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

In Defence of Sleep: Regenerative Sleep Cycles of Archaic Man

“In the age of the rude beginnings of culture, man believed that he was discovering a second real world in dream, and here is the origin of all metaphysics. Without dream, mankind would never have had occasion to invent such a division of the world.” From Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human, aphorism no. 5 

 There's a great lesson I have learned during the writing of this arts weblog resting on the role of the unconscious in the creative life. Firstly, let it be said that this weblog is a compendium of writings, research and dialogue on the wealth of inner inspiration that all of humanity possesses by the sheer facts of physiology: we dream. 

I have learned this basic lesson: sometimes in a person's life, they must be allowed to rest. Occasionally, every person must be allowed to sleep to bear witness to the whole nature of their lives inside and out, to witness the natural course of their consciousness as it dips and lingers in unconscious and semi-conscious states. Are we prepared for this timeless need? 

Truly, depending on the individual, one may require years of extended sleep cycles, to allow the mind to explore the natural caverns of its own self-regeneration through the deep psychic image-language of our internal/eternal life that lies exposed only when the body is at full rest. I can imagine that in more matured human histories and traditions, the seed power of meditation engages the body/mind in a life of inner exploration, even more profoundly restful and intuitive than the subconscious dream state. 

As we are not keen, and even unable, to allow the natural course of our inner lives to take hold and draw us inward for much needed psychological rejuvenation, there is imbalance in the world. So, we are guided by a higher power we sometimes call fate, or even God, but in both realities, is actually the seed of our own imaginative creativity too deeply buried to receive the light of our conscious recognition, reflection and inspiration. 

The old, or second world, that Nietzsche refers to in Human, All Too Human, has been divided and cut off from human life in an age of serious neglect, ignorance and escape from our own inner natures. Thus, there is imbalance, and we continue to deny that we are human, all too human. 

___________

What a massive elevator! I arrive at a doorstop to a metallic behemoth of elevation. Inside, a group of stewardesses welcome with open smiles. As I step inside, I am filled with anxiety. Am I ready to ascend to such heights? The levers at the side of the door are reminiscent of a plane cockpit. With a hefty forward heave, one lady initiates our ascent. The ground of Earth is suddenly imbued with an all-pervasive light. 

Light Paint by Rjcastillo

Huddled in a corner, fearing for my life. I notice the elevator has stopped rising. Has it been hours? Days? Years? I had gone blind, deaf and nearly faced death by astonishment as the incredible rise continued unceasingly. I am weak. I can barely look out into the world, whatever world lies beyond the doors at this elevation. The stewardesses are machine-faced, and continue to smile with an unsettling clone-like smirk. I need to descend. This is not my stop. My brain and face go brittle with overstimulated light energy pouring in through the walls, and it's overwhelming. Suddenly, I can't breathe. I am stunned. 

abstract photography by Getüm

Mysteriously, I am back at ground level in the blink of an eye. Looking into the doors of the elevator, the stewardesses welcome with their inhuman smiles, pasted like ice sculptures under their empty eyes. Do I board again? Can I rise this time? Or, return to the world? 

____________

Observing the skull-emancipated wisdom,
Risking vertigo and the sure endless night
Bringing sugar, tea and a companion’s brethren tide,
Bracing a felt language

excerpt from "Manual speech, a felt language"

Incontrovertible Participation Mystique of 1492

Priests traveling across kealakekua bay for first contact rituals by John Webber

PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE is a term derived from Lévy-Bruhl. It denotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection with objects, and consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity. (Jung, [1921] 1971: paragraph 781). Psychological Types, Collected Works, Volume 6, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Although Levy-Bruhl later went against his own logic and recanted his theory, Jung continued to affirm his theoretical suppositions.

He later retracted this term under pressure of adverse criticism, but I believe that his critics were wrong. It is a well-known psychological fact that an individual may have an unconscious identity with some other person or object (Jung et. al., 1964:24). Man and His Symbols, New York, N.Y.: Anchor Books, Doubleday.

Jung quotes from Wikipedia article, "Participation mystique"

Related article, "Particpation mystique: mythological cosmologies are functions of dreams and visions" on Mythic Dreams

It is wildly fascinating when we apply the logic of "participation mystique" to the impact of the mythic 1492 first contact, as the beginning time when dream and reality were clearly delineated in global history. Dream being the riches of the orient and our pre-contact Eurocentric notions of the world and Reality being another continent inhabited by non-Christian and thriving societies. Both of these two separate European lenses through which the Americas were experienced illustrate the post-virginal spring of absolute earthly delusion, and thus our entire consensual knowledge base, commenced.

Indeed, our "unconscious identity with some other person or object" has moved from the unconscious to the subconscious of our collective national consciousness, and only fully bloomed in the mind of each individual of mindful conscience.

_________

On a concert stage, a fantastically roomy floor for our world fusion quartet, my wife plays on the zheng, and our friend masters the Indian tabla drums, while I gather Middle Eastern style percussion and touches on woodwind. A guest to our homebound trio takes center stage. He is an expert percussionist on the Turkish davul. 

Odalisque with Slave by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres and Paul Flandrin

When the music begins, he takes the lead rhythm by storm, without mind to our accompaniment. He is so overly animated in his egotistical inertia. I become exceedingly frustrated, so much so that I stop playing altogether, and it seems our other percussionist is contemplating the same. As I talk with my wife about the unseemly course of events, he stops playing as well and begins handing out gifts to the audience, smilingly captivating them with an open charisma that effectively portrays our music with underhanded nonsense. For me that’s the last straw. I grab a glass of milk and throw it at him as I walk out in disgust.

