The Gathering

Ahhh...! The Gathering and the Return. I am still shaking from the power of community coming together.

In the Chiricahuas we witness and participate in not only an inter-generational rite of passage, but an international community coming into it's fullness.

In the words of Black Elk: "We cannot have the power of the vision until we have performed it on earth for the people to see."

The Next-Generation and their elders sit in simple ceremony before the community. The youngers in the center, their elders flanking them. Stories are heard. Not long, just enough. A vision, a moment, a bird. And the elders pass along their mantles, these objects of power or acknowledgment or lineage, these objects that throughout the course of this experiment had become a resistant point-- (who is to say I have a mantle to pass on? Why should we receive it and not everyone?) becomes one of the most powerful moments in the ceremony. Because objects hold power. Because objects are symbols of relationships, and symbols have meaning, because an idea is just an idea, a concept, a feeling; but once it is put into symbolic form, once our hands can touch it, can feel our arms holding it, passing it, and releasing it, empty again, we feel it so much more deeply than before. The symbolic object brings more of our faculties, our senses into play. And as a symbol, the ceremony brought all of the groups senses together, what was once a group of people, passionate, and purposeful, now I see becomes a community. And that is magic. This is alchemy on a social level-- this is the birth of the new global community, one of touch and care, of tenderness and voice and witnessing. A community, newly born.