Adaptable Rootedness: Visionary Revelations of Winona LaDuke

"The other thing I brought up here, which I happen to always carry around, is my corn. My father, he passed away about twenty years ago, he’s a pretty simple guy. He was from our reservations. He used to say to me, Winona, you’re a really smart young woman, but I don’t want to hear your philosophy if you can’t grow corn…

I grow corn…it’s like us, corn is all different…this is a corn that’s called a Manitoba White Flint…our Anishnaabe people…we’re the northernmost corn growers in the world. Corn is very smart, it can grow almost anywhere…"

Winona LaDuke, speaking at the 4th Annual Tar Sands Healing Walk

Truly, and now, experientially, the life of waking reality and the life of dream consciousness are one and equal. When confronted with the practical evidence of vision, with eternal meaning, a deep mystery of the soul unveiled in the shade of internal belonging, I know. So, when meeting with mystic voices whose souls are married with the beyond in a harmonious union of the opposites, dream and waking, the mind begins to know the path of the heart, of intuition, love and sound. As such, in SoJourn(al), I revision virtual experience through the lens of a unique self-knowledge, yet in so doing, I seek to inspire visions anew in visitors whose wanderings are never lost to the immediate necessity of connectivity, interdependence, and the shared internalization of the psyche, manifest. 

When I heard the humbling voice of Anishinaabe author, orator and activist Winona LaDuke, whose bountiful and beautiful mind I sought excitedly for a devout listening, she spoke of my dream. Her musing answered the image of my dream with a new vision of the Earth. When she spoke of Manitoba White Flint, the earth fell into the sky, and the sky grew below the earth, the waters condensed into air and the air evaporated into water, and dream became real, reality became a dream. In her hand she held my subtle imagination of nights in the solitude of my furthest inner reaches. Read ahead for the unshakeable truth, as she grounded my nightly revelation into the fine nourishments of sacred knowledge:  

“In the morning, eat of the red corn,” says he, Herbsman. An ear of red corn emerges as with the pleasure of an offering, gift or invocation from the mouth of a ground and tongue of a seed. One kernel, consumed, and my flesh lightens with the bread of fulfillment, and all my wishes humbled with regard to the constant water that flows to the life of all. Cleansed, opened, revived, moved and lifted, I listen, intent with respect. 

“At night, eat of the white corn.” As the morning eye of fire stares into my forehead barely above the horizon, I yet see a vision of the white corn in mind’s eye, unknown on Earth. The Herbsman continues to pour the clear-souled water of natural wisdom through the mystic wine of musical friendship over each and every pour with all movements and messages invoked, intoned, and conveyed with brevity, clarity and unity. 

Returning Home: Teachings of the Priests of Dream

Yet, as Winona LaDuke shared with all Healing Walkers, "some things are supposed to stay in the ground" and so, there are visions, dreams and insights that are meant to stay in the subtle realms beyond memory and imagination, beyond the creative manifestation of personal will and worldly attachment, beyond the attainments of knowledge, beyond the bearing of tradition. 

And in the Medicine Wheel tradition, so the dream of the red corn for the morning, and white corn at night affirms the basic principles of the Four Colours within the Aboriginal Medicine Wheel. The colour red, and the eating of the red corn, affirms the element of growth, time and developing the mind. Whereas the colour white, and the eating of the white corn, would affirm place, achievement, reflection, and spiritual understanding. Therefore, the advice by the Wise Herbsman of Dream, seems a revelation to practice a harmonious way of life, where the morning is equated to growth, and the night to reflection. 

More, corn also teaches that rootedness does not oppose adaptability. So, as people of this land, for and of ourselves, we learn to adapt anew, with a sense of rootedness that overcomes dominant cultural stereotypes of the stale, the old, the past, and the traditional, and instead seeks truth in the likes of our Western imagination, as in the mind of Tolkien who wrote, "The old that is strong does not wither, / Deep roots are not reached by the frost". Adaptable rootedness is the way of the wounded healer, the traveler, the wanderer who, as Tolkien wrote, is not lost, and who instead leads all on with a prayer at each step to the beating blood that flowers in the voice of a pure heart.  

