Today's Considerations
[Continued from yesterday: "Primordial Cooperation" and "Communities of True Love"]
10. Once, walking among the New Jersey pines with Tom Brown (a.k.a., "The Tracker"), he discussed how an Apache he called "Grandfather" introduced him to the ways of the indigenous peoples. I shared how a Cherokee I called "Grandmother" did the same with me.
By 1953 (at the age of six) I was already staying with Grandmother at least 4-1/2 months out of each year, loving every minute of living in her wooden cabin which had a wood-burning stove, no running water, no indoor plumbing, no air conditioning, and one propane heater which I could sometimes talk Grandmother into lighting on what I considered to be "really cold" winter days (though she usually did not agree).
By the time Tom crossed paths with Grandfather, and by the time I began staying with Grandmother, both of those very old and very wise "native Americans" were living alone in the forest and in the solitude, but both - in sharing with us their stories about the ways of the indigenous peoples and about those who preceded them by thousands of years - were two people that had always been in touch with nature, that had always lived naturally, that had always understood the unicity, and that had grown up with relatives and friends that were all in touch with a primordial sense of cooperation and a Community of One and a sense of True Love.
[Maharaj: "Love is knowing I am everything; wisdom is knowing I am nothing."]
The days not spent in the solitude offered by extended stays with Grandmother were passed in an inner-city, slum-like, chaos-filled, and very dangerous neighborhood with two gang leaders living within a stone's throw of the two-bedroom house in which all four of the people in my family of origin lived. [A noisy, inner-city area vs. Grandmother's peaceful forest. Talk about duality.]
The earliest introduction to "primordial cooperation" and "A Loving Community" came when Grandmother recalled her childhood days. Her grandparents and their kinfolk had joined with two other very large, extended families to clear some lands in the piney woods of East Texas. They felled trees to make a clearing suitable for farming - usually growing corn and peas and potatoes and tomatoes to be enjoyed along with fish or venison or rabbit - and then they used the trees they had cut to erect a 30-foot by 90-foot log cabin. The cabin was partitioned into three sections of equal size with deer skin and other materials.
Inside that structure, three large families - along with two or three generations as well as their friends and acquaintances - shared the space. That group, numbering 50 to 60 at times, not only shared accommodations. They also shared the community's tasks of planting, of caring for the crops, of hauling water up from the nearby creek for their plants, of harvesting, of fishing, of hunting, and of gathering. [The right-wingers of today would dismiss them as "a bunch of worthless, lazy Commies."]
A typical day involved rising slowly and quietly, sitting around a fire with fish nearby, hanging by cords from wooden stands to smoke the fish that would be shared among the members of the community later in the day. They went into the forest alone for more quiet time; they went about their tasks of caring for the crops or fishing or hunting; they rested during the heat of the day; they enjoyed the company of the community; and they enjoyed their evenings with family.
At night, though nothing solid separated the three sections of the cabins, there was no "disturbing the peace" because each respected the space of all others and each honored the silence that all appreciated. (If you have neighbors, are they that considerate? Do they value and maintain the same sense of primordial cooperation that was shared in common by the families and extended families of those Cherokees? Do they honor the peace and quiet, or are they about the business of annihilating the peace and quiet?)
Those people who would eventually come from many European nations and take the land from Grandmother's family - and march most of them off to Oklahoma and some of them to North Carolina on the east coast - were people who bragged about their love of the concept of "freedom of speech." Grandmother and her people instinctively loved "freedom from speech."
When those from Europe invaded, the beginning of the end of a sense of primordial cooperation and a Loving community began, and nowadays in the U.S., and in so many other countries as well, the dualistic beliefs which those people brought with them have resulted in an end to cooperation among communities and to separating communities instead. That near-universal separation is dualistically-based most often in economic and racial considerations; in a sense of "different-from-ment" and "better-than-ment"; and in the rigid hierarchical structures which Europeans built and maintained all around the globe during their days of invasion, controlling or killing, occupation, expansionism and colonization.
Now, the chance of anyone returning to that fashion of living is remote, but each has within an "internal Medicine Place" which can be tapped into and which can provide a retreat from the chaos which most persons are exposed to nowadays. And one need not go anywhere to visit that quiet and peaceful and all-natural Medicine Place.
But how?
Please enter the silence of contemplation.
