The Forest Rearranges Herself

Lessons in the Art of Humility....

My wife and I spent last week guiding a small group of friends through an experiential exploration of memory. Our farm/eco-village is nestled quaintly on the edge of Sri Lana National park in Northern Thailand. If you can navigate your way around the forest here, which is not an easy thing to do in the rainy season, than you can walk from our community to several relatively culturally in-tact “hill tribe” villages where our “neighbors” are miraculously managing to still live in good ways, ways that my wife and I are consistently inspired by. After years of conversation, collaboration and dreaming with the P’wakaeya tribe living in the forest community of Hin Lad Nai that has become our extended home, the youth in their village asked if we could bring people to see how they live.

Having witnessed first hand how bringing outsiders in to places like this can quickly result in irreversible negative impacts on a community, I was reluctant to move forward with the request but in the end it was clear that the youth and the entire village had thought deeply about this and were well prepared. Unlike say, an untouched forest community in Peru, the P’gakenyaw are not cut off from the modern world. They are well aware of how people in the city live. Many of them have themselves spent significant time in Chiang Mai, and some have even spent time overseas. They are remarkably well traveled, well educated and deeply thoughtful. The invitation was not offered us without first giving it great consideration.

Still, it is always a bit risky bringing people who have fully embraced modernity into the last remaining places still managing to live in alignment with long since abandoned Original Agreements. It can feel a lot like introducing the genes of a domesticated pig into an organic, heirloom tomato seed. This community has become such good friends to us. Their elders are some of our closest mentors. Our daughter has spent much of her childhood here, they truly feel like our family. Knowing what we know of the outside world we were nervous, but it is abundantly clear that the wisdom they carry, wisdom we have gained much from ourselves, can be of great benefit to all living in these misguided times. So together, with the youth of Hin Lad Nai, we created a week of talks, activities and meditations, special opportunities to reflect over origins and how far humans have come from sanity while briefly being immersed in living vestiges of what might still be possible.

Rotational farming still being practiced ritually in the forests of Hin Lad Nai.

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It is not appropriate to glamorize indigenous peoples. “Civilization” tends to be overly romantic about tribal life, forgetting that all beings are flawed and regularly make mistakes. Yet, to be sure, there is great wisdom to be found still in some well-hidden pockets of the world. Hin Lad Nai is one of these places. Yet to suggest they are somehow different than us is to feed into the toxic idea of “other”. We all have in us the potential to live well in a place. Some just honor The Agreements while most do not. Yet no matter who a people are, courtesy and respect when approaching new places is always required. Although I have intellectually understood this for a while now, the deeper reasons for this and the subtle ways in which habitual arrogance keeps us from true courtesy has only recently begun to reveal itself to me. All people deserve to be seen as grand.

As a recovering academic who for years took rich kids from elite universities into “remote” parts of Tibet, India, Nepal, etc. I carry with me some shame regarding the job we did, how many peoples lives I fear we may have had a negative impact on as we stormed into their magnificent handmade homes with expensive factory made backpacks, enormous cameras pointing at their children from behind giant, perfectly white grins saying “Namaste!”, “Namaste!” but knowing nothing about what the word actually means nor having the willingness to put the time in to learn more about who our hosts really are, what mythological forces bind them into place, and how our inability to consider the implications our loud intrusion might have in the long run. Nowadays such “experiential” trips are becoming increasingly popular and are a dime a dozen. Everyone wants to have an encounter with a “noble savage”, maybe help build them a school, teach them some english, volunteer at an orphanage for a few days, then bail, give them some money, mine them for an exotic experience and peace out. Colonization continues to manifest in ever-evolving ways. And rarely does it see itself as lacking in courtesy.

Tricky. Yet, those infected with the dangerous ideas of modernity, if their contagious mind-disease is ever to be controlled, need to be re-minded (and re-hearted) as to how to live well in a place. It is also true that it isn’t up to us to decide what is best for any given people. I know that as soon as I was able to travel and see the world, I never looked back. Exploring different cultures and interacting directly with the diversity of views that weave our world into the richly textured quilt of hope it miraculously on occasion still is, has made me who I am, it offered me a real education, one that breathes and feels instead of the lifeless one determined by test results and a board of directors no one gets to meet.

The benefits of meeting new people are vast. And as such, we decided it would be good to co-create an experience with our hosts. One with better care that looked deeply into universal topics of Origin, Myth, Memory, Place, Self and Belonging that begged participants to consider, What if we listened to another song?, What if we were able to regenerate again a very different way of being than that mono-cultured view now saturating “civilized” mans creative impulses?