_____________

summer tradition

mystery of love

bridge to ecstasy

eye for simplicity

endangered light

___________________

With Still Unborn Eyes

A presence belied in the soft air aglow with diligent drizzle
            From this, our American lighthouse heaven,
                        Alit with dream
                        in stories told by great-grandmother’s
                                    Life lived outside the pages of the “true”
                                                And into the truly earth-quaking
                                                of dream,

A silent praise now unforgiving in this one unkempt death
            Blowing past the burly crevasse of a listless youth
                        Climbing up past the gold icon in Biblical temptations
                                    To screw women into their darkest pain
                                                In a house filled
                                                with the semen of timeless wandering

Men whose throats burn with the soil of their unloved mother
            Croaking up agro-fossil drains
Reaching from modern skylines to prehistory,
issuing from our Christ-death

In the end of an age
            As inevitable as the reptilian fate in the everyday brain
Expanding with the feared herbs growing
like weeds in our Western mythology
Built in smoke
and the knowledge of Earth’s ever-forgiving
blessings
                                                Bringing America’s children reason
                                                to explore mind
                                                            In the socio-pathic
                                                            lie of success and money
As we corner the livid
daze of the booming war
                                                            Fertilized wombs
                                                            manifest
                                                               As
                                                               westward
                                                               suburbia

In the housed mystery of our yet undiscovered world
            Beneath each colonial home
                        Shot out of the ugly worldview
                                    Misplaced over the moral genealogy
                                             
In an ecological philosophy
            To dry the eyes of our spectral hosts
                        Who watch and wonder
                                    With still unborn eyes


This poem was featured in my most recent self-published chapbook, Act or Confront

Dreams of Palestine: A Transitioning People, An Ephemeral Mind

I usually begin with a cultural dream context and then select a creative dream description, however when I read Rashid Khalidi's book, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood I was struck by a fact regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, namely that the Gaza strip is only slightly twice as large as the area of Washington D.C. (Source)

It is one thing when a dream can be applied to a cultural context, though it is wholly another when the cultural context can be applied to the dream. 

On that note, I have always been highly intrigued by the similar plight faced by both Palestinians and First Nations/Native Americans. Which is why the article, "What is Settler Colonialism?" by Maya Mikdashi has resonated in my memory so deeply.

For a great resource on Palestinian films and writings visit Dreams of a Nation

Also, see my earlier post, "Making a Home with an Identity of Conflict" on Rashid Khalidi

_______

A map of New England, pieced together with intersecting lines and pure conceptual space, is represented in a form unknown to me, a son of the land. An unmistakably present empty space lies in the middle of the map. The white of the uncharted territory stands out like a mirage over the sandscape, deluding the eye into such incredulity enough to trick any human sensibility.

Later that night, at my grandparents, I am transfixed by the emptiness. The open white space turns my attention inward, as I meditate on the image, as in an unconscious stupor, half involuntarily though secretively through my utmost will, unchallenged, I ruminate on the mystifying aura of a palpable nothingness so close to home.

The next morning, a family friend tells me all about the emptiness on the map. He is Arab, ancestral to the Levant, while a proud American. He tells me exactly how to get there. I am awestruck, undone as with a viral need, doubly expressed as an escape from the normalcy of the known and also to confront the other.

I arrive to a gate of barbed wire fencing, an entire society of Arabs, transplanted as it were on the uncharted map. A rudiment of the colonial present, a territory, though flown upwards with a gargantuan mall, the area is blistering with the heat of overpopulation. As I enter the grounds, I am constantly watched. Every passerby regards me with a hard edge, though delicate and unassumingly friendly. 

It is Palestine in America! Though they say they are Lebanese. I am taken by their quaint humility and sensitivity to intercultural warmth. I am welcome, though an alarming fear abounds uncannily as thick as the smog-worn air. As I feel for the exit in the train terminal-style, busy street-esque bustle, I stray towards a news kiosk to ask the man behind the counter a question.

Inquisitive as ever, I observe ruffian street children buying single smokes, and so I follow suit with deliberation, quite taken by the overt signage in Arabic absolutely everywhere. I try a few phrases I remembered from Egypt. The man is quiet. A deep pain seems to inflict his chest, almost speechless in the act of a simple exchange. The transaction, while gentle, struck a chord of such powerful resonance that I was never able to return to that emptiness, for the nothingness was filled only with my own ignorance.

_______

Interpretation: The Achuar and the Meaning of an Indigenous Map

_______

a reach
to touch Love's palpable drift
in the body of one Northeastern life
slipping softly from consciousness
into the unending scream of ignorance
as waves of ghosts piercing the cracked, loose air,
and our lonely exit comes to fruition

...

dreaming soundlessly into the never-ending swarm of heart

...

sensitivity under the 95 year old skin of true feeling
resonating in the earthy hair of guitar & piano strings, cut
burning in the night's long internal ache,
that fires the ebullient seed in grass-thundered vocalizations
giving melodies to ancestral brother and sisterhoods
calling throughout
the music of surprising beauty

- excerpts from "Fortune's Glutton" 

The Genocidal Unconscious of America

“The U.S. is a strange society because I think consciously the country wants to believe that it does good and that it has, you know, good intentions around the world and it’s not very in touch with its subconscious self that is a lot meaner and a lot more homicidal than the self that it would like to acknowledge.”

