While gardening extensively, I also write, listen to books and podcasts, and live a life sequestered from crowds. I am married to a combat veteran of the Vietnam war, am his helpmate and his ill tempered (on occasion) assistant. Today is the anniversary of Carl being blown up by a Russian mortar wielded by a north Vietnamese in 1969, He reminded me just this morning who made the rocket and why he is adamant that Russia is not our friend.
I am a mother, grandmother, daughter, sister, and friend. As I sit at what feels like the edge of all things civilized, I manifest being an ally of the environment, soil, creeks and rivers as best as I am able in my limited understanding and means.
There is a degree of anthropology in my long ago past which has colored my understanding of the world and guided it ever since. The world around me translates to belief systems and cultural alphabets. I long to understand our ancient history and how the indigenous mind works. These longings flavored a deep dive into the I Ching beginning in my twenties. I understood it as an alphabet, whole and complete of a world view that was coherent, holding directions, seasons, a creation story always beginning again. An escape from the western linear thinking I was desperately trying to shed in my bewildering life as a young housewife and mother, working full time, married to a lawyer, held in the bosom of southern, conformist, social norms.
Decades later, I began studying the Mayan Calendars for the same reasons. These windows into ancient indigenous minds, coherent and whole, moored to the natural world have helped guide me, as mother, grandmother, wife to combat wounded vet, in a complex racist society dominated by men, hierarchies and understated cruelties.
These days I have accepted my own ancestors as who and what I have a right and duty to explore. I have paid scant attention to them in the past, those damned colonists, Indian killing, enslavers. I wanted to have nothing to do with them. And yet here I am, the product of long strands of DNA, miles and miles of it in my own body, creating the person typing on this keyboard. Time to look at my privileges, my own place in this mess of changing paradigms warring in this culture.
It is time to have the courage to begin expressing my values and understandings.
I now study tarot asa source for divination. Tarot has symbols used in western understanding of reality from as as far back as Sumeria and Mesopotamia. It holds a patriarchal hierarchal world view that has been gaining strength on this planet for thousands of years. It also holds the directions, seasons, astrology (and thus astronomical understandings) of my ancestors. In this practice, I hope to find a path through the archetypes making up western world views and expand our understanding of the elements into larger concepts, once more woven in a web of nature and radical interdependence of all. I hope to have the language to bridge our understanding as members of a dominating/dominated society to the concepts born from nature stressing our collaborative and interdependent nature.
Today the Strength card came up as I questioned the Tarot about why to write and allow others to read. What you have read is how I responded to this card as a writing prompt today.
strength - publish to find courage while giving voice to my values.
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