Your description of belonging, as a child, to a place and time and community reminds me of how I feel/felt moving to Montana this year. I was born and raised in California and never knew what "home" felt like until now. Didn't know it was possible to have such a connection to a landscape.
It's really amazing to me how we all conjure that feeling in different ways and from different places, sometimes so unexpectedly! Can't wait to read about how that manifested during your trip back to AK.
That smile says it all!!! Oh I’m so glad a clear directive came from your ceremony and got you to make the dream happen! Such a joy to see you there! And what a beautiful intention setting experience. It’s such a fine line with cultural appropriation, that does sound like a conundrum. I’m glad it was fruitful.
Side note, it’s incredibly refreshing to be able to read the unpacking of your experience so clearly. It feels like a gift to help others more deeply unpack theirs.
I saw this lengthy D. H. Lawrence quote shortly after reading your post. It seems to speak eloquently to the medicine wheel experience. Maybe to the mushroom experience, too:
"Birds fly portentously on the walls of the tombs. The artist must often have seen these priests, the augurs, with their crooked, bird-headed staffs in their hand, out on a high place watching the flight of larks or pigeons across the quarters of the sky. They were reading the signs and the portents, looking for an indication, how they should direct the course of some serious affair. To us it may seem foolish. To them, hot-blooded birds flew through the living universe as feelings and premonitions fly through the breast of a man, or as thoughts fly through the mind. ...If the augur could see the birds flying in his heart, then he would know which way destiny too was flying for him.
...And if you live by the cosmos, you look in the cosmos for your clue. If you live by a personal god, you pray to him. If you are rational, you think things over. But it all amounts to the same thing in the end. Prayer, or thought, or studying the stars, or watching the flight of birds, or studying the entrails of the sacrifice, it is all the same process, ultimately: of divination. All it depends on is the amount of true, sincere, religious concentration you can bring to bear on your object. An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer. And you choose that object to concentrate upon which will best focus your consciousness. Every real discovery made, every serious and significant decision ever reached, was reached and made by divination. The soul stirs, and makes an act of pure attention, and that is a discovery.
...Whatever object will bring the consciousness into a state of pure attention, in a time of perplexity, will also give back an answer to the perplexity. But it is truly a question of divination."
--Excerpt from "The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia 1", in Sketches of Etruscan Places, by D.H. Lawrence
Thanks for continuing to share your words. This was my first encounter with them; they're lovely.
I remember reading years ago that the Radiohead chaps all stayed put in their hometown (at least for some period of time), because it's what gave them their mojo.
I come from small town brain drain rural decay in central Pennsylvania, and yet even for me, spending time walking there wakes things in me.
Wheels In Motion
Nice! I hope you keep sharing your journey.
Your description of belonging, as a child, to a place and time and community reminds me of how I feel/felt moving to Montana this year. I was born and raised in California and never knew what "home" felt like until now. Didn't know it was possible to have such a connection to a landscape.
It's really amazing to me how we all conjure that feeling in different ways and from different places, sometimes so unexpectedly! Can't wait to read about how that manifested during your trip back to AK.
That smile says it all!!! Oh I’m so glad a clear directive came from your ceremony and got you to make the dream happen! Such a joy to see you there! And what a beautiful intention setting experience. It’s such a fine line with cultural appropriation, that does sound like a conundrum. I’m glad it was fruitful.
Side note, it’s incredibly refreshing to be able to read the unpacking of your experience so clearly. It feels like a gift to help others more deeply unpack theirs.
I saw this lengthy D. H. Lawrence quote shortly after reading your post. It seems to speak eloquently to the medicine wheel experience. Maybe to the mushroom experience, too:
"Birds fly portentously on the walls of the tombs. The artist must often have seen these priests, the augurs, with their crooked, bird-headed staffs in their hand, out on a high place watching the flight of larks or pigeons across the quarters of the sky. They were reading the signs and the portents, looking for an indication, how they should direct the course of some serious affair. To us it may seem foolish. To them, hot-blooded birds flew through the living universe as feelings and premonitions fly through the breast of a man, or as thoughts fly through the mind. ...If the augur could see the birds flying in his heart, then he would know which way destiny too was flying for him.
...And if you live by the cosmos, you look in the cosmos for your clue. If you live by a personal god, you pray to him. If you are rational, you think things over. But it all amounts to the same thing in the end. Prayer, or thought, or studying the stars, or watching the flight of birds, or studying the entrails of the sacrifice, it is all the same process, ultimately: of divination. All it depends on is the amount of true, sincere, religious concentration you can bring to bear on your object. An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer. And you choose that object to concentrate upon which will best focus your consciousness. Every real discovery made, every serious and significant decision ever reached, was reached and made by divination. The soul stirs, and makes an act of pure attention, and that is a discovery.
...Whatever object will bring the consciousness into a state of pure attention, in a time of perplexity, will also give back an answer to the perplexity. But it is truly a question of divination."
--Excerpt from "The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia 1", in Sketches of Etruscan Places, by D.H. Lawrence
Thanks for continuing to share your words. This was my first encounter with them; they're lovely.
I remember reading years ago that the Radiohead chaps all stayed put in their hometown (at least for some period of time), because it's what gave them their mojo.
I come from small town brain drain rural decay in central Pennsylvania, and yet even for me, spending time walking there wakes things in me.