Spirituality and Nature: Native America
Imagine what it must have been like to wake up in the morning with the whole world yours! A land that was not yet divided up into parcels of private property was a land that belonged to no one and everyone. The land was as borderless and elemental as the sea or sky. It is hard for us today even to imagine this.
Part of America’s heritage is a strong identification with freedom. But we are no longer free to dwell within a whole world. This was a freedom enjoyed by Native Americans and by many other people around the world until only a few centuries ago. It was a freedom known by the ancestors of us all.
Still today, where we allow nature to stand here and there near enough to count for some part of our day to day lives, it relentlessly whispers its only word of how the world is one. The message can briefly overcome us in the smell of pine sap. It touches us when we lie in tall grass that leaves stuff stuck in our hair. It resounds in the simple refrain of a birdcall coming at dusk from across a pond or field. And it is written far and wide across the sky anytime we look up at night to be infinitely dazzled by the being of stars.
And it flashes back into our faces when we view our own photos of the earth as shot from space: a tiny, startling, and beautiful incandescence. A sacred space, as if one firefly were winking in a huge field of dark.
Colors. Air and light. The only place we all inhabit. The place we were created.
The wholeness that Native America knew close up and that we can spot from space, is something to which our divided world must return if we are to survive for long as a species.
Native Americans faced the only face of this one world for their whole lives, lost deep into the staring, steadied and unstartled. For they and those who came before them had always stood there.
We seem to have left, but it is only seeming and it is not forever. We will again live in a world made whole, this time by the willing help of our own hands, or we will finally shatter not the earth, but the possibility of our own long term future here.
__________
PS: As long as we’re on the nature theme, I just submitted an entry to the blog carnival Festival of the Trees for Aug. 1. If you haven’t done a “blog carnival” before, they’re easy to do – you just submit something you’ve blogged that’s relevant to the topic. Festival of the Trees has a link to the submission form. After you enter the permalink for the post you’re submitting, most of the rest of the form fills in automatically.
Part of America’s heritage is a strong identification with freedom. But we are no longer free to dwell within a whole world. This was a freedom enjoyed by Native Americans and by many other people around the world until only a few centuries ago. It was a freedom known by the ancestors of us all.
Still today, where we allow nature to stand here and there near enough to count for some part of our day to day lives, it relentlessly whispers its only word of how the world is one. The message can briefly overcome us in the smell of pine sap. It touches us when we lie in tall grass that leaves stuff stuck in our hair. It resounds in the simple refrain of a birdcall coming at dusk from across a pond or field. And it is written far and wide across the sky anytime we look up at night to be infinitely dazzled by the being of stars.
And it flashes back into our faces when we view our own photos of the earth as shot from space: a tiny, startling, and beautiful incandescence. A sacred space, as if one firefly were winking in a huge field of dark.
Colors. Air and light. The only place we all inhabit. The place we were created.
The wholeness that Native America knew close up and that we can spot from space, is something to which our divided world must return if we are to survive for long as a species.
Native Americans faced the only face of this one world for their whole lives, lost deep into the staring, steadied and unstartled. For they and those who came before them had always stood there.
We seem to have left, but it is only seeming and it is not forever. We will again live in a world made whole, this time by the willing help of our own hands, or we will finally shatter not the earth, but the possibility of our own long term future here.
__________
PS: As long as we’re on the nature theme, I just submitted an entry to the blog carnival Festival of the Trees for Aug. 1. If you haven’t done a “blog carnival” before, they’re easy to do – you just submit something you’ve blogged that’s relevant to the topic. Festival of the Trees has a link to the submission form. After you enter the permalink for the post you’re submitting, most of the rest of the form fills in automatically.
Posted by Paul at 9:55 PM Permalink
25 Comments:
Even setting aside love of beauty and love of nature, we haven't gotten to the point yet as a species of consciously looking out for the long term self interest of our own species. And it seems to me that's what it's going to take.
NVISIBLEW: Or try being housebound and abandoned by the medical system, without access to health care for a condition that's gradually left you semi bedridden. America's heritage is freedom but that's not the direction it's been moving in lately, imo, unless you're talking freedom for big money to arrange what leaders we get to vote for and what legislation gets passed to "regulate" itself.
MARK, glad you liked it. Something about Native Americans has struck a chord with me since I was a kid, I think because there are so many Algonquin place names around the state of New Hampshire where I grew up. It made me aware of the absence of the people who gave the places their names.
