STORIES OF LAND AND BELONGING

I'm going on this weekend event in Cumbria with Lewis Mehl-Madrona and his wife Barbara in October. He's a proponent of Two-Eyed Seeing, a modern Native American concept that values both traditional and modern forms of healing, without one having to criticise the other. 

 

Lewis is himself Lakota/Cherokee, and trained in the traditional ways; he is also a conventional doctor. 

 I recommend his book Coyote Medicine, which describes his path to becoming a healer. I learnt a lot about traditional attitudes to healing from it. He also uses story as a means of healing. "Tell me the story of your cancer." And then watch the story change over the months.

 

 

I've been on a weekend previously with Lewis and Barbara, and I can recommend them. This event concerns stories of land and belonging. Notice the typo in the link that says tories instead of Stories. Lewis can be slightly disorganised, but to me that is in his favour.

DREAMKEEPER

Had a few friends round to watch this film last night. Have seen it several times now. It's a great telling of some Native American stories in film form. And with a back-story of a road trip to the pow-wow by the grandfather-storyteller and his angry young grandson. The stories, the grandfather says, preserve the dream of the people.

One of my favourite moments is when they pick up a hitch hiker, a young white New-Ager who wants an Indian name. The grandson despises him as a 'wannabe' but the grandfather says no, he 'wannabe connected'. And he says to the grandson it wasn't these guys who drove us off our land, it was their forefathers. Being open to that longing in people that wants to do something, become something, seems so important to me, otherwise what are we doing? And it's so easy to tread on it if we are full of ideas about what is 'authentic' shamanism and what isn't. It doesn't matter, it's that other thing that matters.

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FACTS AND MYTHOLOGIES

I have this notion that we need to treat our facts as mythologies, and our mythologies as facts. In particular, science is the most recent addition to our vast collection of stories about the world. I try not to see it as a special category that supercedes all the previous stories. The old creation myths, for example, contain important truths. But we cannot experience those truths if to us they are 'just' stories: they need to be felt as real - in a way that is no different to, say, the Big Bang, which of course no-one was around to see. 

And here's something we're not used to culturally: being able to hold two truths, two stories in our head, without having to eliminate one of them as 'false'. When it comes to death, on the one hand I like to be true to my experience and say 'I don't know, I really don't know'. And yet I can't resist a song like this from the Wintu people of Northern California:

It is above that you and I shall go;
Along the Milky Way you and I shall go;
Along the flower trail you and I shall go;
Picking flowers on our way you and I shall go.

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