We have a connection to a different way of being, to a direct living experience with this world.
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We once lived unmediated from this earth, ate directly from the forest, drank straight from its waters, slept touching the ground, healed ourselves with its plants, and made all of our decisions concerning our lives with people whom we loved.
We still share this connection, this lineage, this birthright and hidden beneath the layers of 21st century domestication it is still possible to realise that we are these same people.
Yes we have become scarred with cold and clunky armour, created for us by a culture of ‘civilization’ and death that we have reluctantly accepted, when and where we have grown too tired and weak to oppose it.
Yes we have been tamed.
Yes we have been domesticated.
But we are still connected under those heavy layers of subjugated wildness and urban disposition.
We are still feral, we are all still indigenous.
In this story there is no need to play ‘native’ nor to co-opt tradition, we are simply reclaiming what is ours.
This contingent state is something we now reference as a native way, and we feel that it has been somehow lost, and lies buried within our archaic and ancient ancestral past.
But the indigenous native path I am describing is not otherworldly nor does it belong to tribes from another time or reality, it is absolutely worldly and of this time.
It is in fact current and contemporaneous, it is my way and your way.
This way of being is not dependent upon us living on sweeping plains, or in rolling forest, this wildness can and does inhabit our cities, our urban lives and highways.
It is of this present world and the places that we inhabit, as well as the nature that surrounds us, the nature that we are an intimate part of.
The natural world speaks to us in a tongue we can all understand, she has no need of countries nor even cultures. In this way I am the aborigine, the bushman, and the Lakota. You are my tribe, my community.
We once all lived in this way and we can do so again.
It is possible to reconnect the hoop and to rebuild the wheel of life.
Photo courtesy of the author
