New Strength from Ancient Wisdom
I was wondering what we would eat when the last jar of peanut butter was gone when Kathy stuck her head through the door to let me know her stove was working and offered to heat up a can of soup.
“Our stove works, but we don’t have any water,” she said.
It was the morning after. Time had slowed to a breath-by-breath situation. Life as I’d known it was irretrievably broken, smeared with sludge and feces from our town’s sewer system treatment plant, which had broken during the storm surge and contaminated our water supply. The nauseating stench seeped through the walls.
Every tiny movement required a decision. If you drink bottled water, where will you pee? If you move something, how many steps through slime will it take to reach that canister of antibacterial wipes? You can’t carry them with you because there is no safe place to put them down.
A few months before the storm, my father and uncle came to me in three separate dreams, warning me that there would be an emergency and I should stock up on fresh, clean water. There were thirteen gallons upstairs and twenty-four bottles of drinking water on the kitchen counter. Since the house was becoming toxic with bacteria, we were going to leave the next day—if I could find someone nearby who would let Bogart and me stay for a couple of nights until I figured out where to go next.
All that was running through my head as I gave Kathy a gallon of water to take across the street to her own damaged home. She could come back if she needed more.
A bone-chilling cold settled in as the October afternoon light started to fade. Soon, it would be dark, and I did not look forward to a second night upstairs in that cramped crawl space.
Ten minutes later, Kathy returned, holding two cups of hot tea. I felt like crying. Her kindness left me feeling cared for and supported. It was the gift of empathy in action. We were in it together. We hugged, and in that moment of having lost everything, we were rich.
The Richest Man in the World
That stays in my mind like a Post-it, reminding me of a photojournalism assignment to shoot pictures of gold panners in the Madre de Dios jungle, a forgotten corner of the Peruvian rainforest. Our government-issued Ford pickup truck had gotten stuck behind a mudslide, which had buried the one-lane road under ten feet of muck. After an uncomfortable, cold night trying to sleep in the truck, the driver and our guide joined a crew of volunteers who were shoveling out. Looking at the mountain of mud and the pace at which the crew was working, the driver guesstimated it would take around five hours before the road was drivable.
For some reason that I don’t understand, I had no fear about being alone there and went for a walk in the early morning cloud forest where cloudlets of dew clung to the trees. Pushing away branches and stepping carefully over slick, wet rocks, I entered a clearing where a skinny, bearded man with one tooth was living in a bamboo lean-to, covered with a blue tarp. We stared at each other—two creatures from different worlds. Maybe I was just an exotic animal from another, unfamiliar jungle. We nodded, exchanged “Buenos días,” and then he pointed to a large rock next to the fire and motioned for me to sit.
Modeling his half-kneeling position, I watched him carefully pour water from his aluminum pot to a chipped white enamel cup. Foraging around in his lean-to, he retrieved a nearly empty can of powdered milk and measured two large spoonfuls into the cup. Maintaining eye contact, he stirred carefully until the powdered milk had dissolved. Then he gave me his cup and motioned for me to drink.
“Thank you but I cannot take this. It’s your breakfast,” I said.
He insisted, repeating the motion for drinking, pointing first at the cup, then at me. As I sipped the hot beverage, his weather-beaten face broke into the most radiant smile I had ever seen. This man, who possessed next to nothing, looked like my eating his breakfast was the greatest gift he could receive. I couldn’t get over it. His happiness filled the space around the sputtering fire, expanding into the clearing and beyond, to the cloud forest itself. He kept thanking me for taking his breakfast. When I offered him money, he refused.
I had met the most generous and, clearly, the richest man in the world.
Fast-forward several decades to the morning after Sandy. I had no idea what to do next. Neither did anyone around me. Without phone service, there was no way to call for help. But help was already there. That cup of tea affirmed it while simultaneously bringing me back to that morning where I first encountered the gift of humility. Between then and now, I have started to understand the power of humility, which opens the way for us to embrace life as it is—like it or not—without regret for what we don’t have. With humility, our sense of entitlement dissolves and we give thanks.
A Different Cultural Filter
In my travels to places where people lived without running water, electricity, phone service, or indoor plumbing, I noticed that despite their difficult circumstances, many of the people I met were able to endure long periods of hardship with relative equanimity. In dusty towns along the foothills of the cordillera, people loved, hated, fought, mourned, and danced on the edges of life and death.
They lived with earthquakes and avalanches, fuel and food shortages, violent strikes, guerrilla activity, poverty, and disease.
