Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [79]
This does not mean that our perception of these lesser differences may not color or affect power dynamics and the ideology of oppression. It does offer the possibility for greater discernment about those perceptions and broader accountability for uses of power. It offers species relationship and interdependence as a means to securing a future place on this planet along with the other life that sustains us.
Traditionally the cosmologies and social structures of indigenous cultures held the earth as sacred and developed the capacity to respond to multiple stimuli from both the landscape and other species. The wind, water, fire, rock, earth, four-leggeds, birds, insects, plants all sent messages. These cultures taught and modeled that humans were able to respond to these messages as details of the landscape. The teachings of indigenous peoples abound with these practical applications of relational thinking and subtle distinctions of interdependence and difference.
These indigenous wisdom traditions were born out of deep understanding and connection to cultural or environmental relationships to specific geographic locations. In many indigenous languages the names of different nations, tribes, and sub-tribes held both the idea of humans and their relationship to a specific place or geography (the river people, the mountain dwellers, the people who scatter their own). These languages held the names of the people beside the names of the other nations or species (the stone people, the standing people) defined and framed by the immediate geography. Difference had everything to do with relationship to the specific place.
In an evolving world, living now calls us to evolve our understanding of “indigenous” beyond culture and specific locale to an awareness of it as the basic link of consciousness in all life including humans and our planet Earth. lndigenous mind is an evolution of awareness of our natural state of relatedness. Opening to it shifts our perceptions of difference. It calls us to adapt our orientation and build our individual and collective capacity for thinking relationally. lndigenous mind enhances our ability to move from the micro: our particular locale to the macro: the relationship of facet or specific to the Whole.
What we need is a new orientation for the cartography of interdependence. We need compass points to align us with the larger web of relationship, our specific place in the moment and the mechanism that corrects our course. Spiration is our orientation and is linked to the automatic function of breathing. Aspiration is the North Star that lifts our gaze upward and guides us to remember the larger web of relationship. Inspiration is our inward awareness of that guidance in our moments of choice available at each breath. Respiration grounds us in the details of our lives. AIR.
My nature binds me to the earth as tightly as I am bound to tree and plant producing oxygen, not only for physical survival, but for the awareness of myself as part of the planet and her changes—not as cause or solution, but as an intimate and dynamic detail of her process. I can fall prey to the rhetoric and drama of issues, events, and emotions or I can breathe into the tiny moments of choice that allow me to collaborate and participate in my own unique way as a partner with the earth throughout the web of relationships with all other species.
I can continue to ask “how do I live my life right now?” or I can take a breath and remember—to listen as well as talk to nature, to receive the breath of the earth through plants and trees, to feel the smallest vibration of relationship in our actions—to redeem my indigenous mind and move from human centered thinking to earth centered perception. We have the power to live our lives right now with a new orientation—to listen to the layers of species on the planet for their