Is village life what modern people are longing to come home to?
Four years ago, when we began the journey to organize a family witch camp in the Reclaiming Tradition, we hadn't even thought of using the term "village" to describe what we were reaching for. Then, there it was: "Village Camp," being organized by Tejas Web. My partner and I and our two young children packed our bags and went, and the path toward village began to open up in earnest. Within less than a year, we had found a camp facility that was "good enough," put money down and assembled an organizing team for Cascadia Village Camp to be held in August 2002, not far from Seattle.
Then a friend in our community invited us to attend a workshop being offered by Malidoma Some`, a teacher, healer and shaman from the Dagara tribe in West Africa. He was coming to the small rural town we live in to offer a five-session program of "village trainings" for families to explore the "power of ritual in community." We signed up. From there, the path we had been walking turned into a river of teachings flowing from many sources. This river has carried us deeper and further than we could ever have imagined possible when we began organizing our notion of a family witch camp.
As this year's camp concluded, the facilitation team reflected on the richness that has emerged in the many interwoven layers of learning from running the event. It seems that the medicine cabinet we have gotten into by calling on spirit and the ancestors to help us "re-member" village life is bursting with teachings vital to the transformation of our modern world. What we seem to be cracking into are spiritual and social technologies that may help allow, in Malidoma's words, "for the indigenous colonization of modernity." From the Dagara cosmological perspective, the modern world is on fire. Everything is being driven by the unrestrained energies of acquisition, production, consumption and constant growth. To the Dagara, it is the healing water of spirit -- the rituals and understandings -- that bring community into right relationship with the ancestors and the unseen world. This relationship is needed to restore balance to the earth. What we are learning is that villages rooted to place and spirit are necessary vehicles and containers for this healing medicine.
Our first two years of Cascadia Village Camp experience have shown us that even approximating a village context for ritual, shamanic learning and healing opens a powerful portal to the other world. It is as if the closer we can come to the pattern of indigenous village life in our gatherings, the more recognizable we become to the otherworld as a vessel into which spirit can pour its healing teachings. By "village" we mean an assemblage of not only humans of all ages and inclinations, but also the ancestors, nature beings of the place where we gather, and other spirit allies. We are calling on the spirit of village in the broadest sense that we can imagine.
The results of this call to the ancestors, to spirit and to the deep memory of our own bones to learn and to "re-member" what it means to be in village with others have been extraordinary. This year, several stories emerged over the course of our five days together. Instead of choosing a story to weave the learning of camp around, fairy tales wrote themselves on the slate of our gathering. The rhythm, facilitation style, guiding principles and fundamental teaching tools we have chosen to nurture the development of village culture have resulted in a powerful new learning model that is spirit-driven and truly participatory.
In this article, we would like to share what we are learning about how "village," in the deepest sense that the word implies, provides some clues to the longing of our spiritual homelessness and to the healing that our world is desperately crying out for.
Conquest: The fundamental belief of conquest is in scarcity. Thus survival depends on superiority, acquisition and control. Conquest becomes the goal of human life and the driving force of social organization and history. Socially, this produces and normalizes constant economic growth, the concentration of wealth and the constant expansion of territory and access to resources. Competition as the means to gain superiority (i.e. survival) is held as natural law, ultimately resulting in war and genocide.
Slavery: Humans become property, nature and the earth become property. Everything is valued only for how it serves the competitive goals of conquest and acquisition. Everything is impoverished to its material reality, and the natural and spiritual law of reciprocation is broken. Taking no longer requires giving.
Alienation: It becomes necessary to break people from their gifts and their true genius, their indigenous spiritual practices and cosmology, their land, their ancestors, their extended family and their village. Humans broken, brutalized and desensitized in this way are able to commit atrocities against other humans and the earth. Scarcity as a brutal experience reinforces the belief in scarcity. The divorce of the seen and unseen worlds, the de-spiritization of the natural world, makes it possible for humans to destroy the earth.
Production: The "work ethic" is the manipulation of the fear of scarcity into constant material activity. People who are scared and alienated from themselves are easy to manipulate. Our deep, but alienated, desire to contribute to community fuels the flames of production. The dominant paradigm uses multiple layers of psychological, social and spiritual technology to keep our deepest yearnings unconscious and to pattern us and keep scarcity driven productivity in place. Its primary modern tools are mass media, especially television, and a professionalized, institutional and compartmentalized society.
