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.

Georgy, Narcissism and Community in the Post-Communist Bloc

"I want my relationships to be sharp." Georgy is a psychoanalyst. He is a powerful man. His words come out sparsely, but when they do, they stick. As if this whole story really is connected, when I arrive there is a reunion of two groups of fasters Jora (as he is affectionately called) has taken out on the land since he got back to the Ukraine after the Death Valley experiment, and one of these was not only fasters, but their families came with them. He says it was like a village, almost thirty people in camp together, and then sending out their fathers and sons and wives and the rest staying, tending the fires, making food together. Perhaps there is space, room for our families in this work, indeed for all families. And what if it is even more potent, more powerful, that the families are there? That there is a community there to receive the fasters, and that while they are out, there is a community supporting each other in base camp?

How simple, how original. I don't know what it means. But it happened. And it worked. And all were touched by it--every member of the family had a new unique experience, and each member of the family participated in the story that came back from the mountain. How can these stories remain only personal, when there is a community there to send them off and to receive them, and not become something more?

It seems like Georgy answered the Uwe and Rebekka directly. You make room for and honor the family by doing just that, include them, and see what alchemy is there hen the many small circles of family join together once again around the camp fire.

Between two trees with Uwe Werner

Uwe is standing below a 400 year old oak. I cannot see the sky--the canopy of trees overwhelms it. But this oak, standing taller than the others transmits the light down to the road we are on. The leaves are phosphorescent green, brimming with light, as if they are convincing us that we too could generate our energy from the sun. Uwe looks up. I see in his face an old warrior-- he is a German man. He is a father with two families, one of girls, the other of boys. What gift does his story bring to this greater story?

Sylvia, his wife, had a vision. She had a vision that the community of people taking people onto the land opened itself to the families. A year ago sh was planning to come to Death Valley for the fast, but then she found out she was pregnant. Rebekka took her place, and now Rebekka herself is expecting.
The theme of family keeps coming up here. Mothers and fathers to be, mothers and fathers already, all looking, calling, for a community to receive them, and more so, calling for their communities of which they are participating to honor and make room for them in their new roles. Not just room for them as individuals in a new role, but room for them as the families that hey have become. How do our communities receive us when we transform from "I" into "US"?

Dark shadows pass through. A great grief that I can only witness in moments beyond laughter. Not far from here St. Boniface cut Thor's Oak, a mystical tree for the early Germanic peoples. Because he was not struck by lightning when he cut it down, they believed that his god was more powerful than theirs. He knew how powerful their connection was to nature, especially to the trees, and so he knew that to establish the church he must destroy this sacred life at the center of their rituals. He built the church out of it. There is a statue commemorating this act. I am hurt to see this statue--a man holding a cross and an ax stands atop the amputated trunk that was a great tree. He holds up a model of the church he will build on that site. He will build it with the tree he has cut.

It strikes me as completely barbaric. And yet it is a local monument. And I suppose it is. We celebrate that we were created. Not the means by which this creation took place. And perhaps we do not question that we are, we will be, will continue to be, even if such barbaric acts were not monumentalized. That the tree could still stand and we too. That our standing here is not and has not been dependent on the destruction of something so grand, so alive.