Seeding a World that can Hold Other Worlds

Writings toward the diversification and regeneration of culture and on stewarding a land-based community & maternal gift economy learning center beyond the deserve/overwork paradigm

[akeshabaron]

On making time to include more-than-human purposes

I get antsy when there is too much focus on human framing, human thinking, human-to-human interaction. Something about the functioning of NGL (Nonviolent Global Liberation) does this to me lately; I wish for more allowance and encouragement of a spacious approach to life, for letting go of the modern need to be always driven and always productive. I wish for the recognition that it is often productive and sometimes essential to stop doing, to slow waaayyy down, to gaze at the light on the leaves and the birds, to perhaps even drop one's human identification altogether and sink deep down into a larger and wider consciousness (To "individuate" as Jung meant it).

There is an imperative in these times, and probably in all times, that human beings listen to the larger world, the larger patterns of life, that we make time to do this daily in order to realign with the living world (in us and as us, not just beyond us!) If we spend all our time making time for the stated human purpose, created by humans, to take care of (mostly) human needs, what happens to our ability to attend to this? What happens to our ability to give ourselves the freedom to go outside and watch and listen and smell, and sense what might be wanting to happen with ease today, regardless of stated program/rational priority/what my list is telling me to do? This is not just "doing whatever I want"~ it is an ancient practice, however forgotten, of going deep into a silence beyond words, beyond human thought, to align one's life with a pattern* that is a unique convergence between the human and super human realm. It is so easy to lose sight of this, to never learn to do this. It is so easy to think our human plans and purposes are all we need to attend to, that they will help us go very far, if not all the way, toward healing and liberation and regenerating.

I am compelled to point out that we are not even designed to function this way, that our rationality is not capable of aligning with life, that by itself rationality cannot even make decisions (as Miki Kashtan noted today in RTTC). Alnoor Ladha calls Separation, Materialism amd Rationalism "the unholy trinity" of the religion of neoliberalism.

Dadirri ("Deep listening~ silent still awareness"), an aboriginal practice of slowing down and listening, is how Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr Baumann describes the spirituality of her people. Also in the Aleutian Islands, this way of being "was likely the foundation for [indigenous] Unangan existence for millennia...[not to say anything,] but to listen and experience without words. Words were not only superfluous but would diminish the fullness and understanding of any human experience. It is an age-old Unangan way that likely is central to how and why Unangan survived and thrived in the Bering Sea for over ten thousand years." (p. 26, Wisdom Keeper, Ilarion Merculieff, 2016) Merculieff describes how his people navigated the sea not by any outer markers or navigational devices, but purely by using this inner sense, which was cultivated through years of observing the natural world in silence.

What is the living world saying, needing, beckoning me to do today? It is this sense that we need to cultivate in order to survive in a post-capitalist world, this sense that tells us when there are fish nearby, when the roots are ready to dig up, when the tree is ready to give itself to us in part or in whole.*

*Credit to Tyson Yunkaporta (Sand Talk) for bringing the need for humans to be able to read larger natural patterns into my awareness and vocabulary.

[akeshabaron]

Intact Foodways

One of the main reasons I want to shift to a land-based lifestyle is to have the ability to grow food and other useful plants.

When I used to interpret for unaccompanied Tzotzil minors in government-run shelters, their counselors would ask them questions like, "What do you like to do for fun? Let’s say you have the day off; what do you do?" Without fail, these youngsters would answer that what they did for enjoyment was cook and eat together with friends and family. “I would go with my family or friends to get stuff to make a nice chicken soup, make the meal and eat it.” To which the follow up would be, “That’s it? There’s nothing else you would do?” And the answer would be No, that’s it. To the American social workers’ ears, this was scarcely believable in its humble simplicity as an activity one would choose above others. To westerners, food is seemingly just an everyday necessity, nothing special, nothing especially emotionally satisfying about it. Yet to their wards, hailing from a culture with intact foodways, the preparation and enjoyment of traditional, health-giving food is still the center of family and community life.

Consider how much people say they want community in the west, and yet have no actual reason to show up for it. It’s actually enough for most people to give lip service and say that they value community, because it’s really not clear what it means or where it exists anymore, and one of the reasons for that is the loss of connection to subsistence lifestyles (!!).

We modern people have too many options of what to do with our time and this keeps us separate in a way people whose lives center on the same basic (food) needs are not. If you live in a village where everyone has to boil corn, grind corn and make tortillas daily, those tasks can be done together; they bring people together. If your work is something wholly unique and your interests are your own to choose and pursue, what is there left that will bring you towards others in a consistent way? 