Poverty/Consumption: Concentration of extravagant wealth in the hands of the very few creates actual material scarcity of food, water, medicine and shelter and inflicts intolerable suffering, starvation, infant mortality, slavery and disease on the majority of the inhabitants of the planet. Hopeless feeding of spiritual scarcity and homelessness with material goods numbs the pain. Addiction in all its forms is the self-medication of our alienation from spirit and community, a hunger insatiable by anything but the true holding of village, spirit and the land that we long for. Mass consumption is used as the argument for mass production and the need for further conquest.
All flows back to conquest.
Community: The community we long for is the community of all beings, seen and unseen. The human community that our bones desire and our genetic makeup crafts us for is rich with multi-generational relationships fully integrated into daily life and work. In the village the foundational belief is that abundance abides in our relationships; in how all of our gifts are shown, recognized, held and healed, and in the beauty and wisdom that flows through a community in right relationship to place, spirit, self and work. Accountability for individual actions rests with the whole community, and the whole community is responsible for the individual's unfolding.
Place: A village exists in a particular place, and its physical health depends on right relationship between its material technologies and its environment. It occupies a complex ecological niche. The material relationship of a village to its place is guided and regulated by direct relationship to the beings of that place: the land, water, plants, animals, minerals and spirits with whom the village co-exists. It is recognized that humans, by nature, are manipulators of their environments, so special attention to the natural law of reciprocation is required. Taking requires conscious giving as a way of maintaining balance with the places we inhabit.
Spirit: The indigenous village we long for includes not only living humans but our ancestors, elemental spirits, nature spirits, deities and other spirit allies as well. In this village, the unseen world is as real as the world we see. Here the seen and unseen worlds are inseparably interwoven, each requiring attention and action to maintain the health of the community. The tools of relationship to the unseen world are as diverse as the cultures, villages and individuals that use them. The shamanic pathways can be negotiated by individuals on their own behalf, but are often negotiated by the village's diviners, shamans, healers and elders on behalf of others and the village as a whole. The vesting of the spiritual authority to conduct work in the other world on behalf of the village is complex and culturally defined, but ultimately rests on the consent of the village as a whole. Personal rituals, healing rituals and community rituals accompany all the significant transitions, healing crises (transformations) and "work" of the village community.
Self: In a village, our individual gifts can flourish because they are seen, nurtured and reflected back to us by a diverse community grounded in the belief in our spiritual uniqueness and greatness. Individuals are received as a gift from the ancestors to the community with a particular purpose to live up to. The job of the village is to nurture this gift. The job of the individual is to deliver the gift. The dynamic tension between the expression of individuality and the expectation of service to community is honored and held as a sacred creative force within the village. Each of the major life crises -- birth, initiation into adulthood, sacred union with another (and the breaking of such unions), community leadership, elderhood and death -- are accompanied by community-wide rituals that have a general form, but are tailored to the specific person being held by the community through the life transition.
Work: Work is directed toward providing for the material and spiritual necessities of the village and the creation of beauty. There is little separation between the mundane and the spiritual. The technologies and work that provide food, fiber, shelter and energy are often surrounded by ritual, conducted socially and integrated with the expression of beauty. Singing accompanies work; practical tools are also sculptures. Skill at particular crafts is taught, valued and honored. The technologies of spirit are also taught and valued as work. They, too, are accompanied by the expression of beauty: story, song, dance, poetry, theater, carving, etc. The creation of beauty is recognized as the most vital food for the other world and for the human spirit. Personal achievement is measured by how completely and with what degree of beauty and elegance one delivers one's gift to community.
All flows back to community.
We live in a very imperfect world, governed primarily by the pentacle of conquest. We are constantly holding back the cries of our souls because of the pain and suffering that surrounds us and for our own deep longing for a sense of home and purpose and beauty. If it is true that some key to this longing is held in the pentacle of village, how do we negotiate a path toward what we long for in the modern context that we find ourselves? Because this has been the central theme and question posed for the explorations we have undertaken at Cascadia Village Camp, we have discovered a few clues that may be worthwhile to share.
It seems that it was no accident that the environmental learning center in the state park we chose for the camp was a former military base: barracks, military chapel and mess hall. At first many campers were put off by both the camp's permeability to the public (visitors to the park regularly wander through, and this year a fundamentalist church youth group was in the neighboring facility) and by its military "vibe." But as we leaned into these issues, we realized that the task of transforming a military facility into a village with a temple to the goddess and a sacred grove and fairy shrine has been the perfect metaphor for the question we are asking: How do we transform the culture we live in? The first year it took us three days of "work" before we could gather for ritual in the chapel-turned-temple. But when we did, it was very powerful. This year the temple was ready for ritual the first night, and our challenges showed up in other ways.