There were two key traits that seemed to give them strength and equanimity despite those difficulties: strong bonds with family, friends, and community and a deep respect for nature and their connection to the natural world. Here, you tell time by the sun and the cycles of the moon and the tides and seasons. So, too, after a disaster, your body rises and sleeps in rhythm with the coming and going of the sun, rather than obsessing over digital time. You are now living in rhythm with millions of people all over the globe who are sensitized to the natural cycles of time.
On a bright Tuesday morning in the Andes Mountains, a Quichua Indian mother and her teenage daughter walked patiently through the fields, carrying covered aluminum pots to a section where six men were working. Slowly, they unfolded a large blue cloth and laid it on the ground so everyone could sit. The mother ladled rice, corn, and a thick soup into shallow enamel plates, which the daughter passed out to her father, brothers, and each of the workers. They all sat together in a line, eating lunch under the noonday sun, as they did every day, and as their ancestors had done for hundreds of years before them. They did not have microwaves, but they took time every day to stay connected. In times of trouble, they would navigate crisis together. My friends and I wondered if perhaps they weren’t better off than we were.
Indigenous Connections
It has been my privilege to sit with teachers from different spiritual traditions. The indigenous healers, who entrusted me with wisdom handed down from generation to generation by oral tradition, deeply influenced my worldview. Their reverence for the spiritual intelligence of nature and their belief that the physical and spiritual worlds coexist have strengthened me and given me hope in times of acute stress.
Although indigenous peoples make up less than five percent of the world’s current population, there are, 5,400 indigenous languages of approximately 7,000 languages spoken according to Tiokasin Ghosthorse, host of “First Voices Radio” who prefers “original peoples” to “indigenous.” Despite their differences in culture and language, the original peoples’ message has been consistent across the board, transcending geographic boundaries and distances.
In Stone Age Wisdom: The Healing Principles of Shamanism, Tom Crockett writes, “When we are out of balance with the unseen world of spirit, energy and life force, we cannot be in balance in the physical and material world.”
The indigenous healers I met in both hemispheres consistently reiterated that “You people from the north, your relationship with nature is out of balance.” Whether or not you believe in the science of climate change, people who live close to nature believe that in refusing to accept that every one of us has a soul connection to nature, we show disrespect to the spirit of the earth, the sea, and the forest.
“Mother Earth is always giving, even if it’s a lesson. She is always giving,” says Ghosthorse. “Now that we are running out of food in the fridge and there is no water, we need to invite the indigenous peoples. We are the older brothers and sisters and parents to this land.”
In his eyes, “The majority of Americans have never come out of their adolescent state. You see children in grown-up bodies running around reacting to everything. They are still looking for a nurse, for a mother that has more milk.”
Our collective anxiety, doubt, guilt, inferiority, and confusion will continue to increase until we address our root spiritual crisis.
“We are stressed and suffer from PTSD, just as Mother Earth suffers from PTSD,” he says. “Mother Earth needs to create a good catastrophe to wake us out of our zombie state.”
At an interfaith retreat years ago at Auschwitz, Ghosthorse asked a Lakota elder whether the Lakota have a word for “domination.” He was told, “If you have language that is in relationship with everything, there is no need to dominate. Therefore, there is no concept, and no word.”
A Culture of Interconnection
When a Hopi cultivates plants, he believes he works in harmony with the sun and the rain, the wind, soil, insects, and birds. There is no separation. In the same vein, the Apache language has no “I,” only “I am,” as in the statement “I am connected to everything.”
“There are four words in the English language that separate you from everyone,” says an Apache shaman, based in southern New Mexico. “Those four words are I, me, my, and mine. Try going four days without saying I, me, my, and mine. It will change your life.”
Taking further the concept of interconnection, Ghosthorse explains that there is no separation between life and death. The Lakota have no word for death since life and death are seamlessly interwoven.
“We think that everyone thinks like us,” he says. “But we see the whole. Our bodies are in the soul. The soul is not merely contained within the body. I can talk about the way people were before we got here and how we will live after we live here. It’s a whole transition of one life.”
Words like “empathy” and “compassion” hold deeper meaning for the original peoples. “We have to relate to that tree, to the air, to these other things that keep us alive as human beings. We relate to them because they have consciousness. They are able to cleanse and are able to produce air,” says Ghosthorse. “Once we realize the tree has a relationship to whom we are, we see the tree inside ourselves.”
In recognizing that the tree needs water, carbon dioxide, sun and wind, it is no longer so much a thing as it is a being “a tree-ing living being,” he says.
The Science of Tree-ing
Since the 1990s, scientists in Vancouver have been studying how trees communicate through their roots. A network of “Mother Trees,” made up of the oldest and tallest trees in the forest, form root hubs, which connect to younger, smaller trees around them. The root hubs function like a neural network to send and receive messages about what a specific tree might need to stay alive.
