(Last month we celebrated the festival of Samhain, a time of remembering and honoring our ancestors of blood, spirit and place. Since then, I continued to ponder how we might best honor our ancestors. This post is the result.)
The ancestors of everyone on the planet lived nature-centered lives for many, many thousands of years.
My late deep ecology teacher, Dolores LaChapelle, used to say that humans were hunter-gatherers for 100,000 generations, agriculturists for 500 generations, have been industrialized for 10 generations, and computerized for 1 generation. (By now we’ve added a couple of generations to the latter two.) While we don’t know exactly how those 100,000 generations of hunter-gatherers went about their lives, it’s certain that they were completely attuned to the rhythms of the land for their very survival.
This is confirmed by both the world’s remaining indigenous peoples, and by researchers in archaeology and anthropology. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and the early agriculturists too, had to be observant, attentive, and patient. We can also surmise that those primal peoples felt grateful, even reverent, toward the land, plants, and animals that gave them life. We know that they expressed this reverence through an enormous variety of earth-centered spiritual practices. The most enduring of these still survive today. From the beautiful annual cycles of dance and ritual performed in the Native Pueblos of the American Southwest, to the simplicity of Scottish and Irish country people putting out milk for the faeries, ancestral veneration of the natural world and its gifts is still being expressed around the globe in ways both large and small. [Read more…] about How We Can Truly Honor Our Ancestors
As the days shorten and the fruitful darkness of winter approaches, Gaia’s Blog is entering a time of renewal and growing relevance. My own thinking about Gaia and humanity—where we are now, and where we need to go—has become clearer and more incisive. And also more hopeful—which might be surprising, considering the state of the world right now.
When I was about 9 years old, another girl and I were discussing what our favorite color was. My little friend, in a burst of childish patriotism, dramatically declaimed that her favorite colors were red, white and blue. I replied unhesitatingly that my favorite color was green—and that it was “underneath” all the other colors. We wouldn’t even have red, white and blue, I declared, if we didn’t have green.
After writing Gaia’s Blog for over a year, I’m circling back to the most central questions: Who is Gaia? How can we understand and unite with Her as fully as possible?