Reclaiming The Indigenous Soul

For several million years we have been shaped by the landscape, by wind and mist, wolf howl and sunset. We were inseparable from nature and knew ourselves only in relationship with all our kin. We were one among many, finding our way in common with those with whom we shared this sentient terrain. The indigenous soul carries the long evolutionary story of our species set intimately in the context of the wild world. The indigenous soul is that part of our psychic life that is in communion with the life that moves around us.

It was in this setting that the soul was given its shape. Our psychic lives were made here, on the plains, in woodlands, near rivers and hills. Our original spirituality emerged with a growing awareness that something immense bound all things together in a seamless web of life. Chief Seattle reminds us and modern physics affirms that, “All things are connected.” When we walk in nature, some piece of us quickens and knows the truth of this fact. We are connected with all things and they are our kin.

The indigenous soul lives close to the ground, to moss, river and loon. It moves in springs and wind, is close to the breath of coyotes. It is scratched on rock walls around the planet; is seen dancing around firelight and is heard in stories told under the canopy of stars. The indigenous soul is the filament of our humanness woven inextricably with the world. Where all things meet and exchange the vitality that is life, there is soul.

The recovery of the indigenous soul is imperative. We are in serious trouble as a people. This woe is not confined to us alone, but extends to the others with whom we share this world. They are caught in a cascading net of sorrows, powerless to change or adapt. We must reconnect with this ancient strand of our DNA and recall that we are all of the earth.

We are living, you and I, with only the remotest memory of life intimately lived with the earth. Our progress has taken us away from the green world and landed us squarely on asphalt and concrete, microchip and mall. My soul cries out from this loss, this ripping of the primal matrix. I know I feel different, quieter, when I sit and let the sounds of wind, rain, birdsong and cricket wash my ears with the deep song our ancestors recognized as the eternal music of the world. When I walk in the woods, or along the ocean, my soul comes forward and breathes deeply, sighs and comes once again into the living earth. It is in this state of permeability that I can actually feel the world, register its manifold presences, and come into the full radiance of this shimmering terrain.

Laurens van der Post writes, “We cannot, today, recreate the original ‘wilderness man’ in shape, form and habitat. But we can recover him, because he exists in us. He is the foundation in spirit or psyche on which we build, and we are not complete until we have recovered him.” (pg. 56 A Testament to the Wilderness) We are not complete until we have recovered this part of our being. The ground of the indigenous soul is the foundation upon which we build. This is the basis of our lives, the root structures that guide our every day movement through the world, through instincts and emotions, intuitions and sensations.  This is a very different perspective than trying to deny, control or repress our natural desires to connect and live within the folds of the world.

What is native to each of us is an underground well of beauty and a fascination with the sacred. Our soul genetics is designed to feel kinship with the living world. Watch a child enraptured by the vitality of life found in nature. Everything about this world engenders awe, a pervasive and encompassing feeling of love for this life: The beauty of wildflowers, the hum of bees, and the sweet taste of honey, all swell within us with joy.

We have become accustomed to monotony and depression. We must come back to life, in both meanings of that phrase: back to that which shaped us and made us thrum with aliveness and back from this state of pre-death where our sense of who we are and what holds meaning has been torn from our hearts by a narrowing of our attention and a preoccupation with survival.

I know we were made to live here happily. Everything about our makeup says so. We are carriers of connection. Our psychic and physical design makes us a giant receptor site for engagement. We were made to take the world into us, to digest her astonishing beauty with our senses. Then, in the quiet of our inner world of reflection, intuition and thought, in the places where intimacy is registered, our affections are meant to be returned to the world. This erotic leap between our senses and the world deepens our connection and affection for the world.

I have been intrigued with indigenous cultures for many years. One of the frequently reported comments from those that witnessed these cultures was the amount of laughter, humor and joy they encountered. (Liedloff, Davis, van der Post) I want that in my life, in my community, for my son and the grandchildren; joy that is infectious and that keeps our hearts fed during hard times; joy that enables us to step back from the feeding trough of consumerist society. Jean Liedloff, author of the Continuum Concept, has suggested that happiness has ceased to be a condition of being alive, and instead has become a goal. I’ll be happy when, what? I retire, I get this new TV, I get my shit together, and on and on: the pursuit of happiness.

This pursuit is endless. We are, as one of my mentors said, climbing the ladder of success only to find it leaning against the wrong building! Living as we do in the belly of a soul-eating culture, we must consistently find our way back to the ground of our indigenous soul. By doing what matters most to the soul we are drawn closer into our lives. We will be pulled by the allure of village life, that genuine experience of community that circulates around a shared commitment to one another’s soul life. We will feel the pull of nature and find our feet walking deliberately into the woods and mountains, along singing rivers and blue-green turquoise seas. We will be in the arms of the living earth, an ocean of life-giving amazement. These primary satisfactions are what feed the soul and assure us of our deepest needs for connection and intimacy with the life around us.

The indigenous soul is immense. That is why we come alive when we move near the energies that inhabit the world: rivers, deserts, mountains, woodlands. Some arc leaps from our being and creates a link with this otherness, thereby making us one. Our loneliness is tied up entirely with our loss of contact with these deeper truths. We cannot be lonely in this world when we feel connected with it continually. When the finches sing, our ears become enamored with their beautiful call and if we have but ears to hear, we know and feel the corresponding cadence in our soul and offer our song back to the world.

Recovering this deep song in my soul has made all the difference in my existence. I feel at home, at ease in my life and body. The earth is longing for our return. One young woman with whom I worked could not feed herself in a nourishing way. She would consistently deprive herself of good food, as if she was not worthy of nourishment. One day I reached out to her, took her hand, led her out of the office and brought her into the yard outside the building. I cleared away some leaves and grass, revealing the naked earth. I brought her over, knelt down with her and placed her hands on the ground and I asked her to tell the earth about her struggle with food; a torrent of tears unleashed long lingering grief about her feelings of worthlessness. The tears dripped onto the earth and she felt the benevolent pulse of the ground beneath her hands. This was a moment of healing, restoration through the grace of the indigenous soul knowing its deep affiliation with this world. Her relationship was re-established and she is now the loving mother of her own beautiful, well-fed daughter.

This sweet medicine is available to each of us, offered by the earth without reservation or deserving. There is no earning of this grace, no reward for doing it right. It is a matter of connecting and feeling into the fullness of this constant connection. Our welcome is not predicated on measuring up or being on the right side. It is a matter of intimacy, of relationship with this world as she is.

Somehow along the way, very recently in our human story, a perception emerged that suggested that this world was not holy enough for the soul. The earth was seen as inferior and only heaven or some state of transcendence from this lowly life was acceptable. Our souls were seen or imagined as being ill at ease in the world. The world was a veil of sorrows to be transcended as soon as possible. I simply cannot accept that perception. I feel with my entire being that soul is in love with this magnificent world, that it takes absolute delight in the endless variety of shapes, colors, textures and scents. Jesus himself declared that the kingdom of heaven is spread over the earth, but we do not see it. It is here, adorned in every possible way by nature and this adornment calls the soul out to play. This was the lap from which we emerged and in which we are still held. Herman Hesse says,

Sometimes, when a bird cries out,
Or the wind sweeps through a tree,
Or a dog howls in a far off farm,
I hold still and listen for a long time.

My soul turns and goes back to the place
Where, a thousand forgotten years ago,
The bird and the blowing wind
Were like me, and were my brothers.

My soul turns into a tree,
And an animal, and a cloud bank.
Then changed and odd it comes home
And asks me questions.
What should I reply?

Our reply must be to step back into the embrace, into intimate relations with the world where we still feel ourselves turning into trees and animals and cloudbanks. This is not an abstract idea. I m referring to the watersheds and woodlands around our homes, about knowing those whose migratory pathways we have entered. Our soul is in love with the singularities, the particular expression of a gnarled cypress, the one-eared feral gray cat on the hillside, this iris and its amazing beard of blue. Love finds itself in the specific. Thus, our efforts to save the world must begin within the scale of what indigenous soul relates. We will save the world from our mass overlay of ideologies by loving the world tangibly, with our hands and eyes and our whole bodies. Love is never abstract. It requires bulk and substance, feelings, sensations, quickening in muscle and bone, where the anticipation of the other is felt across the surface of the skin.

This is where each of us has an opportunity to decipher how we can do this in our own lives. I feel we are coded genetically for relations on a multitude of scales, with the stars, with forests, communities, and with the smallest circles as well: a lover, a child or ourselves. We are supremely crafted for intimacy with this world. How else do you think we survived for so many millennia? I talk about intimacy not in some romantic fashion, but in that sense of being penetrated by some great force, to be engaged in the “constant conversation” that the Persian poet Rumi attests to. This soul dialogue with wind and blackberry binds us to the world.

I was talking with a group of men engaged in the deep work of initiation about the role of love in a man’s life, and how we have placed such confinement on this capacity in our nature. What I mean by that is that when we love another we are invited to love the world. Rather than a finite point where love congeals, our loving is meant to move through our beloved and then fall into the world. Imagine falling in love with the blue of the sky, the scent of honeysuckle: And why not? Why is our love cloistered and reserved only for others like us? When I leave here, I want to know that I loved this world wholly and by so doing I added to filling the belly of the world; I wasn’t simply a point of extraction.

I see manifestations of the indigenous soul in eruptions of celebration, enthusiastic expressions of gratitude and rituals of kinship, in shared times of grieving, all acknowledging the abiding connection between the human and the more-than-human world. The annual cycle of rituals that we have developed locally over the years has made it clear that our relationship with the world is deepened and affirmed by these actions. These gatherings strengthen our sense of connection with all life. Our annual “Gratitude For All That Is Thanksgiving Ritual,” is a three day gathering that addresses our intimate and primary bond with all creation. When we pause, even for a brief time and realize our affection for the world, we live a more inclusive and relational life. We remember our place as one among many, at home, sacred and blessed.

Gestures such as these confirm what was self-evident to earth-based traditions--that we are inseparably linked to nature. We ARE nature. In this language older than words, we uttered the speech of the indigenous soul and the most notable word in that language was kinship.

The indigenous soul lives in a sea of intimacies, at home with earthworms and eagles, mountain vistas and marshlands. The extensive ground of kinship offered our ancestors a continuing affirmation of the seamless web connecting their spiritual life with the mystery of this world. What we moderns often experience as existential anxiety stands in stark contrast with what is found when the ground of connection is solid beneath our feet. When this wider array of connection is established, we find individuals who feel assured, carrying a soul confidence, which I can now feel. My own sense of belonging and kinship feels settled and I feel my soul unpacking, unwrapping the gifts it came here to offer.