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September 27, 2008
My other life is an ethnobiologist
I remember clearly the first time I saw a picture of Machu Pichu. It was the first time I understood that you could be slack jawed in amazement. The very idea of such a city in such a place was incredible. Also, I felt that somehow I had seen it before*. This lead me to dream about spending six months in a mountain village living as and with the locals - I was especially fascinated by quipu and rope bridges.
Holy moley. This kind of stuff strikes deep chords in me. That's why this TED talk sends shivers down my spine. Check this out.
The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four, sequestered in the shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for eighteen years. Two nine year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spent in their natural mothers womb; now they are metaphorically in the womb of their great mother. For this entire time they are encultured into the values of their society. Values that maintain the proposition that their prayers, and their prayers alone, maintain the cosmic - or we might say the ecological - balance.And, at the end of this amazing initiation suddenly they are taken out and for the first time in their lives, at the age of eighteen, they see a sunrise. And, in that crystal moment of awareness of first light, as the sun begins to bathe the slopes of this stunningly beautiful landscape, suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory and the priest steps back and says "You see. It is really as I have told you.It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect".
They call themselves the elder brothers and we, who are the younger brothers, are the ones who are responsible for destroying the world.
It goes up, way up, from there. Seriously - hang in there for the description of the shit knife.
We have a lot to learn about communicating with each other, and a lot to learn about communicating with ourselves, but even more to learn about the different ways we can commune with our world - there is no one true way
* I don't believe in the super natural but this still makes me wonder...
Posted by dottie at September 27, 2008 12:21 AM
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