Internal view of the O'Neil cylinder by Donal Davis

On the street outside the concert hall, industrial trucking and convenience store culture intermingle in an altogether drab disarray of poverty and addiction. Over-the-hill men glare at me, wondering about their next fix with vampire teeth and screwy eyes. I silently glide past, entering the dismal folly of a culture affixed to the worthless distractions of fame and light personified in an attractive male with the maturity of an anxious adolescent. I won’t return, and the horizon is still empty. 

_________

Morose, pangs stir my subtle breath, walking up the nerves,
To break down with laughter and see ocean’s rise
From the abysmal core of first being,

The naked home of belief,
Cradling Lover’s net
As a down-pressed skeleton, chained with ire

...

Coldly moving from place to place
Like numbers spit into the viral joke of God
Seeing white rice burn to blackish brown on the needy plate of the human universe

Believed so beautifully
In the back of a working man’s mind,
Stepping to the bold indecision of a wakeful conspiring

...

Across pyramids, tunneled to the foot of known reason
Yet, to be detached from an able body
Now roasting at the offering spit and waiting for mass death

To plummet from our towers, piercing heaven with a sufferer’s torment
Across worlds, times and into the imagined memory of the once-respected
Human insanity behind the art of the worldly races

excerpts from "Art of the Worldly Races"

The Twilight of a Psychopathic Civilization

“We also, when building a relationship with people, believe that they are real. What a psychopath does is they weave a picture of a person that’s really a dream. It’s a spirit. It’s not real...When the psychopath is done with you, they leave. They’ve never had a bond with you. It’s all been a game…feeling no empathy…” Paul Babiak, psychologist, author of Snakes in Suits in I Am Fishead

I've showed this film to a friend of mine who has worked in mega corporations, and been subsequently laid off for his personable style of mitigating interrelationships between different interest groups. Simply  put, he was not a megalomaniac nor a psychopath, increasingly necessary prerequisites for keeping one's job in the field of human indecency, the corporate world.

I live in a city where oil corporations run amuck, seen as the life of the party, and there are Fisheads among us here, this is a city ruled by psychopaths, and the status quo lauds them. My friend, mentioned above, who worked for an oil company described their worldview well, "they are a storage and pipeline facility, and their worldview is as narrow as one looking down a pipeline."

________

Arctic light fills the top of the room with a brittle delicacy, like the tooth of a gentle jaw in the unknown hours of a white night. I sit across from a well-known theatre music composer. In his characteristic black jacket, he eyes me with the filling presence of boreal light, as a friend in the mysterious haunts of a northern dream. I’m at work on an essay. The title marks a conscious turnabout towards the psychic rush of art in the unconscious; a memory become prophecy as the light dims and the man disappears with my thought.

Arctic fox in winter mountain by Magne Håland

Leaving my room for the main complex of the northern university, I feel on edge as concave walls cut with sharp angles into grass-laden gardens, while up above the window glass refracts the incessant sun with chilling delight. As I move through a room, I am accosted for passing over an international boundary.

Mikak and Tukauk by John Russell

An Inuit woman breathes with intensive definition as she explains the national boundary, seemingly on the grounds of the school. With a bright empathy, I willingly and pleasantly follow the guidelines and roam across the border daily, with attention and respect for the defense of physical difference. 

________

        Throughout the sanctified fields of one human home
                  Lived to the final digression into creative madness 

The right to be
        As connected as all beings
                  With electric happiness
                          Outside

- excerpt "Lugubrious Background Nearing an Electromagnetic Haze"

Mindscapes Interpenetrate Dream with Reality

Has a instantaneous image from dreaming or creating or imagining ever floated amiably by through your waking lens?

___________

One afternoon, I woke to find a red balloon floating in my windowless bedroom. The door was shut. As to an atmosphere from the imaginal realm, the scarlet balloon lifted, fading from the perception of my open eyes, slowly flooded with the light of the earthly sun. The light of dream had penetrated my waking consciousness. The red dream balloon had crossed into my waking mind.

___________

Balloon

"Blighted hopes and adversity come with this dream. Business of every character will sustain an apparent falling off." (iDream)

___________

“zany paradigms of falsehood croon
beaming
lost in a dream.”

high, driven alive
awry by and by
lively inside my mind,
finding a screen to need
in freed
[ ]

wakefulness, asleep
calling beyond
to meet the naked beauty
afraid, open

- excerpt from "Zany Paradigms of Falsehood"

Professional Dreaming unto the Last Horizon

[Werner Herzog]

"And how does it happen that we are encountering each other here at the end of the world?"

[Stefan Pashov (Philosopher, Forklift Driver)]

"I think that’s a logical place to find each other because this place works almost as a natural selection for people who have this intention to jump off the margin of the map and we all meet here, where all the lines of the map converge. There is no point that is south of the South Pole. I think there is a fair amount of the population here which are full-time travelers and part-time workers. So, yes those are the professional dreamers. They dream all the time. And I think through them the great cosmic dreams come into fruition because the universe dreams to our dreams. And, I think that there is many different ways for the reality to bring itself forward and dreaming is definitely one of those ways." 

From the film, "Encounters at the End of the World"

__________

"In the upswing of a jet train

cooling into the sonic blues

of a new world horizon

soothing the answers of the afraid

in mundane pockets of strange insignificance,

a judgment inane"

excerpt from "Improbability of tongue and belly in Upswing"