The Divine Ache to Evolve

growing beyond revolution

Jun 13, 2025

If you could kindly tap the ❤️ at the top or bottom of this newsletter it will make it easier for other people to find this publication. Ahéhee'! བཀའ་དྲིན་ཆེ།! 謝謝! Thank you! ขอบคุณ! شكرا ! תודה! Спасибо! धन्यवाद! Cảm ơn bạn! អរគុណ! Merci y Muchisimas gracias!

On the eve of Trump’s big birthday bash, I feel inspired to share a bit about a recent return to Hin Lad Nai village, where a P’gakenyaw community have been tending to a forest for over 500 years with little disturbance. It is rare in this day and age to find such places and my wife and I are extremely grateful to have been able to form a deep relationship with this tribe for over a decade now. Each time we return we find our understanding of what it means to be human significantly expand. This time, was no different.

It can be a bit debilitating to have the rug pulled out from under you not once, but repeatedly, day after day. To be a genuine seeker of truth however, seems to require us to grow comfortable with such an unstable sensation. I once naively thought that if only we could topple empire, then we would finally be free! Then later I was told that, if only I did enough yoga or ate enough raw foods I could liberate my consciousness from the disturbing mundaneness of everyday existence and see clearly. Turns out neither was right, nor necessarily wrong for that matter, but still missed the ball. Now here I am, halfway through life, watching my homeland from afar, observing well-intended people heroically attempt to seek “justice”, with the understandable belief that such noble acts might level the scales. I am reminded of how naive I was. How naive in many ways I still am. Maturity humbles us, forces us to come to terms with the fact that life is far more complex than we have been taught to believe. Life is uncertain, not always fair and rooted in Chaos and Chance.

How unlikely that any of us are here. We could have been born as snails or subatomic particles. We could have been flowers, feathers, fiery flowing fields of magma or giant toothed felines. Yet against all odds, we were born as humans, able to develop incredible capacities of creation, destruction, or sloth-like apathy. We are somewhat unique in the family of life, in that we are able to not only learn new skills but can penetrate deeply into the nature of mind. How strange it is then, that with such profound opportunity, modern people generally remain stuck, incapable of evolving beyond the constant lusting for simple desires, perpetually plagued by cyclical thinking.

The modern world is so shrouded in distractions that it rarely even considers that many of our answers are already here. I too often get overwhelmed by the loud voice of social media and think to myself, “When will we ever learn?”. When I do this I subconsciously feed into the modern zeitgeist that forgets that humans were living in very evolved way for thousands of years. It wasn’t always like this. Even today, in well-hidden, overlooked pockets of miraculously kept-alive indigenosity, an evolved intelligence still guides everyday life.

Hid Lad Nai is such a place, a Place where the basic needs of life are provided in abundance by the forest, and the forest is not merely understood as a “resource” but a living Being. To the untrained eye, the forest appears to be an unformidable expanse of unused obstruction, yet for the wise, it is a living encyclopedia of all that we need. All food, all medicine, all fiber for clothing, all tools, all materials for beauty making, for music, play, protection, transportation, technology, etc. Earth provides all to those with eyes to see.

Every plant is known intimately here. At birth, among the P’gakenyaw tribe, the babies umbilical cord is wrapped around a specially chosen tree. This tree then becomes a blood relative, a close partner for one’s entire life. Here, at the edge of the world, the subtle movement of a turtle can signal the coming of a flood, the slightest shift in how a vine climbs can help aid in important decision making. Nothing here is without meaning and no person is without purpose; all beings collectively playing a crucial role in the ever-unfolding, always-evolving creation of Time.

My wife and I were given permission to bring a small group of friends from around the world to join us in our return journey to Hin Lad Nai this week, under the “planting moon” to explore our long lost inter-relationship with mythically aligned educations that animate all that we do, things modern culture has suggested are “trivial”, “silly”, “not important” or even “backwards”. Our group was diverse. Some were older by age and came from affluent countries, some were with us escaping wars in their native land, some were young, taking a break from school. There were some from the Americas and several from Asia. A glorious, diverse, motley crew to be sure, all offering their own perspectives yet all choosing to learn from a people who have not forgotten how to live in sync with the cycles of the moon, the call of the wild, the simple wisdom of a pre-modern memory still ritually fed.

Lighting the fire. The Story begins, again.

