I came across a video this morning of a bunch of women in an old barn all dressed up in raw homespun and they were singing and chanting and it was beautiful. It rose up through me and I felt that kinship that is within as all and that's all well and good, and it is, but at the same time I wanted it to be in a shopping mall where they all came together without ceremony, threw aside the christmas shopping, kicked off the high heels and just let the mascara run and the sweat drip as they found and fell into the communal praise that was in them all already.
And that's kinda like why I haven't ever really been interested in leaving the city. Oh yes, I've had many kind offers to go out and grab a bit of the big untrammeled nature and be my altogether weird self within her bosom of fecundity except that has never felt right... almost too simple. Not that I don't discourage anyone else that right but it's just not for me.
Maybe it is that I was born within spitting distance of a steelmill and that the sounds of life I hearken to will always have that beat going on. I really don't know and somehow it doesn't matter either... it just is what it is and I love machines and steel and oil as much as I love weeds and trees and rivers.
But I've always been weird, different drummer and all that, which was never really something I thought about except over the years the feedback from others has been such that okay, I'll accept I'm different but at the same time 'so what'.
To the point though, 'cause it's writing and supposedly it has to have one, and even before I started this I did kinda have one... but now I've started and out it pours I'm even wondering how to get to it.
'Cause, me, myself, as an illustrative quality, I'm all over the fucking place. Bit of this, bit of that, almost as if I've got the whole human experience to draw on and make use of yet at the same time, while I'm quite comfortable with that, it does tend to be a bit too piratey and cowboyish... as if I can't quite be trusted, yet that somehow too is the point.
So I suppose that the thing. That the video... and I better try and stick it in here, has the old barn and the homespun clothing and it has a beauty and it has goodwill but at the same time it almost discourages and sets such things aside because there is a specific uniform going on, that the culture isn't ours, the space and connection isn't ours... we weren't born to it so we can't have it, and all that is just a bit fucking bollocks. Except it's not wrong either.
Okay, I went back to Canada in '95. One month and sponsored by Grandma, bless her heart, and the land was sick. It was where I was born and it was hurting and I felt that. Maybe it was that I left at 7 and came with my family to New Zealand and whatever tendencies I did have felt at home in this land, that it was somehow wild enough still, and engendered a kind of wildness in me, that when I went back to the land that birthed me I felt a kinship trodden and hurting. I don't know. And it may have been too an uncle dying who kind of picked up, in that accepted reality, a sense that I had a sense going on and we sort of cajoled and coaxed each other towards whatever it might welcome within us. So he felt something and I felt something so we got the women to take us out to the reservation... to see the Indians.
And so we did that, a coupla times actually, but just went wandering without being able to somehow form the questions and also without being able to get answers... it became almost a vision quest, as it were, and eventually, through the mouths of babes, the acknowledgement came.
Typically too I wrote it all down but I've lost the paper I wrote it on. So what happened was I felt this need to explore why I felt what I did, 'cause it was as real as I am, and went off in search of what I felt might resonate with that and was merely perplexed and more confused. So I had to accept that and settle into it.
Anyway, I was given a paid job to do a mural at my cousins and paint up their room, these two young, very young, boys who had rudimentary speech, which interestingly there was a little worry around. So I did this painting and I kinda discussed in that painting what my questions might be about and then afterwards we had a big family barbecue and during this, with all in attendance, the youngest of these lads walked up to me, and loud and clear, spoke words way beyond his vocabulary and said " We acknowledge your presence, we hear your plea, and we feel your commitment." Or something very similar anyway, 'cause like i said, I've lost the proof... and don't need it anyway.
Back to New Zealand and again go back to lot's of fun and games just being almost tragically unsuccessful but at the same time always managing to make good and go off on all kinds of tangents and along the way the past lives kinda start accumulating and they all fit in quite neato, quite specifically there for quite specific reasons but suffice to say, 'cause that in and of itself is a whole other completely tangled up ( but only in how it might be explained cohesively as a linear thing... 'cause it just ain't) set of weird, but essentially it became part of my vocabulary, as it were, and I met a woman where basically there was stuff in the air that wanted grabbing and it tended towards native American so that's what I focused on.
Now specifics aren't required except I made a connection, and the Aborigines of Aussie call it the dreamtime... I don't call it anything, it's just what I do, but I had the audacity, that once I'd kinda gotten the info to see this woman in the light that wanted seen, to ask what my Indian name was. I don't why I asked that, it wasn't a concern, but it popped out and it was answered "Sleeping Wolf"
The thing is then that yes, I could go on building the pomp and ceremony and even badge myself up with this whatever it is except while it's kind of deep and meaningful to me it's also somewhat silly too.
Because I went in and read up on the founding documents of the Iroquois and low and behold, it's right there written down, the adoption agency, as it were, the invite to come sit under the witness tree and it makes total sense that this is what's been going on.
And what is silly, and the hard bit too, is that it's kinda got to be silly but almost really bloody serious too. The connectedness we find that connects us all, our ability to singularly, and en masse connect, cannot be lifted out of the connectedness for self importance... therein lies the fiasco.
So what if I'm havin' conversations on earth frequencies or picking up messages across stellar distances, so what? It's just my normal and it's gets fed back into the wider bigger normal which is all of us.
It's like the Saviour thing has gotten us to where we are now and it has been good, I've no doubts about that at all, but this tendency to put all our eggs in one basket, the looking for wisdom from on high as it were, these permissions and allowances granted with the pomp and ceremony of versions of corporate dignity emblazoned with the glories of "The answer"... it's reached a use by date.
Now we gotta look into ourselves and find our own permissions, our own willingness in the uniquely but perishable existence of our possibility, the tiny and precious similarities for a whole new mix'n'match, where we all get little bit's of whatever cloth strikes us and make our very own dreamcoats... or something like that.
And see... I can't just repost the video here. It's just beyond me so all I can do is link to their facebook page and you can find stuff which might be relevant... as in find your own and own it your way and share it your way 'cause that, I reckon, is the brand new, fresh off the shelves, shake, rattle and roll "All of Us!"
https://www.facebook.com/laboratoriumpiesni/
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