For example, in the village I am most familiar with in Chiapas, the vast majority of village members have the same daily routine and recurring tasks that center on food (corn, more specifically). Women rise early to grind the corn they boiled with lime the night before, and turn the masa into tortillas that they cook on a round griddle over an open fire. This will be the staple food for the family for the day, eaten in quantity at every meal where it can accompany beans, greens, and all other foods. Because the women are going to the mill and making tortillas at the same time every day, they also tend community and family relationships in their diurnal rotations, and have a lifestyle in which it is possible to do their common work together.

The more specialized work becomes in more “advanced” societies, the less we are able to be together and take joy in the essential tasks of life–which used to be growing or gathering, processing and cooking food. In intact Mayan foodways, tortillas are made fresh everyday from corn that is grown, harvested and processed usually by the family in whose bellies it ends up. Corn is considered so especially nourishing and strength-giving that Mayans say humans were originally made from corn. In that sense, eating the staple food at each meal renews the very substance that we are, reminds us and reminds our bodies of how to be human. It is satisfying like no other food and brings people together not only in the eating of it, but in the cultivating and the making of it. At all stages of the corn’s life cycle, people also come together cyclically.

Many times during my fieldwork, women said to me, "Your life is easy. You don't have to turn out tortillas every day." And for that ease, possible though a life centered on money, we pay in isolation.

[akeshabaron]

Ferment

We are on day two of our second pre-moving moving trip to the family homestead. Day one felt as long as two days. It is clear that we cannot move in the way things are: with scarcely a free cabinet or drawer. Every nook and cranny is full of decades old junk that our parents cannot seem to simply throw away. Last night we acknowledged to each other that it can't work this way, that we simply need more space and need to have the two rooms that are currently habitable cleared of items that are not ours. This conversation needs to happen.

After sleeping well, in the morning there was a small praying mantis in our all purpose, kitchen/bathroom sink! The first one Zeke had ever seen in his life. The life around us continues to seem to say that we are wanted here, that in spite of the long project it will be to create psychological and physical space for ourselves in the old house, this is right. I am reading Hospicing Modernity on this trip (I left it here a few weeks ago), and it is as if it were planted just for this phase of the transition. Five sentences from the "Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness" exercise that speak directly to me now:

Feel your entanglement with everything, including the ugly, the broken, and the messed up.

Relate beyond desires for coherence, purity, and perfection.

Deactivate your cravings for protagonism, greatness, or legacy.

Mourn your illusions, compost your shit, ferment yourself.

Dissolve the limits and weight of your body, allowing others to move through, with, and for you.

[akeshabaron]

Quien soy

I am the granddaughter of two Holocaust refugees from the AustroHungarian Empire and two midwestern American farmers of earlier provenance from Western Europe; daughter of two hippies who met in a time of great possibility in the fragrant valleys of the Okanagan; mother of a Pakistani-descended child; spouse of a musician who will always have an undomesticated soul. I also have an adopted family that I have accompanied for the past thirty years for greater and shorter spells of time, a family of Tzotzil Mayan Indians living in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. I began to learn their language (Tzotzil) starting at the age of 18. For the last 15 years I have been an interpreter for speakers of this indigenous language in various US courts and some other contexts. I will use stories from my own experiences living with and interpreting for Tzotzil folk to illustrate some of my points as I go.

I am writing this blog because it is clear to me, as Martín Prechtel has said repeatedly, that modern culture has gotten onto a pretty bad track. I have always felt since my preteen years that something is missing from western culture, the “culture” (if we can even call it that) that has now been exported around the world as the pinnacle of progress, development and civilization. I have spent the last 40 years studying cultures, driven especially to learn everything I could about living (or until recently living) indigenous cultures all over the world. That there are now books authored by indigenous and aboriginal writers is a joy and benefit I cannot praise enough. The writers and speakers I love most are not academics, but rather outside of the mainstream as I myself have been, and they are therefore not squeamish about including profound observations about spiritual health and spiritual disease as they see these. I would reference here Pat McCabe, Ilarion Merculieff, Yuria Celidwen, Johnny Moses, Virginia Beavert, and Tyson Yunkaporta, in addition to Martín Prechtel. It is time to bring these ideas into popular awareness, for we can no longer afford to pretend that the spiritual health of our world is not directly connected to the knowledge and lifeways that our indigenous ancestors have always protected, knowing that such practices and ways of being protected, in turn, the source of life herself.

I am writing a blog rather than a book because I don't want to wait to get these ideas out there, and I don't want barriers for anyone. I choose free and immediate access to any ideas that might help in these times of great crisis. Lastly, I believe strongly in the need to return to a maternal gift economy: let us, in so far as is possible, remove money from the center of our lives and concerns, and begin to remember ways to care for each other that are in fact how humanity survived before the last few millenia introduced debt and enslavement (see Debt: the First Five Thousand Years by David Graeber for a detailed history of how money arose in tandem with governments and armies, who dominated through farflung military control that required the use of displaced people: soldiers).