4 minute read
“Where the Horses Sing”
The title above caught
my imagination and led me to an article in Emergence Magazine, by author Llewellyn VaughanLee. It is an inspiring article talking about how far we’ve drifted on the cloud of progress and technology away from our connection to and understanding of the fundamental nature of the natural world. I soon found myself in a mental conversation with the author, not in disagreement, but more in a “yes, and …” manner.
At one point she says, “I wonder at this gulf between the simple, magical awareness of our ancestors, and our present-day mind, as cluttered as our consumer world.” Those words sent me spinning off in slightly different thoughts about those ancestors.
For the past year, I have lived in RVs, two small, contained spaces, each parked in separate regions of California. Much of the year was spent learning how to stretch my comfort zone enough to deal with cold weather using less-thannormal resources. During that time, I thought long about our ancestors who lived without electricity, propane, television, and grocery delivery services. How endless the cold and dark winter nights must have seemed.
However, maybe those nights were the key to their survival; the gift of time they used to stitch their understanding of the world around them into a unified tapestry enlivened by story, rhythm, and dance.
Cold comfort.
Not either/or; rather both/and
Our ancestors connected rational and imaginal (spiritual) thinking in a way we can no longer access since we have delegated much of our information and awareness to the nether worlds of computers where it lives as data points rather than deep wisdom and connection to the reality of the world.
Was their thinking any more magical, any less rational than ours? They lived closer to their land, saw more of the actions of nature first hand, but still had the same needs for food, shelter, and community as we do. Plus, there were probably close to seven billion fewer of them to bump up against each other.
Just like us, understanding their world was a matter of survival that required a technology of awareness, understanding, and remembering. They wove this lifecritical technology into the fabric of their lives through song, ritual, and celebrations. We still haven’t learned to use our collected and carefully stored data in a way that creates wisdom and connection to each other and the land on which we live.
Is our problem “rational blinkers” or our definition of “rational”? In a scientific age where science cannot define consciousness, we do need to expand our definition of rational. There are things we do not understand, things we may never understand. We still don’t even know where we are. We can define our neighborhood, however, every time we have a better way to look farther
Faces in Time
into space, we just find no end to other neighborhoods.
Our rational minds find it difficult to deal with endlessness, something without boundaries, something lacking a beginning and an end. At some point, we are going to have to understand that true, rational information can come from sources other than double-blind, laboratory experiments. We may not understand how someone living in a cave or going on a spirit quest can “download” wisdom and visions for our world, but that does not mean it doesn’t happen and that the information should not be received and explored.
The needs of our species and our planet are great. We need both technologies, the so-called rational and the less-tangible imaginal, to inform and guide all of us. We need new stories, rituals, and celebrations to help us deeply connect with each other and all the living beings of our neighborhoods, as well as the earth and all the rocks from which we evolved.
The author of this important article offers a warning and a wish:
“Without this quality of consciousness there is the danger we will just remain in the barren wasteland created by our rational mind, will not fully wake up from the nightmare that is poisoning the planet. Maybe the land and its spirits can welcome us awake, help us to fully see, hear, and inwardly sense the garden we never really left.”
The author quotes Black Elk, a Lakota medicine man who had a seminal vision “when he was nine years old that took him to where the horses were singing, and the Thunder Beings spoke to him of the destiny of his people, how his nation’s hoop was broken. The spirits called upon him to help restore his people through an awareness of all of life’s sacred nature and its inherent unity:
‘And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must all live together like one being.’ ”
Found Art
