Our
Turn to Try
“The
aboriginal people called modern people the 'line people' because we
believe time is linear. If we woke up from this trance, we would
understand that time doesn't exist in the way we think it does. We
would understand that this is simply our turn to try. If this is
true, we can repair the past, and prepare a new future. In this very
moment, in this body, with this heart.”
Tracy
Cochran (You Would Run for Your Life; Parabola, Winter 2017, p.21)
Lots of people are having
their DNA analyzed to see what their ancestry is. I have not yet done
that. There is a family tree for one side, my father's, that goes
back to Charlemagne (8th century) and Hildegard, his
second wife. On my mother's side, there is almost nothing in the way
of known lineage, except for the fact that they almost certainly had
Native American blood. My sister, Jerrie, like our grandmother, was
dark skinned, with almost black eyes, and straight black hair. Our
grandmother was born to a tenant-farm family in northeastern Alabama,
an area of overlap of native tribes—Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Creek. My first cousins on my father's side show mostly
Scottish/Irish ancestry. All this is to say—we are all a tossed
salad of ancestral components.
One of the things that I
learned from Carol Proudfoot, a Lakota Sioux shaman, that has stuck
with me all these years, is that time is not the simple linear
construct that we humans believe it to be. Albert Einstein found the
mathematical formula to demonstrate that truth, but original people
knew it from their innards, and from their spiritual connection to
all that had come before and all that would follow after. Carol
Proudfoot taught that when we do our psychological work, when we
further our wisdom and evolve in consciousness, our healing extends
backward and forward, through the generations. Einstein called our
notion that we are somehow separate from all others, including those
whose DNA spilled into the soup that became us, “an optical
delusion of consciousness.”
We represent a modern
manifestation of all that has come before. It is my belief that we
are tasked with moving human consciousness toward a more egalitarian
way of being; away from warfare as a means of decision making, and
toward a deeper understanding of life as a gift to be shared. The
small town where I was born, Murphy, NC, holds an historic example.
It was originally Cherokee territory, situated at the confluence of
several rivers. It is/was a valley of rich farm land. When white
settlers came, they were incorporated into the native village and
lived side by side with the Cherokee. They inter-married, and
produced children. In the 19th century, U.S. soldiers came
and built a fort there, they rounded up the Cherokee—the ones who
did not escape into the mountain wilderness—and marched them off to
Oklahoma. Many did not survive. The Civil War split our family down
the middle, with some moving north to avoid fighting for the
Confederacy. My family stayed and fought. During my grandparent's
lives, the depression hit hard, and people had to go away to find
work. My father worked for the TVA, tasked with building
hydro-electric plants on the fast-flowing rivers of western North
Carolina and Tennessee. People moved out of the valley and dispersed
into other parts of the country, carrying their DNA with them. The
world wars moved them even further away. Nowadays, that little town
is a mixture of old and new, as people from many places discovered
the mountains and moved there to get out of cities and traffic. They
love the valley's climate and history, they are inspired by the
traditional arts of the mountain people, and want to live that
semi-agrarian life that once was the norm. Life comes full circle,
but with new DNA, new ideas and new consciousness. And so it goes.
We are one link in an
unbroken strand, connected to all other parts, both known and
unknown. We are not now, nor have we ever been, separate. The energy
we give to our own evolving consciousness extends backward and
forward, clearing and healing as it goes. Our children and
grandchildren come here possessing that evolved consciousness, and
continue the process. That's the movement of life. Here's the
question: What do you want to pass on to your children and
grandchildren knowing that it will be incorporated into the DNA that
future generations inherit? It is our turn to heal the past and prepare the future for a new way of being.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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