Each people, species, tribe, band, or clan protects and nurtures unique gifts, roles, and spiritual power (magic) that are shared to create health and balance within the Circle of Life. Carrying these gifts and roles is a profound act of love and togetherness with all life. This is true for the Animal People, Plant People, human people, and all kinds of living beings.
For example, one’s people or tribe may carry unique knowledge of a sacred place. Or perhaps one’s band protects specific gifts or roles, like how to honor the water, use plant medicine, communicate with spirits, or defend the people. Maybe one’s clan or family group nurtures special songs or dances that belong to the people’s culture as a whole. Or perhaps one’s clan carries the specific power of a certain animal, plant, or element.
When a people’s sacred knowledge is forgotten, these unique gifts fall asleep. The powerful love for one’s home place and culture has been hidden. The interdependence of life has been upset. Health and balance amongst peoples, and in the Circle of Life as a whole, is disrupted.
The dynamic process of reawakening ourselves and our peoples, that we call ancestral recovery, re-indigenization, and decolonization, is a path back to finding and restoring this sacred knowledge so that we may share our people’s unique gifts within the Circle of Life once more.
This understanding is not about romanticizing Indigenous peoples or our own Indigenous past. On the contrary, returning our people’s unique gifts back to the Circle of Life is a necessary act of healing. How that looks in today’s world is a complicated vision, but one we can grow to see if we give ourselves to a spiritual way of living, act with integrity, and fall back in love with who we are and the places we come from. If we do these things, the way home will become known.
Are you one of those people who will help return our people’s gifts to the Circle of Life?
October 2019 Update: The more I travel down my path, the more I experience the absolute importance of reawakening sacred gifts and roles.
As a people, this means supporting each individual in realizing their gifts, and then encouraging these gifts to work in togetherness so that healthier social structures can be recreated. This is one reason why people involved in these movements MUST be talking with each other, and ideally even living around each other.
As individuals, it means accepting the sometimes awesome and challenging responsibilities of finding our gifts and roles, and doing what is necessary so that they awaken with as much vitality as possible. This requires not being spiritually lazy, and being willing to sacrifice in order to return what is ours. We are never going to return these cultural touch-stones if we cannot commit to moving beyond shallow movement and superficial understanding. It takes more.
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Reblogged this on Unsettling America.