Keeping Our Agreement with the Wild

Extract from the chapter Our Agreement with the Holy in Nature of book The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic by Martin Prechtel.

The most delicious and comforting characteristic of the strenuous, earthbound, and spiritually drenched existence of intact people worldwide is the cellular detail of the knowledge all their people have of not only their tribal origins, but the origins of every star, planet, rock, tree, animal, sound, food, all mores, strangeness, mood with which people live with and by, and finally resting resprout again. 

This vast education is what makes all things feel at home with all other things and to know where to tread and where to be cautious: how to lie still and when to move; how to eat, speak; and what things are biggest, and which are bigger still. 

The loss of capacity, of detail in our modern lives descended from production-oriented imperial civilizations and may well be the driving force behind the need for science, as its penetrating need-to-know analytic capacity tries to fill the painful void of the civilization it serves to make up for the loss of the lyrical mythologic reality of the indigenous soul present at the deepest levels in all human beings. 

But the loss of this natural education has put out hearts into a zoo like condition of unnatural confinement, causing the worldwide mass epidemic of depression, of lives lived at a spectator distance from the warm soil that births us. Our memory of what it is like to know the story of every rock face in the canyon through which you and your pony ride, what it is like to know the story of how every one of these rock faces originated, and what it is like to know how your ancestral past appeared pushing in and out from their massive cracks, once lost, our memory of being at home on Earth in a real way sinks out of sight back into the indigenous wilderness of our souls, and we become meaningless and depressed. For without that memory, we can't know where we are. 

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People say, " I just want it all to be simple so my gardening relaxes me from the incomprehensible overwhelm of the world, so I don't have to worry about all this." I suppose selective ignorance on the right day is relaxing, but that's the creed our most recent ancestors taught us to adopt. But remember, just because you don't know what happened doesn't mean it isn't banging around in your blood somewhere making trouble with your soul and eventually your health. After all, anything not committed to our awareness becomes history repeated by none other than the ignorant and eventually settles in our lives and bodies as sickness and neurosis.