I often say I am a recovering academic. The emphasis here being placed on “recovering”. I have not recovered yet. For I, having been born, raised and “educated” by the very system I am increasingly attempting to challenge may never fully escape the clinches of its narrow view. Decolonization is an ongoing practice that will likely take many generations to actualize. Try as I may, I can rarely truly get out of my head long enough to genuinely penetrate deeply into the present experience where an authentic merger with the world is possible. For most of us who have been indoctrinated by western educational systems, everything is experienced through an analytical lens. Whereas my wife, who grew up in the same forested Laos village as her ancestors, learning through naturally arising circumstances, not linear, concrete school hall curriculum, can easily step into any village and learn twenty new things at once without needing technical explanations as to why this is this way and that is that way, and blah blah blah…well, lo and behold I cannot learn things so easily. My education won’t allow me to absorb information as quickly. I have to first study it. But to study something offers only facts, not resonance, not wisdom, not myth. To be sure, knowledge has its place, but knowledge is far from wisdom. A map, after all, is only a piece of paper.

Everything around us speaks. Yet someone steeped in rational thought it not likely to experience this. Learning a language is a long, grueling process for those of us unable to hold multiple truths at once. I have been living in Thailand for ten years now. I still struggle to communicate clearly. My wife on the other hand, after spending only a few months in Sri Lanka a few years before our daughter was born, was already fluent in the local tongue.

I have come to terms with the fact that I may not be able to rewire my mind in this lifetime in such a way as to allow me to be able to learn like her, some of our inherited qualities will take many lifetimes to fully purge, and to be sure, much of the work ahead of us is intergenerational. But with the kind help of my wife and our P’gakenyaw friends, our daughter is in fact already learning how to receive information in a bigger way than me, in ways more aligned with the undomesticated, perfect chaos of Natural Law.

She starts not at the beginning, as K-5 would have students do, but rather right where we are, smack dab in the middle of a wild spinning-wheel of information. She excitedly jumps in and spontaneously opens up, in and outward in all directions at once, absorbing myriad vibrational instructions on multiple levels of her still wild innocense. While I sit in the corner with Lonely Planet’s quick guide to the Thai Language, thumbing through literal translations, she simply observes and remembers and gets on with it. I am both proud of her and and bit envious! It’s a complex riddle, being aware yet not capable of shedding certain tendencies can be frustrating. We might not get there, this isn’t for us. We trudge on, little by little. We cross pollinate and evolve, not for us, for them…

My efforts to cease teaching in top-down, overly methodological ways has been met with similar difficulty. I know modern educational models are far from what Nature intends. The case with Surya, her mom and their ability to learn language spontaneously is a case in point. And I have witnessed this a million times in a million different ways over the past two decades of international travel. Yet I have been so deeply conditioned by institutionalized ideas of how to teach, how to learn and what equates to knowledge that the spell is very hard to break, even when I can speak of it with detail. 1 plus 1 still always equals 2 in my mind, even when my heart knows otherwise. The habitual need to attempt to control any given situation, to follow a script and deliver the desired outcome runs deep. The spell cast upon us by the overlords of modernity will take more than mere study and intellectual understanding to break.

Without knowing, I entered into our time together thus with the same, overly structured schedule of daily activities held together by “best practices” designed to “set us up for success” that I was hoping to skillfully avoid. Thankfully, the Forest saw right through me.

We had already entered into another realm once the Story had been told. For any of you who have received the gift of hearing a Real Story told well you know exactly what I mean. I was given permission to tell a Big Tale by one of my mentors, a Myth of Origins. Modern people never have enough time, and to be sure, this Story should have been told more slowly, over the course of several days, but we are all forced in this strange bardo to meet each other where we are, which usually is far from here. Regardless, as forgetful, distracted and displaced as we may be, as master story teller Martin Prechtel has often reminded us, The Story never forgets us. The Story never lets us down. And She surely did not this time.

After feeding the pulsing, metered song that fed us glimpses of lost ancestral views waiting patiently in neglected regions of our DNA we walked the land and did what we could to listen more deeply. Indeed, the whole world shifts when good Story is well fed and well fed people are gathered to intentionally receive Her riddle. Suddenly the garden isn’t just a garden but a sacred temple. It feels shameful to walk through Her gates unadorned, with no gifts to offer. So adorn ourselves we do, bringing gifts, songs and beautiful words. Good Myth, like all real education, lifts the veil and we can no longer pretend. We are made aware that garden beds are not mere lumps of dirt but infinitely complex eco-systems teeming with life and every time we dig our tools (which of course tools themselves aren’t mere “tools” but grand instruments of incalculable aid) into the Holy Earth we are causing unimaginable harm to countless living beings. The Story reveals this truth in excruciating, life-serving detail. When we bury our seeds in soil, we are sacrificing the Great Mothers beloved children so that our people can live. Suddenly, life is not a cold dead resource but a wildly generous, enchanted queendom worthy of our highest of praises. Having learned thus, we tread more lightly. We look more deeply with more than only our eyes, with reverence, great caution and awe.

