Where I sit now, adjacent the serpentine rush of snow run offs raging forth from the West Elk Mountains, Spring ushers in the long-awaited return of wild foods and soils warm enough to plant seeds in. Slowly awakening from hibernations, friends gather from near and far to share stories, to see and be seen by each other, to break bread together again, prepare garden beds, thaw overly contemplative winter minds and emerge once more into the sprouting re-emergence of life’s miraculous cyclical returning’s.
I have not properly encountered Old Man Winter in years. Years ago, when I lived in the Gunnison Valley, I both cherished and feared the inward/outward riddles bestowed on the heart by the unique symbiotic merging of human rhythms with those of the greater Wilderness as is so generously offered here in Father Suns absence. Since marrying into the Far East nearly a decade ago, as soon as my family finishes harvesting there, we journey to the mountains of Colorado to immediately begin planting again. And as Colorado’s harvest wraps up, we head back again to the lush mountains of Chiang Mai, where the cycle repeats. Thus, with few exceptions, my existence has become an eternal summer. Which to be sure, has its perks! Yet, without the silence of winter, without the somatic presence of seasonal shifts, an important Voice has been silenced. Yearning for this, I have sought for Her in the study of Myth.
One of the great tragedies of this strange hyper-techno era of post-truth in which we now find ourselves is that few seem to study deeply the great Stories of which our ancestors once steeped themselves deeply into, using their enchantments as much more than escapist entertainment but as lifelong educational rafts that slowly, meticulously, with elegant culture-crafting intention, initiated both individuals and entire peoples into a maturity I feel seldom experience in the modern world. The stories we live by today, at best seem but to offer a heavily diluted version of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and at worst endless episodes of the Tiger King, interspersed with doomsday scrolling of made-up narratives depicting evil intent from whichever “other” is supposedly seeking to invade us at any given moment as determined by whichever talked head is currently believed to possess authority. Big Stories seem to have all been forgotten by most. Such is the cost, I suppose, of inserting all our memory into superphones and preferring the flatland gods of rational science and technology over the diversified dancing deities that have orchestrated the movements of time and human ritual forever.
Yet hidden in the cracks of our dying empires can be found vestiges still of what can never truly be lost. Behind the corporatized, Disney-ified shrieks of what passes these days as “story”, are hidden like time capsules placed secretly within overlooked corridors of modernity’s incessant loudness by long ago elders thinking then of our future well-being seeds of real human aliveness, of real education, disguised as myth. Nothing we are being sold today is here without the long brilliant his/herstories from which it all has been stolen from. Everything comes from somewhere else and if we can trace back origins well enough, with the right amount of honoring and manage not to get arrogantly swept away by “the” science than the potential to come alive merely by hearing a Story is possible.
When we planted our Corn a few days ago Father Sun rose over the great snow-covered Mountains to the east at dawn as He has for eons. The puny modern narrative that suggests Land is but a mess of inanimate resources to be extracted at will for human means seems so foolish to the far greater unfolding saga of Natural Time that when one truly considers what this entails it can seem utterly terrifying. Which no doubt is precisely why empires have put so much effort into drowning big stories out to begin with. True stories put everything in perspective and as such, humble the shit out of us. They remind us not only that we humans aren’t the center of the universe but that we are only here for a very short amount of time and that nothing our snotty little technologically obsessed modern brains can muster up will withstand the grinding test of time. Oceans rise, empires fall. This is it.
Real Bigtime Stories transport us. They initiate us and insert deeply into us the great rhythms of seasonal, celestial, galactic passings. Real Humans have always known this. In fact, most of our collective human journey has been deeply seeped in this knowing. The modern view, so obsessed as it is with being right, curiously convinced that “facts” cannot change, that because our computers can calculate cloud movements by quantifying fractals and because we can split an atom, etc. that somehow we’ve been promoted beyond the Laws of Nature, that somehow we are distinct and greater than Gaia and not directly apart of Her, has resulted in nearly universal amnesia which has removed us so far from what humans have historically understood life to be it is now as if we have already exited Earth and the human experience itself entirely.
