Original Instructions
I have avoided coming to this page in light of the declared war in the Middle East. I have seen the horror on my news-feed and have been reduced to tears and prayers and despair. Have we learned nothing?!
I will not use this space to attempt to explain the unexplainable. This level of violence and inhumanity defies words. We have been here before. Many times.
An indigenous teacher once told me that the original instructions given to human beings from the Creator are that ‘we will forget and we will remember.’
At the beginning of creation, the oak tree was given the original instructions to grow straight and strong and rise above the understory to be the King of the forest. The skunk was given the original instructions to use scent to define boundaries. The rose was given the original instructions to unfold herself with layers of fragrance, fragility, and beauty. Thorns and blooms. When it came time for the human being to receive their original instructions, the Creator clapped his hands and said, “I have saved the best for you.” Touching his heart he decreed, “You will forget and you will remember.”
The human beings were confused to say the least. “How can these instructions be the best?” they whined. “Well,” said the Creator, “when one of you forgets, he will need the one who remembers. When one of you remembers, he will offer to the one that forgets. The human creature was still confused. The Creator soothed, “In this way you need each other.”
Oh, we have done far more forgetting than remembering since the beginning of creation. Maybe the original instructions given to human beings are not so much that we need each other to remember, but that we need the Creator. We need the Ancestors. We need the Archetypes. We need those eternal energies that bind us, guide us, create us.
An Italian teacher once told me that the root of the word ricordare means ‘heart’. To remember is to return to the heart. To forget is to fall out of the heart.
Between the tensions, the conflicts, the wars that feels irreconcilable, this time in the Middle East of our broken and fractured world, I stretch out both my arms and open my heart. When everything in me wants to recoil and protect my heart from the horror, I remember the ones who hung on the tree of life - Odin, Prometheus, Jesus… I try and remember what I have forgotten.
It has been said that we are the 7th Generation. That is the name I have given to my blog. I am told that what we do or fail to do in this generation will affect seven generations that have gone before and seven generations that will follow. That is a sum total of fourteen generations! Might these humble words, this humble prayer to remember, be a seed? Might the compost of the past fertilize the blooms of the future? I pray. I remember what I have forgotten.
Compassion has at it core, passion. Come-passion. In translation this mean, come suffering. Come open my heart and help me remember my original instructions; that I need you. That we need each other.