Well, we try our best anyway. So much of these abilities have atrophied in the modern era. Our memories have been handed over wholesale to our super-phones and strangely, Right View of nature is now considered by most to be hippy dippy, woo-woo bullshit. Many may feel inclined otherwise, privately, but who amongst us is confident about the love pouring forth for all beings from a tree growing heroically from within one of those heavily manicured lawns adjacent the bank? Will you bow before Her and offer gifts, songs and a big hug when “normal” people are around? Or, like Judas, are we more likely to deny our savior multiple times before the rooster crows at dawn?

My wife feels. I think I feel, but to “think” you feel is in fact to “think”. Thus, I think. I try to feel but the feels are always filtered by my inherited settler-colonizer mind. Overthinking keeps us from direct emersion and haunts us, it keeps us up late into the night and prevents us from being able to do the most basic of human tasks, like making a basket or spinning cotton, all things everyone in the village of Hin Lad Nai do gracefully each day, simple but grand embodied movements that cause me great frustration whereas my wife learns how to do it all swiftly, with ease. I think “How do I do this? What is the right technique?”, while my beloved, watching, feeling, observing, simply does it. No thought. Only immersion. Interbeing.

My wife sees me struggling and though she can’t fully understand, because she does not descend from The Takers, she is empathetic and caring. We journey on together. An unlikely pairing in a place where the conditions are much different than in the city where everything is aligned in a way to promote apathy and amnesia. Here, everything requires memory and a different understanding of Time. And time was turning elastic the longer we spent in Hin Lad Nai, away from clocks and cell phone towers, away from electricity, social media and Amazon Prime.

After we facilitate a brief exploration of the tip of the iceberg regarding why a return to the village way of living is so essential and why saving seeds is so mandatory for any healthy society, slowly, just like in the Story, without our cognizant awareness, something in us knows we have crossed a threshold. Our rhythms attuned more to the rise and fall of the Sun, surrounded not by arrogant cityscapes and corporate distractions but the dense pulsing rainforest filled with Her myriad layers of ancient mystery, we are deep now in the throws of another world, another realm. How strange it is that, by definition of modern mapping we are not far at all from the city of Chiang Rai, yet it feels like we are in another space and time altogether. Even now, in this tragic age of forgetfulness, there are still pockets of brilliance, hope-preserving time capsules hidden in plain site for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. We feel blessed.

It is hard to properly put in words what it is like to be among people whose every act is determined by its heightened ability to align with Natural Law. At times it can cause humiliation and a great sadness. How have we allowed ourselves to veer so far away from the path of happiness and wisdom, the simple complexity of being a True Human? To come into contact with, if even for only a brief moment, a small echoed reflection of how we are suppose to live can be instantly life altering. Yet how difficult it is to bring such insights back to a world of uninitiated ghosts. If the new revelations have no place where they can be properly held than they are merely placed into the photo album along with all the other memorable “experiences”. And we sink swiftly back into forgetfulness.

Real wisdom can only come from someone who can actually embody the teachings. As much as I strive to embody the teachings I have received from true masters, I still have a long ways to go before the teachings transmitted to me penetrate deeply enough for me to be able to offer others any real wisdom. But with so few elders around us these days and with so much catching up we so clearly need to do, with this gnawing feeling of urgency and a strange desire to waste no time, my ego suggests I am ready enough goddamit!

So here we are, in the middle of the forest, leading a “workshop” on how to be more naturally human. My arrogance suggests that I know how to translate the village life of a people whose language I cannot speak, that I am qualified to accurately transmute the ways of the forest to my students better than the ones who actually live here and I hurriedly decide to take everyone to the sacred tree at the heart of their forest to deliver a profound meditation on how to connect to the land and our ancestors, an act I have openly criticized many times over the years, yet wooooo… here I go, another white man certain he knows best! And into the emerald spiral of forested magic we tread….