- Charles Abourezk, Supreme Court Justice for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe

___________

With an unusual collection of friends who have never before met in person, including my childhood neighbor and my best friend in Calgary, we all set out on bikes through a nearby forest path to the ocean. We are excitable, older and more aware of our environment than ever. There is a confident appreciation for the anticipated wilderness charm ahead. As we exit the neighborhood onto the main street, still lacking any signage dedicated to non-motored travel, there is a foreboding stimulus from afar as an interrupted vacuity of law overtakes the street-laden, forested horizon. We all stretch our necks backward, blithe with eager enthusiasm to find our way to the secluded ocean vista. As we comfortably engage on our briefly paved portion of the path, a paddy wagon stops in front of us. Lights blazing with ingenious madness; the government insinuation is of madness and futility. Officers exit their vehicle, pursuing our humiliated, fading glory with a clown-faced repertoire of deception and misinformation. One cop hands me a crinkled dollar bill. Hesitant, I grab its frayed edge. As soon as the act of derogation ensues, another cop hands one of my friends, visiting from Canada, a ticket of over one hundred dollars. Sitting down, exasperated with inner frustration, my friend refuses the ticket. I take it for him as to not cause a stir.

The cops press on with deliberation, attempting to get a rise out of us through any and every means at their wicked disposal. Soon, our bikes are in the back of the van. “What have we done?” I ask myself with intensive speculation. The air smells of fish and pig, putrid. Their glares are fuel to the fire. Letting us out at my neighborhood friend’s home only a few paces away by car, as to pour salt on our bleary, wounded minds. One cop asks my friend, “What’s your family background?” He smiles patiently and responds, “Well, I’m English, and ummm…” the silence is emphasized by the piercing stare of the officer denouncing his Asian eyes with an understated slur. “And Dutch!” I say, in support of my friend before the awful reception of the savage, unannounced feigning of America’s pitiful counterterrorism. Defeated, the rest of my friends join my neighbor into his house for drinks and an indoor evening, while I angrily bike down the hill to my mother’s house with the ticket in my pocket. “I’ve got to tell them about the insipid brink of justice coagulating around our neighborhood with such asinine hubris.” I consider introspectively.

Red flashing lights drown the usual calm haze around my mother’s suburban home with inconceivable villainy. As I ride smoothly around the back of the house to peer out into the driveway stealthily, I can’t believe my eyes. “Another police raid, we are innocent! The police are the guilty ones these days.” I curse their heavy hog-head presence on our property. They have torn apart the entire garage. My stepfather stands on his smooth driveway pavement dumbfounded, entrenched in the unwelcome malevolence. Domestic counterterrorism laws have been enacted. To the local police, now in full operation as a military state, no heed is recognized for the delicate peace and earnest honesty attributed to the very population whose lives have been dedicated to their government services. Through force, the government takes full advantage of the interlocking mutuality behind the dual inception of insurmountable trickery. “When will America’s children realize they have only cheated themselves?” I clamber on, to ride myself through the neglected wilderness path. There is an ocean beyond.  

_________

Police

"If the police are trying to arrest you for some crime of which you are innocent, it foretells that you will successfully outstrip rivalry...A dream involving the police means you feel guilty for not honouring a promise or obligation...The police could be addressing Karmic Law as well as the laws in our physical world...Old dream interpretation books say that dreaming about police is an indication that you will obtain unexpected assistance with a current problem." (iDream)

________

Preconception, the snowball effect, and the end of humanity.

Thematic Abuse.
Two Versions (one for public, one unmodified).

Lost familiarity.
Generations.

“What blue fire has been found hidden these last few days?”

“It is the tax of the many on the few”

And the brandished awareness of our single life
followed into the brazen evening with full vigour.

The young woman revealed her teeth
and wore a short vision on her ring
that lacked the ability to forget.

Her rhythmic movements lied agape
to preserve our entrenched faculty
to be remorseful and sick.

We lie in the unbounded grease
of a pandemic conspiracy,
a mass confusion,
ringing clear as the empty sky
before each face, it sings wryly
behind a mask of enraged pain.

“It is a race to the beginning!”

“The thieves of fire are out to lunch today and we have no one left to hear…to see…to be…”

The groundless mire of slick urbanized gore
lets a finishing cackle into the murderous air
as we slink in our beds engrossed
in the contemplative gold of our own breath
…softly giving way to the perfected sleep
that buys dreamless jewelry from the rocks of visceral stress.

“Illiterate, unreliable, lazy mediocrity, feigning humanity"

"Who is that
who cherishes the meaningless fog?

It covers our sanity…”

Animals quiver with stagnant pleas
whimpering in their cages
and blinking tears into the loveless dust
of the meat they will sacrifice
to a mouth blocked with a family honor
so loud it tears to fuck
all the beauty of being one species.

Feb. 20, 2010