When past seeds the future

I am sitting here at my writing group, staring at my blank screen wondering where to start. When I was here last week, I was finishing off my latest post. Usually once this is done my next idea surfaces pretty quickly but not this week. Little prickles of panic start to bubble up. Am I done? As I wrote about before this often happens but this week my fallow period has extended beyond a few days. Only now reading over some of my old posts do I start to feel a quickening. Something is fermenting fed by the bacteria of my stored posts.

I am not one for looking back generally. I like to move on. New ideas, new projects, new places. My restless mind loves the stimulation of discovery. But if there is anything I am learning from my recent years of immersion in gardening, it is the value of feeding what is to come with what has been. I no longer rip out lettuces when they start to bolt. Instead I wait for their flowers to seed and then, leave in their roots so their fungal threads can hold soil and moisture together awhile longer.

Letting the past feed the present and seed the future is natural wisdom. It is also traditional human wisdom. The more we rush headlong into the future, not heeding hard earned, well-observed lessons, the more we mire ourselves in a perilous present. A present where gee whiz technologies dazzle with promise but end up costing the Earth. And where planned obsolescence funnels endless new goods into our homes only to be spewed out into rubbish tips a few years, if not months, later.

The more I read and listen to First Nations elders and teachers, the more I realise how vital it is to honour and learn from traditional ways of being and knowing, starting with awakening all my senses. It’s confronting to perceive the depth of disconnections which I have absorbed in a lifetime of swimming in the waters of modern culture. There is so much I do not see, hear or feel, in my rush to be in the next place. I am, it seems too full of noise and clutter to readily sink into a slower and more open way of being. My left brain is loud and hyperfunctional in its rationalisations, while my right brain struggles to win my attention with her whispered dreams, images and feelings.

My antidote to all this is to take myself off to my park each day to greet trees, birds and people and to grow food. My hope is that over time a slower more connected way of being will take root in me, one small rootlet at a time.

Sitting on a rug of lilac petals under the jacaranda tree, I try to imagine how life would have been before the colonisers arrived. The Wangal people are the Traditional Owners of this unceded land. For many millenia, they lived here hunting, fishing, performing ceremonies , songs and dances all centred on care for and knowledge of Country. To my eyes, there are few traces of this way of life left today, but when First Nations teachers come to speak at local events they draw our attention to the park’s trees and plants, telling us of their medicines and gifts, reading and relating to Country in ways that extend far beyond my knowledge and consciousness. Hearing their stories and understandings, I feel humbled and awed by the immensity, intricacy and aliveness of their connections to Country, as well as sad for all that has been lost and devalued in this modern age.

The last 500 years have been brutal for Earth-centric cultures and peoples as the economics of capitalism and the politics of invasion have trampled on so many life forms, ecosystems and human cultures across the globe. Indigenous teachers often refer to contemporary Western culture as being young, not unlike an unruly toddler, full of wants and desires, with boundless energy and little patience. Toddler consciousness thinks little of consequences or others’ realities. But they are here nevertheless. Today’s intersecting crises of ecological breakdowns and growing social inequities are the outcome of an immature culture high on greed and low in forethought for the generations ahead. What is missing is the leadership of wise elders carrying forward love and respect for life based on millenia of intimate interactions and observations. So much of what has been lost is exactly what is needed to find our way into a viable future.

Photo by Alexander Van Steenberge on Unsplash

Last week, I saw a moving documentary called The Edge of Life by Lynette Wallworth. The movie tells the story of an Australian palliative care psychiatrist and psychologist, Drs Justin Dwyer and Margaret Ross, who, following their research into psychedelic assisted therapy, visit a Yawanawá shaman’s community in the Amazon. There they take part in an Ayahuasca ceremony, which gives them a very different vision of death than the modern concept of death as a terrifying end followed by nothingness. The shaman, Muka Yawanawa, who leads this ceremony describes First People’s cultures as being the older brother to the younger brother of modern white culture. He recounts a prophecy held within the Amazon about the need to bring these two cultures together for learning and exchange; the older brother teaching from the heart, the younger brother teaching from the head.

This prophecy becomes reality after Justin and Margaret’s visit to Brazil, when Muka and his colleagues visit Melbourne where they learn modern emergency medicine skills sorely needed in the remote jungle. This exchange is life changing for all involved but in very different ways. For the Western professionals, their experience of psychedelic journeying into the realms of death and dying with Muka transforms their concept of death and their practice of palliative care. “We are babies” says Justin, adding that his 20 years of medical training taught him nothing about how to die.

When a culture and its peoples shun death, the consequences are far reaching. In his classic book, The Denial of Death, anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that modern people try to defeat death through “immortality projects” which attempt to win enduring significance in the larger universe. These self-esteem boosting exercises readily find a home in consumerism and firmly entrenched worldviews. Buying endless amounts of stuff, building grand homes, travelling to exotic destinations and driving SUVs can all be unconscious responses to death anxiety, as can be polarised debates. The more we fall into these unconscious responses, the more we endanger ourselves and the world.

Ancient cultures which not only accept death but have ceremonies and rituals to navigate death and grief can teach today’s young culture a wiser way of being in both life and death. Muka says in the film.

There are many different possibilities of us understanding death, between the white man’s view and Indigenous peoples … Naturally, I don’t want to die either. I would like to live forever and have so many stories. But we must understand and accept it.

Helping Western doctors to come to an understanding and acceptance “was like bringing light into shadow”, says Muka. For Justin, Margaret and their patients, Muka’s teachings about death not only transformed fear into acceptance, it also gifted them a heightened awareness of the beauty and joy in life.

When you are toddler there is much to fear and much that is beyond your understanding. If the modern culture that most of us are now soaked in is to mature, we must face its shadows starting with the denial of death and the suffering, greed and ignorance that this fear feeds.

I don’t believe that this means we all have to take psychedelic medicines to get past our fears. While this can be an option for some, especially those in the end stages of their lives, there are other ways to meet death and re-imagine its place in life. Learning from both First Nations teachers and the Indigenous cultures that lie in all of our ancestral pasts is one path, another is to open up to our own and others’ visioning, dreaming and intuitive knowing.

When we can open up to the sacred dimensions of the dying process, it gives us the foundation for care and grieving which honours both what is precious in life and transformative through death. The wise gardener accepts death, knowing how its transformations propel life on, through composts, leaf mulches, insect habitats in hollow logs and other alchemical fertilities. The wise culture similarly honours the intertwining of life with death, knowing that when the body dies, what was matter is transformed into an expansive world of inter-relatedness and spiritual connections that weave together past, present and future.

Writing this post, which I never set out to write, has taken me somewhere I need to go. Another birthday looms for me, while many of my peers are contending with serious illnesses, the effects of ageing and the possibility of death sooner than later. Awareness of death is my daily companion now. I want to honour this awareness with gratitude, compassion and curiosity, as well as grief. What about you? How are you travelling with your understanding and experiences of death? Is there light coming into the shadow?