You write: “We are all one, we are all connected and connected with all things of this earth and beyond.” I’m on the same wavelength but here are a couple questions people might ask about this idea of unity and connection:
In what sense(s) do you see everything as connected?
There are also plenty of disconnections. Why, if I'm assuming correctly, do you think the connections are more significant?
I often think about the Native Americans though when it is snowing here in Illinois or the weather is a challenge in some other way. I wonder how they fared back then in their wigwams and so on.
Yes, they had freedom when it came to the land, but there were only 10 million Native Americans here in what is now the United States when the Europeans started arriving. There was no need for dividing up the land, because it was in such abundance compared to the size of the population. Still Native Americans were territorial, because they had wars with each other. Surely these wars were prompted by territorial concerns.
Something that crossed my mind when reading your post here is the definition of freedom. I began to wonder how much real freedom Nature in its untamed form afforded the Native Americans back then. In many respects although we continue to learn from our mistakes, we have been taming nature for years.
Also, something else I wonder about after reading your post is the question of private ownership of property verses communal ownership. Do you think it is better for land to be owned communally? Or do you think it is better that there be a mix of private ownership and communal ownership as it is right now. Even with private ownership of property, there are many restrictions imposed by the community as to how the property can be used, what can be done to it, and what needs to be done to it to maintain it.
You have a nice weekend, too.
Namaste . . .
Also, in line I think with what you're saying, my impression of history is that there's never been a "golden age." While Native Americans would have known forms of beauty unavailable to us now, they also had to endure hardships that we don't.
I think it's in Hinduism that they have the concept of this as a "middling world." My take on this concept - it's the kind of thing you read and then bring into your own thinking, so I'm not trying to speak for Hinduism here - is that while the world has seen technological progress, the overall "amount," so to speak, of human joy and pain doesn't change.
For example, Native Americans would have often died or become severely disabled from things that are usually just inconveniences to us today - infections, broken bones, appendicitis, childbirth. Yet today our ability to prolong life without always being able to cure the problem often means long pre-death ordeals with diseases that must have been rare to unheard of when the lifespan was shorter - for example, cancer or Alzheimer's.
OCEANSHAMAN: Really glad you liked it -
Keshi.
I wonder about something. Could it be that one of the reasons why many of us these days do not feel particularly connected to Nature and one with it is because most of us no longer get our food directly from the source like the Native Americans and our farming ancestors did at one time? We are separated from the source by several middle men. I am not suggesting we all do this, but when you raise your own food you develop an appreciation for how things work in nature to produce the food and you attempt to preserve and protect that source so that you will continue to have food.
Along the same line, something else that contributes to this disconnect, it seems to me, is that most of us here in the U.S. have food in such an abundance that we take it for granted and we do not think in terms of being thankful for it. We are spoiled in that regard.
I believe that it would do all of us good and we would feel more connected to Nature if we had more community garden plots (really nice ones) available to the public and if gardening in this way was promoted.
Having said that...although we are faced with new problems by living longer, Paul, this does not mean that we will never be able to solve these problems. It is defeatism to think that no matter what we do to improve the human condition there will always be the same amount of human joy and pain overall. If that is the case, we might as well close up shop and go home. We might as well throw in the towel and call it quits and not try to make things better at all.
Technological progress creates its own set of problems true, but I think we are better off today because of it. We are too afraid of technology and what it might do to us, or what it has already done to us. But is that entirely rational? We have so many really good brains feverishly at work in a variety of areas in our society. I am optimistic.
SUSIEQ: Yes, being disconnected from the land/growing food would be one of those downsides to modern life. I'm not informed about agriculture and don't know what a solution could be there.
A couple things on progress:
Technological progress is clear. Progress in moral and spiritual terms is debatable. That doesn't make me either an optimist or pessimist about my species. I'm hopeful - but human history on this planet is extremely short compared, say, to the age of the dinosaurs. We're almost brand new.
It seems to me you could pick out historical evidence to support either a hopeful or a pessimistic (or "middling" - not quite the same as pessimistic) view of humankind but that the bottom line is that it's really too early to tell.
So I have hope for people and I believe in doing everything we can to bring about the positive result. To me that's the focus: doing what we can. That matters to me more than my ideas of optimism or pessimism, which don't amount to much. But the more that more of us do what we can, the better our chances.
