Can A White Man Hear His Ancestors?

Rescuing what remains of an ancient desire to live.

Just as the story of some “Great” America that must be returned to is but a hateful myth,

Just as the narrative that suggests anyone’s land “belongs” to them is but fodder for further fear,

Just as Modernity weaves into our zeitgeist cruel illusionary beliefs that anything at all is secure and safe, that borders mean something, that man-made laws mimic some unseen natural moral code,

So too, the notion that whiteness is anything more than a concept is but smoke and mirrors.

If thus a “white” man were to light some sage, offer cornmeal to a stone and petition his ancestors for guidance, who would reply?

Surely not a white man.

Oh, it may be another angry soldier hell bent on vengeance just like him, but he’d not be white. Ney, he or (ghast!) she would surely be a being of culture, nothing resembling the well-groomed lads we find parading about nowadays in tight t-shirts, short hair, aviators, and hipster jeans.

Oh, the call might miraculously be heard by a gaggle of Vikings or Celts just as blood thirsty as todays so-called “leaders”, but they would not be the same watered-down versions of Christians we find in churches dotting the American countryside today. They’d be beaten down warriors deeply rooted to Place, filled with whimsical pagan song, fed by ancient ecological Myth.

Were that the prayer be made and heard it would be received by people of Grief and Joy, a people of place and of color.

“Whiteness” is a disease of the mind, a product of modernity.

In all our bloodlines are found a hundred thousand forked stories.

Origins abound. And Home is meandering.

Deep in our bones are myriad realms of far brighter options, forgotten passageways hidden within multicultural palaces built from languages more able to imagine.

Under the blasé, regurgitated narratives of us vs. them is a forgotten third way that points to a never-before-seen, altogether New Story built from the bones of Whom Has Been Forgotten.

We are not what we think we are.

We descend not from one place, but many.

We are oceanic plankton that miraculously birthed an ability to eat The Sun.

Our ancestors are not men but plants, stars and Sound.

I hear my brothers from Israel.

I hear my sisters from Palestine.

I hear my friends from Ukraine and my neighbors from Myanmar…

I remember too how hateful and ignorant was the way the U.S. responded on 9/11, unable to see how much of that awful act was a monster of our own creation.

Utterly dreadful. All of it.

And we art that. We all inter-are. We are capable too of so much more. Yet back on the wheel we go. Round and round and round again………

The question therefore is not , Who is right? nor Who is wrong?

The heartbreaking riddle is far more direct;

:::Do we no longer wish to survive???

Have we outgrown the desire to evolve?

Have our memories become so weak that all we now see is fantasy?

Where is home to a species gone extinct?

Which god do murdered children bow before?

…Have the end times already come and gone?

Or are we treading still in primordial soup? Churning forever the endless violent milky chaos that raged for millennia before finally birthing Luca?

If we were to bow before the memory of Her,

If we were to stop, and for but a moment remain open enough to hear The Buzzing Hum of Creation,

Would we be able to handle what looked us in the face?

Would the sound of that black hole make a terrorist out of us too?

…or would it force us to ripen finally into a human? One worthy of growing old. One worthy of descending from…

Do we have the capacity, the courtesy, the active faith to surrender to something altogether different? Time will tell.

Our ancestors are all around us,

They hear us.

And they weep.

:::Shalom:::

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*Please read Ayesha Khans recent piece: Palestinian Resistance is Decolonized Medicine in Practice

*Please read to this important essay by Bayo Akomolafe: Dear White People

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HAPPENING NOW in Bodhgaya, India: https://siddharthasintent.org/events/siddhartha-festival/

#maypeaceprevailonearth