I was thinking of my Grandma the other day and how I was ever her student and how I wanted her to teach me everything she could about life, love, longing, hope, and all of her ways. It was hard because we could both see that her ways were sliding into history as the world continued to evolve forward. Some of the ways were no longer easily described because they lived in eras that came before my sense of knowing. For example, she used to talk of her farmhouse as a child and how they grew much of their food and relied on the store from only a portion of their needs.
She explained that as a child she could wander off into the woods and wilds and find fruit and berries to eat to keep her full. She explained that they had chickens and pigs that they even grew to be fond of and yet there came a time when the lives of these animals would be sacrificed for the family meal so that their lives could carry on. It was a solemn truth that she was neither in aversion to or proud of. It was a matter of fact, a way of life. Yet, to my more modern eyes it was curious, unfamiliar, and even a little scary at times to think of. I had never seen an animal killed and I had never had to kill anything in my life. I had gardens and even gardened at her side, but we were nowhere near reliant wholly on what was harvested. Much of our food came from some faraway place delivered tidily to a clean store with sanitized aisles and canned/packaged in attractively labeled cans and bags. In some ways the things she described were such a stretch that it was hard to even fathom.
The world was different then and it was hard to gain a sense of the scope of differences, especially when that world or culture or way of being fell away in preference for a new less organic way of going about interacting with the world. It felt better for us to defer certain tasks, understandably. We no longer each wanted to have to take the lives of our animals into our own hands to kill. We no longer wanted to toil in the fields all day and night for our meals. We wanted to serve in other ways and let others take those roles and live them and embody them. This left us lost to the connection with nature though. We no longer understand the life cycle of plants, the ways of the harvest. We no longer understand how an animal must be treated to be healthy enough to work or how to come to terms with killing and how that cycle of life feeds on life might work.
I was reminded of this because I was spending time reading about ecopsychology and the idea that we have come so far from our roots. We no longer understand how Native American people navigated an immersion in the natural world. We no longer get a sense for their ideologies that the plants and animals and all things have an intelligence, a purpose, a quality that is mysterious and sentient. We have come to see plants as mute, animals as 'pets' or 'children' without the knowledge to get by on their own but in the natural world they were more adaptable than we. It isn't that they are speaking of ways that are falsehoods, but ways that we cannot understand because we are not immersed in those environments anymore.
Yet, there are still lessons therein we can take with us. We can see through the eyes of the elder the stories of old, the ways that have come and gone, the earthy ways, the organic ways, the literal sense of farm to table or foraging to tummy. We can come to see that the earth had made for us a bountiful array of life and all we are asked to do is to participate in loving each other though the process until one day we ourselves give our very essence to the circle of life so that the system continues to mulch and feed and rejuvenate in turn. The seasons of our essence each meeting the glorious pains of birth, the edging slice of youth and the mightiest sorrows of dying and losing those we love. We want to perhaps whitewash these darker truths that we each must die, or at the very least sidle away or sidestep them but they are the very things that make the juiciest moments the most sweet because we have a veritable comparison.
There are blessings in these stories of our elders, there are fruits from which we can grow a greater flowering of truth within us. We can be the beds of the earth wherein new blossoms can grow if we nurture the ground for the seeds of wisdom to find hearty and well fertilized beds within our hearts. Thank you to all who have gone before me and all who are yet to come. May we make a loving chain of stories that allows us to sustain and blesses us all.
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