Land Regeneration Work, Ancestors, Soul and Culture
May 2-7, 2-24: Into the Heart and Soul with Our Ancestors: Remembering Ourselves to Earth's Dreaming at River's Bend Retreat Center
For More About Land Regeneration Work at River's Bend
Our bones are like landscapes - terrains of stories - etched by sun, grass, waters, storms, love, illness, with blessings/curses for the future tucked into helixed filaments, unfolding a ceremony in deep time, where past, present and future meet.
Etched in the viscera of my being are massive dislocations from places and humans . . . from soft valleys amidst stone ruins replaced by cathedral walls, over ocean crossings uprooted from time. There is also a pulsing song that sings through, like a crack in the code, a sensuous and wild imagination never limited to enclosure, a stowaway poem carried by those who were making me in the midst of conversation and commerce in a bavarian village and sung by women at sacred wells in the Sinai - which echoes from the future, “keep singing that song”.
This body is in ceremony with Deep time - with Ancestors and Future ones.
The body of the lands we live within, that we shape, that shape us, making the world, are in ceremony with Deep time.
We are being called back into that quality of perceptive participation. And, there is tending to be done, in different ways among us, learning to read the visible or invisible hieroglyphs in our relations, all that was forgotten, suppressed and longs to be known and is essential for life and our true soul gifts. Conversations, clearings, listening, invitations with the creatures, including humans around us, with ourselves, with our Ancestors.
I was raised on land in Idaho with a deeply sensuous freedom to daily immerse myself in earth life. Yet as a relative newcomer to this watershed where I live, I did not know the stories of this landscape enough to be present with the lived experience of this place etched with the past.
A few years ago, I walked through the woods here numb with fear, acknowledging what my body had known for a long time: These woods were dying and I didn’t know what to do. Tan Oaks crashed down before they were grown; Live Oaks rose spindly and and practically lifeless. The forest floor was a tangle of ghosts. As if there is something in the soil that these trees could not escape; as if they are caught in a tangle they could not grow out of, no matter how they tried, or how deep the rains or warm the suns. Disconnected from those who might have remembered, and lacking the direct experience of a lifetime, I was at a loss for how to be with this community of trees and beings. I could simply grieve.
The moment I learned a few key phrases in the story lines was like piecing together hieroglyphics from an ancient text - which revealed whole worlds. I felt ecstatic, as the field of relational intimacy opened between me and the trees. I’ve been evangelical sharing these storylines so others, too, can be in the present, deep time.
Many of us are now learning those storylines after they were forgotten or suppressed for over a century in many communities: Fire’s medicinal effect in Oak woodlands and its suppression by settlers and governments; the particular cultural ways all the diverse indigenous peoples of this area worked with fire to benefit craft, food, life; the impact of large predators like wolf, mountain lion on deer grazing on nurseries of baby oaks in the meadows and the dwindling of those apex predators due to hunting and fences and roads, and thus overgrazing on oaks.
But, we know it’s not enough to simply barrel forward with action to rectify the damage. True medicine attends not just to the symptoms of the wound, but underlying roots of well/illness.
We are invited to see again our beautifully entangled relationships as ecosystem animals and the paradoxical need to disturb what we have thought of as the untouched wild, but has been tended for millenia by indigenous communities. We are also called to see how, like rocks and mountains, we are not static, but instead shaped from massive forces of upheaval, erosion, pressure through wombs and valleys and deaths. We carry the dust of stars once burning, while we spin ever faster (or is it slower, now) ;). We are being eroded by the sun as we speak, etched by grief and joy in a way that follows ancestral contours. We are not locked in an ex-nihilo, autonomous present that is separate from what makes us. Like it or not, we are called to learn the art seeing the past (and future) present like a time-lapse MRI, layer over layer together to see the whole.
When I ask the land of river flowing, trees swaying, ravens cawing, humans displaced if they would support this soul-rooted cultural regeneration tending of ancestral threads here in their midst, I hear a resounding and echoing . . .
“YES! You can only be present with us if you know what you are made of, what has made you. Only then can you see us, fully, as well as the beings whose energies are missing from this place, and the life force still beaming through.”
