The Snake and the Ancestors

Connecting with our stories of origin

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Many of us now carry the ancestry of many peoples who come from vastly different traditions and customs. Through the passage of time, we have begun to blend these obligations. Nonetheless, each of us carries a piece of the whole wheel. Each nation, each race, each community, each person carries the medicine needed at this time for the healing of those whose circles we share and encounter. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner reminds us of the synchronicities that occur to bring these pieces together:

“There must have been a time when you entered a room and met someone and after a while you understood that unknown to either of you there was a reason you met. You had changed the other or they had changed you. By some word or deed or just by your presence, the errand had been completed. Then perhaps you were a little bewildered or humbled and grateful. And it was over.

Each lifetime is the piece of a jigsaw puzzle. For some there are more pieces. For others the puzzle is more difficult to assemble. Some seem to be born with a nearly completed puzzle. And so it goes. Souls going this way and that trying to assemble the myriad parts.

But know this. No one has within themselves all the pieces to their puzzle. Like before the days when they used to seal jigsaw puzzles in cellophane ensuring that all the pieces were there.

Everyone carries with them at least one and probably many pieces to someone else’s puzzle. Sometimes they know it. Sometimes they don't.

And when you present your piece which is worthless to you, to another, whether you know it or not, whether they know it or not, you are a messenger from the Most High.” (Kushner, 1977, p. 69-70)

From the perspective of indigenous knowing/being, when we forget our place of origin, our homeland, we are cut off from our Ancestors, their wisdom base; and thus a denial of our culture of origin is inevitable. This reality not only has created a split in the psyche of the human soul and is responsible for perpetuating the violence, the rage, the despair, and the loneliness that pervades our society, but it also is responsible for the deterioration of the planet herself. The result of the disassociation from the sentient landscape is deep rage that is percolating within the souls of modern human beings. Many cultures have passed since we understood how to communicate with the Earth and knew how to be deeply informed by Her. As a result of this disconnection, our despair lives deeply buried in the subconscious and collective mind, only to percolate or explode in our days.

The wisdom and the healing for this dis-ease is in our memory of the indigenous being/knowing that participates in relationship with the Earth. This memory, this cellular memory, lives within each person and every culture, as well as within the morphic field that surrounds us. Each nation carries a vital piece for the ecological sustainability of this Earth and this universe. If we do not remember who we are, whence we come, and the instructions inherent in our traditional knowledge, and if we do not take our rightful place in the wheel of life, how can the Earth be sustained? >> more