I also distinguish this issue from the matter of faith. While I have hope but am honestly "agnostic" about the human race's capacities, the experience of faith occurs in relation to more and greater than the human species.
Thanks for the opportunity to reflect.
We can care for our earth by recycling, using solar panals, etc. I do believe that we should take care of what God gave us.
I think that you are right that the planet will manage, perhaps super intelligent cockroaches should be given a chance. (only joking)
LUCY, good to see you. I think we're all on the same wavelength - see Sue's first comment and my first reply. I'd just add that while volunteer measures on the part of individuals are postive, it doesn't look like they're going to be enough. Unless big business itself starts caring about the environment or we again enter an era where government regulates business instead of the other way around, environmental problems can only worsen. You and I and millions of others "going green" won't matter if giant businesses all over the world continue to massively pollute the earth.
HAZZBUZZ: I wondered about that and figured as much - regarding the flooding. If things do go badly for us I'm rooting for almost anything but the cockroaches, but that does illustrate the point... Life is hardy, resilient, and adaptive. Even if we spoil the planet for ourselves, "life goes on" may be coming out of other mouths - I don't know, hopefully it's talking trees or something but not those spooky ones frm The Forest of No Return...
Often people's hearts are in the right place, but their actions suggest that they are ignorant about what it means to be truly humane. So, in that case education and enlightenment are the keys.
On environmental issues and big business: I think what Lucy said about what we can do as citizens (recycle, use solar panels) makes sense in our country because it moves the public in the direction of making market demands on big business to clean up their act and to provide, for instance, more green products. We can't hope for market driven changes to take place all over the world though due to the developing countries. And I do not see how we can place strict regulations on businesses in developing countries without halting their growing economies. Here is a link to an article from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. I just found it so I have not digested much of it yet. Business Progress Toward Sustainable Development
If it were not so late tonight, I could say more about how we are working toward harnessing the huge amount of solar energy that exists. Scientists are working on creating the right kind of solar panels to capture that energy. We're going to get it done someday and when we do most of our environmental worries and economic worries will vanish.
Also, Paul, some good news on the Alzheimer's front: Scientists on the verge of Alzheimer's holy grail
Thanks for those links; yeah, the environment's a complex topic and I'm sure no expert. Wasn't trying to suggest that there isn't a place for volunteerism. But with the problem literally global, I think it's going to be tough to resolve without seriously coordinated action that may be more than markets alone will see their way clear to taking.
One recent example: I was listening to a report on the BBC about how some countries are obliterating what's left of their tropical rain forests faster than ever. Why? To plant... I'm forgetting the name, but you know, that major thing, not corn but vegetative, that they're looking at as a substitute or additive for gas?
Anyway, since these companies know there's a huge burgeoning market for this stuff all over the industrialized world, they're tearing up the rain forests to make money by planting it and, of course, the net effect is worse for the environment.
ENEMY OF THE R: Thanks, look forward to reading your post. The connection between spirituality and nature interests me a lot - enough that I devoted a chapter to it in Original Faith. Whether paganism or theism, whether it's equated with the divine or seen as "the hem of God's garment," it seems to have a way of working its way into religion and spirituality.
Yes, learn to care for the Earth. Now there's an excellent idea. And 5 billion years is the estimate I always read.
It can't hurt to do something to make the healthy general public more aware. But the health insurance lobby was the biggest in DC at the time that I was involved in attempted health care reform and probably still is.
I have another site on that - may have already mentioned it, not sure. Although it hasn't been updated for a few years, unfortunately basically nothing's changed in that time: hmoappeals.com.
I understand that the founding fathers borrowed many of their political 'inventions' from the local conventional Native American traditions of conflict resolution but it wasn't all Walden Pond.
Fossil evidence tells us that the First Asians who migrated to North America killed each other with annoying regularity and still found time to accelerate the extinction of many large mammalian species along their way to the bottom of Chile.
As a species we have always fiercely competed for territory with each other regardless of where we were or what pigmentation made up our thin veneer to camouflage our primal instincts to own more land than our neighbours.
Now demographics have artificially inflated the value of our domiciles and they are bringing back those 30 and 40 year amortizations!
We went from free Asian wanderers to imprisoned mortgage slaves in record time. Sheesh!
The main thing I was getting at was the different feel for the land that must have existed when it wasn't all segmented and realtored-out and when you literally didn't know what was over the next horizon or two. The land must have felt more like the air, the sea - more large-scale and elemental.
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