What is wrong with us?!
Why is the Western world always
About to splinter into chaos?
On the Day of the Dead (which falls on the same day
As the Celtic New Year - Samhain),
I watched a video / documentary
Narrated by a Mexican family
That grows marigolds to sell on the Day of the Dead.
The meaning they attach to this day
Is evident in everything they do
And how they do it,
So the harvesting and potting
And transporting of the golden-yellow flowers
Is all imbued with the calm intensity of ritual.
There is footage of the grandmother
Working lovingly and intently with the marigolds
A year ago right before she died
After last year's Day of the Dead.
The narrator is her grandson, who loved her dearly
And something he said hit home for me,
Which is, that what kind of person he is
And aspires to be, is in honor of this grandmother
Whose presence is, for him, palpable.
It isn't that his grandmother is judging him or
Spying on him from the other side
Or shaming him, it is because she loved him;
To honor her he must love and respect himself.
This was very touching for me,
Not just because he expressed this sentiment through tears,
But because I feel the same way about my mother.
Who I am, the best parts of me,
That I identify with, are a reflection of her influence.
If you think I am alluding to how she raised me
You are missing my point.
The point is, she is still raising me.
Her spirit is still present in my life.
But there is much more to this.
It is only recently that I realized something
That has been trying to get through to me for a long time.
The mere acknowledgment of the continuity
Of countless past generations
Does not necessarily support our way through life.
The power of the dead to influence the living
Depends on a certain generosity that comes from
Realizing that we are on an epic collective journey.
The power of the dead to influence the living
Doesn't undermine the power of life,
It supports life like the humus supports the rose.
We are actually here because of the dead!
With that awareness comes a blossoming of a humility
That only flourishes when the conditions are ripe,
Like the rose on the rose bush.
If we consign the dead to the past we ghost the dead.
Ancestral spirits can only support us
If they are alive, and therein lies the problem.
Our culture "ghosts" the dead.
(Analogous to how we sterilize or "ghost" soil
By sapping it of life and treating it with chemicals.)
Progress allows no place for the wisdom of the dead.
What?? Let me say that again:
Progress allows no place for the wisdom of the dead.
We have made a religion of progress.
But there is nothing there! Progress is nothing.
There is nothing to it. It is less than a vapor trail.
How close to world annihilation do we have to get
To snap out of this adolescent idea
That we are so important and unique.
My god, the human race has been experimenting with civilization
For tens of thousands of years.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Jung tried to get us to see
That the reason that dreams are never wrong,
Only badly interpreted,
Is because the psyche is the living repository of the cumulative wisdom
Of eons of human experience . . . largely untapped.
This represents an omission of almost inconceivable scale
And helps explain why post-industrial Western culture
Is morally at sea. The other missing piece is
A culture-wide sense of indebtedness to all life that preceded us.
That is, indebtedness to all previous civilizations
And every antecedent living thing because
It has all been recycled. Duh!
Why is it so hard for us to understand that
Life and Death are just two aspects of the exact same mystery.
We don't have to start from scratch.
All the proof we need for that is in Jung's teaching:
We (all of us and each of us) carry the archetypes of a living universe within us.
Each of us embodies the living culture of the continuity
Of our species and of life itself
Which the dead can help us navigate
If only we will grant them life.
If our culture does not celebrate the life of the dead
Then our soil will be sterile.
Maybe we will even stop dreaming.
And that will be the end of us.
Our legacy will be a tumbleweed.
(Article changed on Nov 07, 2024 at 1:52 PM EST)
