Earth-based cultures and individuals who live in similar ways always value remembering. Remembering is how oral traditions are passed through the generations along with the sense of intimacy with which they are shared. Remembering is how the great myth-stories are gathered to share around the fire, inspiriting the free flow of our tears and our laughter. Remembering is how the Ancestors are kept alive in spirit as sources of wisdom and encouragement for their descendants, along with the sense of belonging that is imprinted. Remembering is how one knows where the plant lives that will balance the fever without the interference of pharmaceutical corporations. And re-membering is how the medicine woman sings soul essence home after trauma so that original spirit power remains dynamic and nourishing within an individual.
Remembering is a way of giving back to life, of making wholeness within a moment, of bringing what seems like disparate events, priorities, sensations, memories, feelings, and circumstances together in a meaningful way in order to have clarity for whatever is truly called for now — helping one dance gracefully and effectively in the web of life. Our energetic signature as human beings inhabits many different worlds; that of form and formlessness, of the personal and the collective, of human and nonhuman, and of time and timelessness. Although many of us give this little daily attention and so aren’t aware of how we affect the big picture in these areas, we are always living out these different tensions of experience which helps shape these many worlds, as we are shaped in turn.
During these days it has taken the wails of the Bean Sidhe to wake us from our complacent torpor and it can be compelling during modes of disintegration, chaos, and hyper-speed to narrow our angle of perception to that which is screaming most loudly to us. While we need to allow these cries to touch the home of our bodies and focus discerning attention to respond with care, many of us will rush, proceeding through a very restricted lens; that of human-conditioned thought and untended emotion, thus dulling our varied sensory modes of awareness and depriving ourselves of the wisdom, support, solace, and steadfastness of the greater dreaming Earth. As a result we incrementally lose our ability to remember.
Without relationship with the other beings of the earth and their guiding patterns —the Loblolly pine, the early spring rain, the leaping trout, and the mycelium network just under our feet — tending to collapsing societal structures and the concomitant suffering will not be merely brutal and overwhelming, it will ultimately be futile. We are meant to live as kindred spirits, all of us, and if we say “‘No!” to this, then our ‘no’ will swing its enantiodromaic arc and kick us in the back of the head, for it is our lack of remembering, the disconnect from our true nature as respectful relations with all lifeforms that has factored greatly in getting us here to the daily heartbreak we witness and experience.
Is enough enough? Will we let it be…. enough?
So when our minds are cramped with anger and our hearts can’t stop bleeding and our finely impassioned nervous systems are on sparking overwhelm from the consequences of our lineages’ long toxicity and our own perpetuation of ignorance, self-serving habits and other iterations of our forebear’s errors, so very often unintended, it is a very good thing to just slow down….… and stop….. and start to remember.
Remember the wind and the rain and the voices of the gathering dark purple clouds that both thrilled and alarmed you. Remember the fragrant, generous trees that freely cooled you when you were so hot. Remember the ripples in the creek that turned into silver fire that time you swear you heard the water singing. Remember how in spite of all that humanity does to insult and poison this sweet, generous earth, somewhere still there is always a green shoot relentlessly pushing its way through the darkness to greet the sun with its own remembering of the flower and seed latent inside. Remember your own gasp of delight as the glossy black bird angled through and then balanced on bouncing cattails at the morning pond’s edge, flashing the red of its passion in a joy you recognize.
Remember very well you too are the green shoot, you too are the song of water, you too are the flash of passionate joy flung into being by the erotic extravagance of the Earth. Remember that you need all of this in order to be fully and finely human and then perhaps we will be kin again.
And remember how to love each other.