…

We began our time together with Story. Not some bullshit Disney-ified story but the old-time kind of Story that must be told around a fire, where no one can leave while the Story is being told and after it is told everyone must retell it verbatim before the next chapter can weave herself into what has proven to be been fully understood. And, as it has been done for so many thousands of years before, we ended our time together with song. Not that poppy electro-beat shit but real, ancestral dream-triggering songs that remind the listener how to Live. And all the time in between was shrouded too in Myth, the way we approached The Father Sun at dawn, with cornmeal we roasted the night before from ears harvested ourselves as we sung songs of praise to the Maize Mothers who gifted us with their sweet babies so that we might live. Everything a Story. Everything, Alive.

When enough conditions are present, the seeds begin to sprout. If enough sunlight is present, enough mineral water, combined with rich soil, is able to court buried seed into movement, than life again lives. So too is it with human memory. We are a forgetful people however, living in times that have not provided most of us with the necessary conditions for becoming. With all our fancy machines, few of us even know how to grow a dandelion. And fewer still know how magnificent a dandelion actually is, how filled with nutrition, medicine, and metaphor for myth-making lay hidden in plain sight within her gorgeous sun-like brilliance. Yet occasionally, even in times as strange as these, conditions are right, and when they are, our ancestral understandings give rise, regardless of how poorly our current “cultures” have prepared us for the acquisition of wisdom.

In the forest, surrounded by the smell of cooking fires (not gas stoves and certainly not the electric ones most have become accustomed to but actual wood-burning stoves resting atop properly blessed stones intentionally placed in ways that ritually invoke meaning), something in our bones starts to awaken. Waking before our Father Sun, slowing down and smelling the scent of Rain on Dust, listening to the sounds of birds as women washing clothes along the river sing poems that offer the listener cryptic riddles as to how to unlock the doors of the heART, we come alive again.

In a few short days, the story is no longer mere entertainment. Shrouded now in multiple layers of Living Myth, what initially seemed but a cute tale suddenly revives intergenerational paths of knowing, that transcend space, time, all illusions of cultural identity and national origin, as the forest breaths memory back into our collective cellular memory. We re-member our place in the Great Web of Life.

It’s not as hard as we think. There isn’t that much to do really. The education of modern men has made things so overly complicated that the most ordinary of human actions now seem strangely esoteric. So-called “advanced” culture is so adrift in technological bewilderment, so consumed by its violent mining of precious earth that it has literally sucked all soul from the tale, lost the plot and sent most of us astray. But not all. There are some who still know what we are here for, and where we are from…

Breathe. Listen. Mature slowly. Live wisely, for a time beyond now. Repeat.

My daughter, listening to the forest with her bare feet.

…

The Forest generously demonstrates what it means to live a life of meaning. Everything here is living and dying simultaneously. There is no set beginning here, no definable end. All a massive, pulsing, ever-spiraling organism of unfolding is-ness. And miraculously, a magnificent people who haven’t lost their way still live here! A people whose education is expressed in song, not through scholarly recitation but in simple acts of beauty-making, whose clothes still reflect the Story of it all, whose daily prayers re-mind the forgetter of what matters most.

Like seeds nearly gone extinct yet here still against all odds, the indigenous peoples of the world are still here. We can choose to listen to them, or we can join the war. We can keep telling ourselves that we are not them, that this is the way it is and we can’t change anything, or, we can see things the way they are, as eternal extensions of the infinite quilt of Time, spilling over and cross-pollinating in wild, colorful, never-before-seen ways that re-align ourselves again and again with Her. We can choose… to be free… to be happy… to be here, and sane.

Friends. I am certain that many of you are preparing to gather and head to various protests against the terrible kings of these collapsing times. Godspeed. Thank you for your courage. I will be here praying for you from my tiny little house of mud. As our Father Sun rises over the Eastern horizon tomorrow morning I will offer some cornmeal and sing the songs I have been told to sing by people I know understand what matters most. I will think of you as I do so, knowing that everything we do inter-is. Go with a soft heart, yet demand that the state be kinder. Bring food to the hungry and if you can, invite the immigrant to live in your home. Do not get drunk on the excitement of neo-tribalism. Remember in all such doings She-Who-Gives-Us-Life.

We are not our countries. We are not our birth certificates or religious affiliations. We are the flowering vines of seeds planted long ago, in star-like worlds of what might have been and always is. We cannot continue to forget who we are. As elder Martín Prechtel oftens reminds us, We are not here to “get what we want”, unless what we want is to feed The Holy in Nature, to nourish a time of hope beyond now. So when you come face to face with so-called enemy, see in them another you. See beyond the illusion of divisive banter and co-mingle in unlikely ways. Do not only sit beside those who think like you. Invite the fascist in for tea.

Trump, empire, us, it all will become compost. May we rise to the occasion and help hospice the dying of modernity with wisdom, compassion and an intergenerational aspiration to collectively evolve.