underXposed

The power of love is greater than the love of power–Unknown

This post has nothing to do with politics. This post is a clear digression from my usual rants about the dying hegemony. It describes how I found something I’ve been looking for all of my life.

I’m taking a break from my political rants today because I find it imperative to do that from time to time. I’ve recently begun another blog, Gallactic Taxi, that better covers this side of my life. For now I’m schiz like everyone else. I stand with one foot in the toxic negativity and misery that’s everywhere around us and the other in a different possible world. I absorb alternative radio (and read lefty blogs) with one part of me and to visionaries and shaman with the other.

I think it’s important to keep blogging about the heinous crimes perpetuated by the monsters in charge. However, I think it’s equally important to explore worlds that have nothing to do with them if we truly intend to alter our present reality.

This past weekend I spent on a mountain with a community of people who began as strangers, but by the time of farewells, we are now related by an unbreakable bond. Those 48 hours carried all of us through the most life-altering experience I’ve ever had.

My exploration this weekend was a spiritual one. I’m not religious in any sense, but I recognize the pervasive emptiness in this system that tells us “image is everything” or “just keep shopping” is leeching our souls of all meaning.

I think that we crave above all things connection. To heal the connection we once had to the Earth, to community, and to the selves we have lost.

I participated in a native tradition that few people are allowed to see, let alone partake in. The group of us sat all night in a tipi around a fire, which provided light and warmth and so much more. We passed around tea and mash made from hallucinogenic plant substance. We smoked prayers with herb-laced tobacco rolled in corn husk. We breathed in cedar smoke. We listened to the steady drumming and song that pulled us from those things we thought we had to have.

We got sick and vomited and the vomit was cleaned; we could express ourselves in the truest way; we suffered together as our bodies ached, as we faced our internal wars together. Sat and did little else as the sacred, ancient songs moved us with the rhythmic trance from the waterdrum and gourd and native lyrics peeled layers of civilization from our psyches to return us to what’s most important.

There were no cell phones, no computers, no televisions, no radios, no iPods, no cars, no electricity or lightbulbs, no technology of any kind–no time. We had only the shelter of the tipi as smoke rose up to the stars through the opening at the top; only the elders guiding us through; only the faces around the tipi with new awarenesses flickering behind them; only the fire that drew sweat from our skin, the drinking of the tea, the smoking of the tobacco, the repetition of movements, our shadows against the side of the tipi, the sand, those who sat around us, the stars and dark treetops in the black hole above, the songs, the community of us getting rid of sickness, the fight to stay awake when you could not lie down or lean back, sitting straight up for twelve hours, nauseated, facing the body and mind.

Yes, it was torturous, and yes I would have rather been in my tent asleep or anywhere else but there while I suffered and watched others suffer and wondered if I’d make it out of that tipi alive after the sun rose, or if it was my last night on Earth.

I will never be the same again. I will never look at the world the same way again. The experience reinforced what I’ve long felt inside, and took it a thousand light years further. It would take me a million words to begin to describe what I experienced that night and the following morning as the sun spread its light over the land as we crawled from the tipi as new people. The world as we knew it took on new meaning. Perception has changed.

I now know that there is no substitute for the solid earth beneath my feet, the winds that cool, the night sky, the patient, generous trees, the medicine of food and water and light and dark and love and suffering; there is no substitute for mingling with each other without shields and denial and defensiveness. To express ourselves within a group that helps us to re-envision our selves and go deep into our feelings with questions and discussions–to heal on an unprecedented level of cleansing and purging.

That which seemed important lost more of its grip–money, power, ego, technology, time, hierarchy, suspicion, competition, protective pathologies of all kinds fell away into a hazy distance. I think that on some level we returned to the primeval substance of our origins, to our human tribe.

An ancient ceremony, tried and true, passed down by culture keepers who keep the seeds in their inner sanctuary. To help us to regain what we have lost, to remember what we have forgotten, and to re-awaken and restore the deep underground springs of love.

I want to return there one day, because it was the doorway that will take me back Home.