Robert C. Koehler
The participants in this unique dialogue may have been doing no less than opening the window on the next 500 years.
As scary and stupefying as our world sometimes seems, we are at a place of enormous potential right now -- a transition point of unprecedented understanding among cultures and peoples and worldviews. Pushing that understanding, creating, in the words of the late physicist
Last week I attended the 12th annual Language of
This is how the world's indigenous people see things. They always have. Reverently tied to place, they have been the natural world's caretakers for thousands of years. They are of the world, living not just sustainably but in intimate relationship with their sacred piece of Planet Earth.
"We are a people who never made singing or dancing unrespected ways of knowing," said
And now . . . now . . . 500 years after Western conquistadors subdued and divided the planet, devastating indigenous people on every continent and, while they were at it, pushing the natural world to the brink of eco-collapse, we are turning -- some of us -- to the wisdom of connectedness that has been ours for the asking all along.
This isn't easy or simple. Our disconnect from one another, from ourselves and from the natural world is embedded in the Western languages, which break the world into millions of discrete, manipulable pieces, called nouns ("My name is Matthew. I'm a nounaholic," cried linguist
Just as I began writing this column, the New Yorker arrived in the mail. On the cover of the
With eerie synchronicity, the water on the New Yorker cover flows back to the dialogue. Speaking about the BP oil spill, SEED founder
"The assumption of the laws (of science)," said biophysicist
These words begin to get at the vibration of the conference -- this exercise in participatory consciousness -- which struck at the core of something vital. The ostensible subject of the 12th Language of Spirit dialogue was time. The speakers dismantled linear time, the kind that moves in a straight line and pulls us along on its track. (In the U.S., time wasn't standardized until 1886, when the railroads demanded it.) Nonlinear time -- the timelessness of dreaming, reverence, prayer and awe -- filled the room, and I could feel the living universe pulse. It pulsed with love.
"The eagle is more valuable to you alive" than as merely a source of feathers, said Chickasaw poet
It also pulsed with anger. Writer
"Hurt people hurt people," she added. "Europeans have moved into every part of this planet and hurt people." She offered the plea that we in the disconnected West find our own roots, dig "way back into our own traumatic history" and begin to heal our brokenness.
And for the first time in my life I found myself groping in the darkness of my own past, beyond a few generations of known ancestors and beyond my identity as an American, toward an ancient tribal commonality that has fallen out of history, and I felt a slow give in the assumptions of my life.
"Everyone is indigenous," said
Available at Amazon.com:
The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern
At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes
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(C) 2010 Robert C. Koehler