As we walk my mind reviews and makes plans, little edits here and there to assure an experience is offered that blows their minds!! I am so in my head that I don’t even notice I have walked far ahead of the group. No worries, I say to myself, I have been to this tree a thousand times, I could walk there blindfolded! Most of this is true afterall. I have been there more times than I can count. It has become an extremely important place of pilgrimage for me over the years. The tree haven grown into more of a relative of mine than merely a “place” to visit at this point. Yet the longer I walk I start to realize I don’t know where I am. I don’t recognize the trees around me. There are new smells, unfamiliar energies. I get nervous. Where am I??? It becomes clear. I am lost.

I race ahead anxiously and veer off onto another trail. I traverse back to where I thought would lead me to the trailhead. Nothing resembling anything familiar. I loop up and over, down and around forested hills that are foreign to me. I recognize nothing. How could this be?! I have been in this forest more than any other place I have visited in Thailand besides my own home. What is happening?! Where is the sacred tree?! And for that matter, where are any of the trees I have grown to know so well???

Finally I abandon hope. More than an hour has gone by. My wife and the villagers are no doubt delivering a plan B at this time to our students. All my big ideas and fancy plans to impress them with an incredible download of ancient insight were in vain. The flow of the entire week is now clearly ruined. How will anything make since now if I am not there to lead the super sacred teachings, under the super sacred tree?! Only I know how to do this! Only I have the skillset to translate the deep mystical teachings of the forest!

I start to get tired. Even the thoughts racing in my mind eventually slow down. I need to rest. I sit quietly under a comfortable bamboo grove that dances and sings as I allow myself to calm down and surrender. I do little more than breathe. I don’t attempt to activate any special meditation or practice, I just sit. I take my shoes of an touch the mossy earth with my feet. I weep. I lie down and stare into the forest canopy. I close my eyes. After a few minutes I can see a faint image of the tree in my minds eye. And I recall a conversation I had with Daojai, one of the village youths several years ago. I asked her if their people ever held any rituals at the tree. And she had said, “No, We are simple people”.

It dawns on me then what is happening. I am inside The Story. The Story has eaten me and I am viewing the world from inside the jaws of Myth. My arrogance led me astray in the Forest of Dangers and Delights. Yet still the forest protects me, sending me her guardians. I open my eyes and see sitting before me two friendly dogs, waiting to lead me back home.

As we walk back to the village again, I reflect over what The Story always tells us. In a millions voices, Baba Yaga reminds us again and again how forgetful we are, how often we neglect to remember who gave us the inspiration to even conceive of such a Tale to begin with much less understand the secret mysteries of its Origins, how the riddle is to be ritually understood and alchemically embodied, not for our own self righteous benefit but for the purpose of a much grander vision, one that does not place humans at the center of its eternal saga.

Humbled, it is clear the Forest Herself rearranged her gates so as to keep me from gaining entry into the Grail Castle. Like Parzival, I could not find again the place I had before entered into. For in those times I neglected to ask the right questions, to approach with appropriate courtesy, yet I thought otherwise. I thought I did all the right things, having done everything my fancy degrees had empowered me to do! I had been there and done that! And like so many other wishful knights, I thought it was I who had pulled the sword from the stone.

We must be careful before we start spewing off grand visions. Disembodied as most of us are, we are in no place now to receive The Cup. We live in a time where one can become a yoga teacher in a few hundred hours, when someone can be a certified expert in “cultural studies” after reading a handful of accredited books in an ivy league hall in Cambridge. We need to come to terms with the fact that few among us are truly qualified to be teaching the deepest understandings of which our very souls now so much yearn for. There is knowledge and then there is wisdom.

It’s frustrating, I know. But there are no short cuts here. And very little money to be earned from any of this, if any at all. It requires of us an entirely different view than the one modernity has force-fed us. Just as our ancestors had to work hard for many generations to finally be granted Big Story, we too will need need to play the long game before we are again invited to enter the castle. It doesn’t matter how well-intended we are, there is much more required than merely a good heart.

The only authority now is Earth Herself and if we are ever going to regenerate our lost capacity to understand Her we will need to gracefully come down from our high horse and trust Her, as She is, raw, wild and direct, without our misguided interpretations. We are not yet elders dear friends, we are barely yet suitable apprentices, but we have not been abandoned by the wise ones or Story. Grace still abides. Better than racing to organize the next great transformational workshop thus, a more noble way to honor those who patiently await for us to grow back the capacity to clearly understand, is to work diligently at bringing together the right conditions for such an understanding to be again possible. We ought not study other cultures, other plants and microbial networks but rather kindly sit alongside our fellow human and more-than-human companions and, as Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec suggests, become kin. Let’s dine together, learn the languages that allow us to ask better questions, master the art of humility, hand the mic over, and listen. Just listen.

She will take it from here…

#maypeaceprevailonearth