The Grandfathers, part 2 by Sara Wright

Yesterday’s post which you can read here, ended with this line from the Grandfather, “The young people will become confused and when all is finally lost then the Creator will return to restore not just the Tewa but all tribal peoples to the land.”

I experienced wild hope surfacing… I had heard words to this effect before but assumed that the people needed that story to go on. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure… something about the way this man talked to me made me believe him. He exuded a complex sense of deep humility, knowledge and authority. I thought about the ravages of Climate Change and the disgusting cross-cultural belief that the Earth’s job was to serve humanity. My rational brain went on overload giving me a thousand reasons why what he predicted couldn’t be true, almost as if it needed to win this round (ah, Patriarchy exposes itself – if you don’t win you lose). Yes, it was true that we were in a state of breakdown… he didn’t deny it but he also made it clear that this was not the end. First we had to survive the breakdown, and living through it is a challenge that some like me live with every day. These are dark times.

I thought of my relationship to the Earth then, how intimate it was, how she was my mother, my father, my sister, my brother, my daughter, my lover, and how this relationship that sustained me when all else failed and whose foundation – Love – might be enough. Somehow.

That Nature loved me unconditionally was a reality, that she supported me was a reality, that she guided me was a reality – maybe that relationship was strong enough to overcome the final destruction of a killer culture.

My friend never said that all people would survive, what he said was that those whose lives were tied to the land would live on. And yet there was nothing about exclusivity or being a “chosen” people that was part of this thinking. It was simple. Nature responded to those that loved her. She took relationshipwith her humans seriously and responded in an unconditional loving manner. I knew this from ten thousand personal experiences over a lifetime. Perhaps our love of the Earth, our willingness to suffer heartbreak, torment, torture, even breakdown on her behalf might result in some sort of miracle like the one he spoke of. I didn’t know but now, thanks to him, a new door had opened for me. It was my task to keep it open…not to slip back into what I thought I knew from living through global catastrophe.

I thought about “new age” thinking – the belief that all you had to do was to “transcend” reality – step outside the murky waters of doubt, suffering, and fear – leave the heartbreak of the tortured earth behind, thousands of dead animals, drought, the millions of trees on fire, floods, polluted waters, air, and soil, and you would be free to make judgments about the rest of us who live in the world, not above it (we’re better than you – another tenet of Patriarchy). How utterly revolting, selfish, disgraceful, and insensitive… Above the fray, patronizing pronouncements of peace and tranquility can be made with impunity and superiority. The powers of denial were thriving in new age bubble thinking. All this when Earth desperately needs us to suffer with her, to be witness to her travail, so that together we might reach new awareness, another shore…

We walked and he spoke of many things that I am not at liberty to share, but as our meeting ended he said to me “the Creator told me to come to this conference to find people who would be able to help create bridges between tribal cultures and you are one of them. I was stunned into silence. Numb. I had nothing to give, Nothing. Believe me, I knew. I had been asking the same question every day for years – what can I do? What could this man be referring to? And then I blurted out “I am a writer…”

It wasn’t until later that afternoon after returning from the shrine that I had an illumination. One of the Tewa Grandfathers had incarnated through this elder.

It wasn’t just the Tewa Grandmothers that were speaking to me these days, but the Grandfathers too…