In one study, Dr. Suzanne Simard and her research team from the University of British Columbia found evidence of communication between paper birch and Douglas fir trees using fungi to carry necessary nutrients to each other as needed.
Not only do trees have closer bonds with others of the same botanical family, scientists say they share collective memories about prior emergencies. In Germany, forest ranger Peter Wohlleben came up with similar conclusions, which he published in the New York Times’ bestseller, The Hidden Life of Trees.
Can trees know when one of them needs help? Can they respond with assistance? Do they experience fear? Do they remember?
These are some of the questions Dr. Julia Dordel asked Wohlleben and Simard in her documentary Intelligent Trees, available at Amazon Video on Demand.
In catching up with what the original peoples have known for centuries, science is showing us yet again that it is our responsibility as humans to live in balance with the natural world, even if we can do it five minutes at a time.
“Once you understand your relationship with the natural world, you understand compassion. The tree nation, the ant nation, the water nation, we view them as nations and beings as equal with us,” says Ghosthorse.
Only when we put other beings in other nations on an equal footing with ourselves can we begin to understand empathy.
“You become the water. You become the tree,” he says, adding that this cannot be explained in English because English—“the disconnecting language”—does not have the thought process to communicate with the nations of the natural world.
“Words distract you from really living,” he says. “You don’t know how to listen.”
Spiritual Emergencies
In an indigenous model of the world, any sickness—physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual—is a call for cleansing.
“Sickness . . . is a cleansing process that washes away all that is bad, pitiful, and weak. It floods the individual like a raging river and cleanses it. The sickness becomes a gateway to life,” writes Holger Kalweit in her essay, “When Insanity Is a Blessing: The Message of Shamanism.”45
The term “spiritual emergency” refers to a soul-shattering experience that changes an individual’s sense of self and her worldview.
In her essay, “Illness Heals the World,” Deena Metzger describes a Navajo healing ceremony that was performed for her husband after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a debilitating and incurable neurological disease.
“As illness is understood to occur when the spirits, the community, or the natural world have been violated,” she writes, “healing consists of reconstituting the world, gathering the community, entering into ceremony, reciting the prayers and telling the myths in perfect order. What has been disrupted is healed through the perfection of the sacred.”
In the West African nation of Burkina Faso, collective grief is treated like an illness—a call to cleanse the soul.
In the words of Dagara elder Malidoma Some, “In indigenous Africa, one cannot conceive of a community that does not grieve. In my village, people cry every day. Until grief is restored in the West as the starting place where the modern man and woman might find peace, the culture will continue to abuse and ignore the power of water, and in turn will be fascinated by fire. Grief must be approached as a release of the tension created by separation and disconnection from someone or something that matters.”
To the Dagara, as to the Navajo, connecting with others relieves individual suffering because you become connected to something greater than yourself.
In The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Jared Diamond writes, “Groups protect themselves by building a network of alliances with other groups, and individuals ally themselves with other individuals.”46
Indigenous culture offers us a living model of empathy in action. Being part of a community of people who feel safe to share their experiences and feelings releases the burden of isolation so that empathy can flow and be received by every member of the group. Listening mindfully to those around us can give us the courage to speak up about our own loss. Sharing our stories can accelerate the healing process for everyone.
All of Nature Speaks
At some point during most of my conversations with people in the jungle, someone would stop to point at the forest.
“Señora, the trees talk to us.”
At first, it struck me as one of those quaint beliefs like if you clap, Tinkerbell won’t die. It took a while for me to appreciate their culture of intimate attunement, but one afternoon I became acutely sensitive to the breeze against my skin and the sound of each individual raindrop as it fell. Looking up at the canopy, I sensed the trees were comforting and protective. My hosts explained that I was connecting to Arutam, the Great Force of Life, a spiritual intelligence that communicates through the natural elements: plants, animals, water, fire, rocks, and sky.
It is a belief shared by original peoples around the world.
“Everything is alive. Everything has consciousness,” says Ghosthorse. “What you see in creation: The air cares for you. The tree cares for you. They become ‘ings.’ Airing. Treeing. Caring. That is why we have to learn to care for everything around us. Because everything around us is caring for us.”
When my daughter was ten, we went on a safe one-day jungle trip in Costa Rica. She was delighted by butterflies and monkeys playing in the trees.
Sitting on a riverbank before lunch with our boat crew and guide, I mentioned that the people whom I’d met in Ecuador believed that the trees talk. They nodded.
“Do you believe that?” I asked.
They looked at me with pity, as if I was mentally challenged.
“Señora,” our guide spoke softly. “All of nature speaks. We just have to listen.”
Keys to Hear How Nature Speaks