What is needed as we attempt to live into that holographic perspective? How do we drop into the deep-time ceremony of our entwined body and soul in a way that is needed and generative?
It’s as ancient as human culture to connect with ancestors through time and space, but many of us are recrafting practices, as the entire approach of Modernism has been woven from the hope that that we could simply be in a present barren of the past and forgot all the pain and terror and shame - and with it all the deep and particular sinewy connection to place and belonging, the particular sensual wisdoms crafted from the entwinement of bodies and land and families and collective.
I was lucky to get to spend many years participating in journeys on land full of ceremony and deep culture from guides Annie Bloom and Peter Scanlan, influenced by their muses and ancestors, and their collaborators and teachers Bill Plotkin, Meredith Little, Steven Foster, Martin Prechtel and so many others. They shared practices to attend to what has been lost in the metaphoric, human psychic version of “suppressing fire” and “forgetting of relations with apex predators” in our own lives. Ceremonially, together, we invoke the ancestral realm, and individually invite ancestors who would be allies, and, in time, ancestors who have stories of the wounds, or stories that must be told. Through wanders on the land in shifted consciousness supported by both group and self-designed ceremony and deep imagination, we are surprised by what emerges in these relationships and conversations.
I sense our ancestors, like the more than human wild creatures here on the land, say “Yes! Please Hear us". We have stories to tell that are locked in the past, but spill out pain or serve healing and transformation, the coming present of the world.”
Some would say that the dead cannot become ancestors unless they are remembered. What I have seen over the years, as the dead are remembered, is incredible. Powerful reconciliations, multiple generations perceived to be transformed by conversations among the trees, with the other wild ones, by a meeting, by a story. What was once only seen as only the pain of the past, or one’s own particular soul wound, is transmuted by the healing that comes from understanding, connection, empathy and, ultimately, by seeing how that very sensitivity might be the essence of our gift. And thus we are released and enriched for our soul journeys, recognizing how we belong in time, not just space, to this world. There’s no special guru or even someone we would call a shaman (as beautiful a role as that is). The deep time realms are there, available, especially when we invoke them even in a temporary village “program” that’s held in a strong way, and in relationship with the extended skin of our body, the world in its sensual wild forms. I learned from my own father’s passing when I was twenty that it was possible to communicate across this threshold of life and death. I believe we all have this innate capacity.
Reading between the known story lines in our bones and hearts, we can feel where the page perhaps was torn out, and we never knew we carried with us such gifts, or we find that ancestors who were written off, or unknown, have qualities that we didn’t know we carried or that guide us in some other way.
This work of ecological regeneration guides us to true cultural regeneration and the work of our own soul journey and back the other way. When we gather together to do any of this work, we are tapping our collective and individual memory of bodies and hands tending wilds together, sorting seeds, the support of the village throbbing through our veins. We are resourcing for intimacy. And for the work of tending what has been lost to memory, the gaps in the storyline, for which there have been consequences.
Lucky for us, in the dying/birthing of our beings and this land, the hawk still pierces through the canopy in search of her prey running for its life, deer wander by feeling the thrush's song in the grass they consume, and entire worlds of insects churn the earth. In the midst of each tree, each flower, is still some pulsing infinite desire to be alive.
Call that cosmological Soul, call that Mystery, call it Evolutionary Biology or Theoretical Physics or Love.
May we be ever more in a ceremony of intimacy with and in all that.
Laurie Adams, Feb 2024
I am one shaped by places and humans from the British Isles and continent we call Europe, and beyond, beyond . . . deep into the heart of the world. I have ancestors who came both very early to this continent and later, inhabiting lands known as New England, the Midwest, California and Idaho, primarily as farmers and ranchers. I have been in a long journey integrating the experience of these deeply land-connected humans and ones far more ancient, knowing something of the displacements and violence across time they experienced and perpetrated against other humans and more than human beings.
Writing of the "We": I am speaking of so many of us whose ancestors are fairly new to this continent in the last several hundreds of years and whose movement across oceans, in so many different ways, chosen or not, ripple through everything including us. The variety of stories and experiences is more than I can even imagine or know. I am sharing what I have witnessed and heard.
May 2-7, 2-24: Into the Heart and Soul with Our Ancestors: Remembering Ourselves to Earth's Dreaming at River's Bend Retreat Center
For More About Land Regeneration Work at River's Bend
Our bones are like landscapes - terrains of stories - etched by sun, grass, waters, storms, love, illness, with blessings/curses for the future tucked into helixed filaments, unfolding a ceremony in deep time, where past, present and future meet.
Etched in the viscera of my being are massive dislocations from places and humans . . . from soft valleys amidst stone ruins replaced by cathedral walls, over ocean crossings uprooted from time. There is also a pulsing song that sings through, like a crack in the code, a sensuous and wild imagination never limited to enclosure, a stowaway poem carried by those who were making me in the midst of conversation and commerce in a bavarian village and sung by women at sacred wells in the Sinai - which echoes from the future, “keep singing that song”.
This body is in ceremony with Deep time - with Ancestors and Future ones.
The body of the lands we live within, that we shape, that shape us, making the world, are in ceremony with Deep time.
We are being called back into that quality of perceptive participation. And, there is tending to be done, in different ways among us, learning to read the visible or invisible hieroglyphs in our relations, all that was forgotten, suppressed and longs to be known and is essential for life and our true soul gifts. Conversations, clearings, listening, invitations with the creatures, including humans around us, with ourselves, with our Ancestors.
I was raised on land in Idaho with a deeply sensuous freedom to daily immerse myself in earth life. Yet as a relative newcomer to this watershed where I live, I did not know the stories of this landscape enough to be present with the lived experience of this place etched with the past.
A few years ago, I walked through the woods here numb with fear, acknowledging what my body had known for a long time: These woods were dying and I didn’t know what to do. Tan Oaks crashed down before they were grown; Live Oaks rose spindly and and practically lifeless. The forest floor was a tangle of ghosts. As if there is something in the soil that these trees could not escape; as if they are caught in a tangle they could not grow out of, no matter how they tried, or how deep the rains or warm the suns. Disconnected from those who might have remembered, and lacking the direct experience of a lifetime, I was at a loss for how to be with this community of trees and beings. I could simply grieve.
The moment I learned a few key phrases in the story lines was like piecing together hieroglyphics from an ancient text - which revealed whole worlds. I felt ecstatic, as the field of relational intimacy opened between me and the trees. I’ve been evangelical sharing these storylines so others, too, can be in the present, deep time.
Many of us are now learning those storylines after they were forgotten or suppressed for over a century in many communities: Fire’s medicinal effect in Oak woodlands and its suppression by settlers and governments; the particular cultural ways all the diverse indigenous peoples of this area worked with fire to benefit craft, food, life; the impact of large predators like wolf, mountain lion on deer grazing on nurseries of baby oaks in the meadows and the dwindling of those apex predators due to hunting and fences and roads, and thus overgrazing on oaks.
But, we know it’s not enough to simply barrel forward with action to rectify the damage. True medicine attends not just to the symptoms of the wound, but underlying roots of well/illness.
We are invited to see again our beautifully entangled relationships as ecosystem animals and the paradoxical need to disturb what we have thought of as the untouched wild, but has been tended for millenia by indigenous communities. We are also called to see how, like rocks and mountains, we are not static, but instead shaped from massive forces of upheaval, erosion, pressure through wombs and valleys and deaths. We carry the dust of stars once burning, while we spin ever faster (or is it slower, now) ;). We are being eroded by the sun as we speak, etched by grief and joy in a way that follows ancestral contours. We are not locked in an ex-nihilo, autonomous present that is separate from what makes us. Like it or not, we are called to learn the art seeing the past (and future) present like a time-lapse MRI, layer over layer together to see the whole.
When I ask the land of river flowing, trees swaying, ravens cawing, humans displaced if they would support this soul-rooted cultural regeneration tending of ancestral threads here in their midst, I hear a resounding and echoing . . .
“YES! You can only be present with us if you know what you are made of, what has made you. Only then can you see us, fully, as well as the beings whose energies are missing from this place, and the life force still beaming through.”
What is needed as we attempt to live into that holographic perspective? How do we drop into the deep-time ceremony of our entwined body and soul in a way that is needed and generative?
It’s as ancient as human culture to connect with ancestors through time and space, but many of us are recrafting practices, as the entire approach of Modernism has been woven from the hope that that we could simply be in a present barren of the past and forgot all the pain and terror and shame - and with it all the deep and particular sinewy connection to place and belonging, the particular sensual wisdoms crafted from the entwinement of bodies and land and families and collective.
I was lucky to get to spend many years participating in journeys on land full of ceremony and deep culture from guides Annie Bloom and Peter Scanlan, influenced by their muses and ancestors, and their collaborators and teachers Bill Plotkin, Meredith Little, Steven Foster, Martin Prechtel and so many others. They shared practices to attend to what has been lost in the metaphoric, human psychic version of “suppressing fire” and “forgetting of relations with apex predators” in our own lives. Ceremonially, together, we invoke the ancestral realm, and individually invite ancestors who would be allies, and, in time, ancestors who have stories of the wounds, or stories that must be told. Through wanders on the land in shifted consciousness supported by both group and self-designed ceremony and deep imagination, we are surprised by what emerges in these relationships and conversations.
I sense our ancestors, like the more than human wild creatures here on the land, say “Yes! Please Hear us". We have stories to tell that are locked in the past, but spill out pain or serve healing and transformation, the coming present of the world.”
Some would say that the dead cannot become ancestors unless they are remembered. What I have seen over the years, as the dead are remembered, is incredible. Powerful reconciliations, multiple generations perceived to be transformed by conversations among the trees, with the other wild ones, by a meeting, by a story. What was once only seen as only the pain of the past, or one’s own particular soul wound, is transmuted by the healing that comes from understanding, connection, empathy and, ultimately, by seeing how that very sensitivity might be the essence of our gift. And thus we are released and enriched for our soul journeys, recognizing how we belong in time, not just space, to this world. There’s no special guru or even someone we would call a shaman (as beautiful a role as that is). The deep time realms are there, available, especially when we invoke them even in a temporary village “program” that’s held in a strong way, and in relationship with the extended skin of our body, the world in its sensual wild forms. I learned from my own father’s passing when I was twenty that it was possible to communicate across this threshold of life and death. I believe we all have this innate capacity.
Reading between the known story lines in our bones and hearts, we can feel where the page perhaps was torn out, and we never knew we carried with us such gifts, or we find that ancestors who were written off, or unknown, have qualities that we didn’t know we carried or that guide us in some other way.
This work of ecological regeneration guides us to true cultural regeneration and the work of our own soul journey and back the other way. When we gather together to do any of this work, we are tapping our collective and individual memory of bodies and hands tending wilds together, sorting seeds, the support of the village throbbing through our veins. We are resourcing for intimacy. And for the work of tending what has been lost to memory, the gaps in the storyline, for which there have been consequences.
Lucky for us, in the dying/birthing of our beings and this land, the hawk still pierces through the canopy in search of her prey running for its life, deer wander by feeling the thrush's song in the grass they consume, and entire worlds of insects churn the earth. In the midst of each tree, each flower, is still some pulsing infinite desire to be alive.
Call that cosmological Soul, call that Mystery, call it Evolutionary Biology or Theoretical Physics or Love.
May we be ever more in a ceremony of intimacy with and in all that.
Laurie Adams, Feb 2024
I am one shaped by places and humans from the British Isles and continent we call Europe, and beyond, beyond . . . deep into the heart of the world. I have ancestors who came both very early to this continent and later, inhabiting lands known as New England, the Midwest, California and Idaho, primarily as farmers and ranchers. I have been in a long journey integrating the experience of these deeply land-connected humans and ones far more ancient, knowing something of the displacements and violence across time they experienced and perpetrated against other humans and more than human beings.
Writing of the "We": I am speaking of so many of us whose ancestors are fairly new to this continent in the last several hundreds of years and whose movement across oceans, in so many different ways, chosen or not, ripple through everything including us. The variety of stories and experiences is more than I can even imagine or know. I am sharing what I have witnessed and heard.
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