

If you haven’t seen his vision of the Afterculture, you’ve really missed out. The possibilities of the North American Afterculture await!

In reading up on the Celtic metaphor of “the salmon of wisdom”, I ran across a beautiful little essay on past and present salmon traditions here in Cascadia.

It reminds me again of the holiness of our foods, the holiness of our fleshy experience, the power in the aliveness of reality.

In reading the book, Merlin: Shaman, Prophet, Magician, by John Matthews, I ran across a great passage underscoring something that I touched on before, with the help of an excerpt by David Abram: the connection between insight, knowledge, and the land. The quote from the book on Merlin runs thus:

Messages from the Land

Physical contact with the earth is another important part of the transmission of the skills of both the seer and the prophet. The land held information like a great book, which could be accessed by those with the skill to see or hear it. The most subtle methods of prophetic tradition in Britain and Ireland seem always to have been available to those who live within the spiritual continuum of the land, and this, we have seen, is very much a central aspect of Merlin’s life in the wilderness.

The ancient gifts of the seer poets were not fueled merely by clairvoyance or poetic sensibility, but by resonance, touch, connection. Their ability to root into any object, place, or person and discover identity, quality, and answers to questions concerning these is part of this symbiotic continuum. Thus Merlin’s shadowy successor, the bard Taliesin, speaks constantly of “becoming” certain objects — a tree, a staff, a stone or a lantern — as well as being able to slip between the cracks of time to predict future events.

The author goes so far as to reweave the connection between poetry and visionary language, something I feel strongly about:

The Spirit of Inspiration

…We see that the role of the poet and the seer were considered as interdisciplinary. Poets were also seers; seers were poets. Merlin, in his earliest incarnation, is both.

In light of this, it is not surprising that the Celtic prophetic tradition, of which Merlin is very much a part, is primarily fueled by the search for poetic inspiration.

Every place a riddle…every riddle a poem…every poem a spirit…every spirit a place….

Once again, co-sponsored by the College of Mythic Cartography:

March 9th, at 7pm — download flyer

Circle of Life, Medicine Wheel – A Balanced Way of Life

Charles Fast Horse is an Oglala Sioux Medicine Man and artist. Born on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1941, Charles leads workshops on the Lakota way of life at conferences and colleges throughout North America and is an intercessor for many ceremonies. His grandfather, Tom Spotted Bear, was a direct descendant of Thick Bread, who fought in the Battle of Little Big Horn when he was only 18 years old.

Charles graduated from United Tribes Educational Center in Bismarck, North Dakota. He is past president of the nonprofit Lakota Lodge Training and Learning Center and has led workshops for the justice system as well as other governmental agencies. In 1997 he was invited to bless America’s holiday tree in Washington, DC.

Charles and his wife, Hazel, are both artists. They work together to produce museum quality beadwork. For them, art is a way of life. Their art is a testament to the Indian traditions, as each creation is part of a story expressing the beauty and history of Lakota life. Their work is on display at Prairie Edge gallery in South Dakota.

How do the Places on the landscape help, teach, or mentor you?

What does it mean to receive the wisdom of a place, or to ruminate on its riddle?

How do you know when you’ve entered a place?

Mêsna-ilêhi, natiki mêsnawawa, namamuk-kwêlan.

What does it mean to base oneself entiredly around the rewilded relationship to basic needs, especially food?

To site one’s Temples on the shores of a fish-run, in sacred anticipation, to hold one’s ceremonies on the edge of forest full of venerated deer before the hunt, to have one’s holiday on the day of a great homecoming of geese…to endlessly speculate on the soap opera of the daily lives of maples, of ducks, of dandelions, of weathers and stars?

To make one’s obsession the rewilded relationships to flavors, sights, comforts, and fulfillments of the shimmering living Land?

Namêsklahawyêm-mersi, manamama-ilêhi.

Tell Me About “Rhizome”, Grandpa

In a nutshell, rhizome refers to the underground stems of certain plant species that spread, creating new root centers as they organically expand out from the original center. Think of bamboo, aspens, mint, willow, cattails, etc. Conceptually applied to human living, it can refer to small scale, self-organizing, family-centered human settlement networks. Aka, Villages. Jeff Vail, amongst others (Daniel Quinn, the Tribe of Anthropik, etc.), writes extensively about the re-application of this original human philosophy towards modern living.
Enter the Tao

Recently, rereading the Tao Te Ching, I remembered something that had struck me about it a couple years ago; the many refererences in the book to true village living, and the ideal government (or lack thereof).

Chapter 80 of the Tao Te Ching [trans. Ellen Chen]:
A small state with few people
Let the implements for ten and hundred men be unused
Let the people fear death such that they do not move far away
Although there are boats and carriages,
There are no places to ride them to.

Although there are weapons and armours,
There are no occasions to display them.
Let the people again tie ropes and use them (as memory aids [in replacement of literacy])

Let them enjoy their food,
consider their clothing beautiful,
Be contented with their dwellings,
And happy with their customs.
The neighbouring states overlooking one another,
The dogs’ barking and cocks’ crowing are heard from other states,
Yet till they are old and dying the people do not visit one another.

What does all this mean? Certainly the author, Lao Tse, wrote this book deep in the belly of a well-established (and therefore highly neurotic and destructive) civilization. So his message concerns how to walk away from civilization towards a better life – a rhizomial life. Furthermore, the Tao Te Ching can serve as a primer and inspiration for animist, rhizomial action. Scholars commonly agree that the Tao Te Ching speaks with the voice of an original, shamanistic, animistic Chinese past. I encourage you to read it! Check out Professor Ellen Chen’s translation – I recommend it as the best one I’ve read.

For some interesting history on the evangelical invasion of Taoist folk culture by Buddhist Ch’an (known in japanese as Zen) missionaries, check out Opening a Mountain. Have no doubts – everywhere in the world had its own original standoff between indigenous cultures and the manifest destiny of the civilized. The time has come to return to our beginning, to return to the Tao.

I don’t mean this in the sense of “become a Taoist” – what I find remarkable about the Tao Te Ching involves its spareness of mythological detail – in many ways it goes to the root of animism. I believe it adds richly to the voices that still give clues to the modern animist, to the one searching for a way back to the beginning, back to where Life has always, and will always, flourish.

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.

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.

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.