The modern way of thinking is not normal. The stories told by melting snow at dawn as the great returning Sun kisses budding spruce tips offer a glimpse back at normalcy. For most of the human story, we knew this. We lived this. Observe any great megalith in the world and you will discover evidence of this immediately. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, architectural marvels can be sensorily felt permeating from within and without the walls of old-world buildings such as those found in “Chaco Canyon” constructed entirely with the movements of time and space literally embodied in the foundational architecture itself. Entire cities were built that merged citizens of a Place with the deeper rhythms of elemental dancing. City walls were the body of the people and the Earth. You couldn’t think of it being another way. There were no words to express such arrogance. Nothing is an “it.”
This is Normal. The only people to ever not understand this is us, modern man. The ancients knew better. And I don’t think this is simple romanticizing. Just sit with the stars before dawn and listen. You will know too. Nothing lasts. And everything, everything, is alive, interconnected, and always changing.
Tear apart your phone. Dissect your automobile. Turn off the radio, the television, the “news”. Delete your Facebook account. Stop purchasing food that you or someone you know did not themselves harvest with care. Can you? Do you have this capacity? What education results in not being able to these things? It’s a worthy question to ask. Who among us even can name the precious minerals who are inappropriately enslaved within the hidden realms of our beloved devises? What sacred watersheds were viciously threatened so that some fancy new Apple product could seduce us with its pretty lights and prevent us yet again from observing the call of the nightingale, the shimmer of alpenglow, the tidal wave of wind passing through Midwest prairie grass at dawn? Who amongst us can tell the stories of the peoples who have been forced to mine that which is needed for us to slip away into another evening of Netflix and Chill?
The Corn remembers. When we make but a small effort to save some of last years seed, to ask Her permission again to bury Her children, as have all our ancestors, regardless what race we think we now are, since time immemorial, so that our children can also live again, so that life itself can live again, we keep alive a Real Story, one that we are not the center of but are absolutely an important part of. This is not a story we simply consume while eating GMO popcorn smothered in artificially flavored butter and drinking ice-cold Coca-Cola. These are the Stories that churn us into the kind of people the disintegrating empires of the world loathe, people of memory, substance, real beauty, and skill. People in synch not with the cycles of this year’s new version of the iPhone, but with the ancient movements of Sun and Soil, Water and Ancient Song.
With the permission bestowed on us by last year’s generous harvest, we gathered and ground our corn, corn that has miraculously managed to live for thousands of years without being enslaved by the Monsanto’s of the world. We ground Her and sang to Her as best we could. We offered her lime and boiled her children and She transformed miraculously into shimmeringly hazy blue-grey paste with the kind aid of fats bestowed on us by the generosity of a kind neighbors’ pig. Whatever keeps us alive requires a death, be it animals, plants, or epochs. We recognized this as best we could and offered gifts.
We grilled chickens and corns, chiles and beans. We mixed it all together and as the tamales steamed, we made cream from raw milk graciously provided to us from a nearby farmers majestic, holy cows. Old stories became new as we laughed our way through the timeless tradition of Making Mistakes While Trying Our Best. And we feasted. The Sun high in the sky. Dandelions already going to seed. Bellies full. We remembered how that very morning, the offspring of that which now fills our bellies, offered more than we will ever know, by allowing us to bury Her children in the Soil surrounding our home. And then Rain fell.
This world is so very alive. Every stone has a story. Every stick, a song. It wasn’t long ago that when we ate our food, we knew what to do. We were in right relation. And we knew what this meant. The stories being told to us now of doom and despair, of failing economies and eternal war are all true in a since, but how we view these narratives is the result of peculiar type of education inflicted upon us by modernity, utterly new to the human saga, far from normal.
Decay is certainly inevitable. But can our current narratives explain decays life-giving majesty with enough wisdom to destroy our fear of death? If so, we might be able to live again.
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It is important to recognize from who our ideas sprout forth from. I am amazed how seldom this happens and am ashamed at how regularly I myself forget to properly make clear where my own interpretations of myths and plants and places, etc initially come from. I must point out here that much of what was discussed in this weeks newsletter and how my family approached our corn as we planted came to us from the generosity of our beloved mentor Martin Prechtel’s teachings and books and from Joshua Michael Schrei’s excellent podcast, The Emerald. We are infinitely indebted to them and those from whom they learn from for anything we may have learned (though certainly we have not learned entirely the proper deeper meanings they generously share. We vow to keep trying our best.). Please do you and future generations a favor and slowly, with full attention, explore their works. (Links below)
The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive
Animism is Normative Consciousness (Re-mixed, Re-musicked, and Re-released)
This weeks Song of the Week: