To all readers of my blogs, I offer this post in gratitude to you, and if you are just finding me by accident, please accept my invitation to join me at the table of life!
Homeward
This morning, I am reading “The Secrets of the Talking Jaguar”, by Martín Prechtel. He describes the creation story of the Tzutujil Maya, his people of the village of Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. The tribe is a Tree and each person in the tribe is born through layers of four other worlds, like the parts of a tree: roots, heartwood, xylem, and bark. In each life Grandmother and Grandfather dieties speak words that create the person, who is eventually born into this life as “earth fruit”, welcomed by others in the tribe who will help him or her remember. Martín says “The fifth world gave all those Old People’s words a place to have form and run around, happy to be alive and eating together.” The Dieties not only created the people through passages in those other worlds, but they sustain this world of the fruiting body, “where we enjoyed what they could not.” *
This Tree originates in the place of the village. The Tzutujil people did not come from somewhere else in the past to take residence here. The world is created here, in their village, so much so that their language has no phrase for leaving home. Every step away from the village is a step of returning Home. Martín continues describing the village relationship to these other worlds in a beautiful way, but I wait here for a moment to catch up. I feel the beauty of these people who are created during multiple lifetimes in world rooted in the Earth of their living. My heart is struck that they are born into life in this HOME tribe and place, to enjoy the pleasures and gifts of living together, eating, moving as the Dieties who made them cannot.
The religious tradition I was born into also has a belief that we humans experience life in a way that our Creator cannot, and we are the envy of Angels because we have this earthly experience. The Judeo-Christian creation story says that God made humans out of the earth, wetting dry clay with his spit and forming a man. He gave man everything on earth for his good, and give him power over it. Dominion is how the King James Version of the Bible translates this husbandry of Life’s bounty. All the creatures, male and female, were given life to be of use to and subject to Man. Eventually, almost reluctantly, God realized that Man needed to have sex and a help mate if he was to fulfill his purpose of dominion, so God created Woman from the body of Man.
So we are made of earth, and we are given Earth to use, but Home is elsewhere. Christian mythology tells us that we are visitors here on Earth, and home is in heaven, with God, and Christ. We are sojourning invaders, strangers in this Life, here to use what’s been given to us for a little while, and return home. We are God’s ambassadors to Life, sent to experience what Heavenly beings cannot experience, but the primary experience we are expected to have is one of estrangement from God, a separation that fills us with longing to return Home. We descend from the Purity and Bliss of a heavenly Home with Divine, through the vulgar vehicle of sex and birth through a woman’s body, into separation, with the charge to take dominion over all we see, including other human beings, all the while longing for home, feeling lost. The religion of my childhood talked about that a lot: we are lost, here on earth.
I was lost, and confused. As a child I lived in Nature, in the woods and fields and skies, and felt Divine Life pulse through me. And every Sunday, I would dutifully allow myself to be regaled with evidence of my own sinfulness and separation, my ugliness and unworthiness. All around me was evidence of beauty, blessing, and grace, but I was unworthy to participate, along with the other exiles from Heaven in my family, church, and community. I became a spiritual wanderer, and exiled myself from Nature to the city, sought communion and salvation in Art, and in making my own household and family.
Like the Israelites I wandered for 40 years, until I found myself in desperate expectancy on a threshold. In that doorway, I accepted an invitation to Vision Quest and found myself praying on the ground in the dark in a sweat lodge. There, with Brother Yeshua resting his head on my right shoulder, I came Home. I took root in the Earth, and began to remember. My gratitude to you, my companions, guides and teachers in our remembering, is so deep I hardly know how to speak it. I am grateful to Grandfather Joseph for his familiar relationship with mystical realms and an introduction to our relatives from other Galaxies. Even they are not separated from us by space/time, but teach us that Out There is really HERE and we experience this through sound, and breath-matter-movement. I am grateful to Nut Tmu-Ankh for helping me remember to walk consciously in the orgasmic union of earth and sky, that I am the fruit of a perpetual Cosmic Orgasm. I am grateful to all the indigenous people of Earth, who have remembered the ceremonies of connecting with their place, the Dieties that sustain their Home in the Cosmic Dreaming that lives through this precious planet. I am grateful to Martín and the Tzutujil for the metaphor of the Tree of Creation, through which I can feel my own belonging here.
I am grateful to you, my brother/sister Fruiting Bodies, an interweaving of tribes among seven billion other rememberers. I am grateful we are here and now, together, to have pleasure in one another’s company, to feed each other, to ooh and aah over the beautiful place we have been given in which to live, love, dance, and awaken. I love how we have recognized each other in our remembering. Truly the angels must envy us our beauty, our awakening pleasure.
Brother Bill said: “. . .the definition of Messiah would be community.” Truly, our salvation has always been in community, Divine root arises through us into Life. There is no Separation. We know and touch each other in endless intimate ways. The other day, Brother Olivier wrote: “If there's a heaven for me, it's THIS planet, THIS place and THESE sojourners!” As I stretch to touch his joyful words, I remember that I am not a solitary Sojourner in this Heaven on Earth, but I belong here with all of you, for this is our Home.
With Love from your sister,
Diva Carla
* from “Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: Memoirs from the living heart of a Mayan village”, © 1998 Martín Prechtel
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