(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.
Meanwhile, the dominant, human-centered world and its linear principles of entitlement, ceaseless consumption, and taking without giving back, have become everywhere more entrenched. Even now, when faced with endless wars and unrest, widespread poverty, and increasingly catastrophic climatic events, humans collectively persist in aligning themselves with values and structures that have no chance of moving us toward a better future.
In response, those of us who still innately love the sacred land often yearn to return to ancestral values and ways, and put them into effect in our lives. How can we manifest this?
First, we need to remember that moving toward a rebirth of ancestral values is not “going back.” To the modern, linear mindset, there are only 2 possible choices: continuing forward or going backward. In contrast, the natural world shows us circles and cycles, spirals and returns. We can therefore think about spiraling around into something that is both old and new: an older, deeper ancestral reality of love and respect for the land, but one in which, sadly, that land is now depleted and overpopulated, leaving its lifeweb weak and tattered.
And what about us, the ones returning? We are also a mix of weak and strong, ignorant and wise. Our strength comes when we recognize that this journey is one of becoming ever more fully who we really, authentically are. As scions of those 100,000 generations, we know that we are strands in the earth’s vast, ever-evolving tapestry. Our difficulties have arisen more recently, from the relative handful of generations of near-ubiquitous human privilege, where the entire natural world is treated as merely a source of resources, wealth and ease for narrowly-defined human thriving.
Our early ancestors might have experienced droughts, floods, and famine, and even shivered through ice ages—but it’s certain that they never lived in a world where human beings are the earth’s apex predator, exploiting every species and ruining every habitat and landscape. Nevertheless, even now, ancestral values can offer us essential guidance, both practical and spiritual, in our work of restoring wholeness to the land and ourselves.
What ancestral principles can support good changes in human societies? A primary one is that, instead of being human-centered, we must return to being bio-centered, that is, focusing on the health of the total ecosystem within which we live. When we give up our self-important human exceptionalism, we can take our true place in the lifeweb. We can commit to the thriving of the whole rather than acting like the most important, deserving members of it. This radical shift could ground enormous changes within us, and point us in positive social, political and economic directions too.
When we come to know ourselves as one with all life around us, we begin to feel the presence of the mysterious, immaterial beings that are also part of the land. Ancestral cultures the world over knew about these entities. Whether they called them faeries, orishas, or kachinas, early people knew that these wise, divine beings play a crucial role in securing the energetic existence of our planet. Allying with them is part of harmonizing with the land in our place on earth.
Essential to all of our relationships is the principle of reciprocity. Instead of taking whatever we want from a sense of superiority and entitlement, we enter into an exchange. Even if it’s as simple as offering a sprinkle of oats (in Ireland) or cornmeal (in the American west) when harvesting from the garden, doing this establishes a living, circular current of giving and receiving. Ancestral people worldwide had many ways of celebrating mutuality, generosity and reciprocity among themselves and the other inhabitants of the land. When we reinstate these values today, we are sowing the seeds for genuine abundance on all levels.
True exchange, instead of mere taking, can support deeply life-affirming changes in our communities and societies. It brings us into a state of belonging, a feeling of communion with all material and spiritual life that is profoundly nourishing. The most important aspect of living in harmony with the earth, therefore, is a real experience of love. When we know ourselves as members of the lifeweb, we come to understand that the earth herself is constantly generating a green field of love in which all beings participate. This flowing love is part of the planet’s indwelling momentum toward regeneration, which has been sustaining life for several billion years already and isn’t going to stop anytime soon. As we learn to partner with the land’s regenerative forces, they can guide us in working toward a more beneficent world.
When we plant this green field of love into our lives and the life of the land, we are truly honoring our ancestors.