Several lessons have emerged from this process. First, it is not necessary or even desirable to be secluded or invisible to be protected and able to go deep into healing ritual and magical work. Second, we need to work with the materials at hand. Just because their original purpose was to serve the goals of conquest, doesn't mean that they may not be useful to the modern village. Third, we are capable, if working with intent and spirit, to manifest the qualities of indigenous village anywhere, not just off in a world we create unto ourselves for a workshop week or at an exclusive intentional community. Fourth, there are many obstacles to overcome, both internal and external, but if we welcome them as our spiritual teachers, the learning is rich and deep.
We need to understand that the journeys from modernity back toward indigenous village are voyages into uncharted territory. They have their rough patches because they are pioneering efforts. The pathways must be discovered, forged and perhaps sometimes broken open. Our experience is that deliberately reaching to pull together as many of the qualities of village as we can imagine in a given context and then calling on spirit to lead us to the next step works. Somehow, the next step becomes clear, and we call on our courage and willingness and take it.
In the past year, a major transformation has begun at our family farm. The magic and abundance of village has begun to show up in an unexpected way. That it was full-on harvest season, and I had the energy, inspiration and space in time to be writing this article even after we hosted the facilitation team and helped facilitate five days between the worlds at Cascadia Village Camp in addition to parenting two young children, is a miracle of the holding of village and the ancestors. I cannot explain it any other way.
Last year I was an exhausted, depressed wreck for five months after Village Camp, wondering how and if village could ever possibly show up in my life, and being an energetic burden to my dear partner. But we held our ground and kept moving along what was, for us, a very rocky and twisted path of learning, guided from step to step by divination and dreams through a series of personal and community rituals. Gradually more and more shrines, sacred places and spirit relationships began to show up on our land and in our home.
But still there was a tension. How could we possibly continue to go deeply into the shamanic work and training we felt so called to pursue and continue to farm our land as well? It felt overwhelming. We were exhausted. Should we stop farming to pursue the passion of our hearts? We sought out a divination from one of our "village" diviners, almost hoping to be let off the hook by being told to stop farming. The answer was clear: "You are to continue farming. But your farming must change. Your farming must be done as an offering to your community." What did this mean? The divination also told us we were to keep running the farm as a business.
Then, this spring, a notion caught hold of us to expand our work-in-trade-for-food day to two days and invite parents to come and bring their children with them. We said, "We'll just figure out how to hold the children's energy together as part of what we do, just like we've done in our village trainings with Malidoma and at village camp. We'll just figure out how to hold the kids together as we go along." We wanted to make the experience feel abundant, so we prepared fairly lavish snacks, and we began taking forty-five minute to an hour snack breaks. In exchange, each family or individual has access to all the produce they need from the farm for the week.
The response has been almost overwhelming. Some days we have had more than thirty kids and their parents show up. Parents are thanking us profusely for the beauty and richness of their experience and the food they receive. And we are thanking them for all the work that gets done with so much joy, companionship and beauty. The deep satisfaction we all get from working side-by-side with our hands in the earth almost makes the work-for-food trade insignificant. We have a social life, our kids are more integrated into the farm scene, forty or so kids are getting a farm experience and we are liberated from being an overworked farm family. We are farming as an offering to our community, and the abundance is flowing. Remarkably, our bottom line looks better than ever. So a new economic model for community based agriculture is being born as well. With the help of the ancestors and the spirit world, and as a result of offering our farm to our community as a village-like context for work and children, abundance has shown up in a very big way.
I share this example mostly because I want to emphasize two important lessons I have received about manifesting village in a modern context. The first is that it really was spirit that delivered this to us. I didn't recognize what was happening until it was already manifest. This is because I was carrying around a concept of what village would look like if it showed up based on my anthropological and socio-political notions of some kind of intentional community. Instead, it is showing up as a trend, a theme that resonates deeply within us. Most of the folks that are showing up for these work days have no idea about any of the stuff in this article, including my shamanic work. They only know us as farmers and parents in their community. This is not because we hide anything, but because those are the parts of us that are relevant to them. This is very exciting because it means that spirit moves us toward village even when we don't have a conscious context to put a framework around our experience. I am beginning to suspect that the power of "village" on our psyches may be even deeper than that of a psychological archetype, that it goes deeper into our humanness, reaching down into the root of our evolution to resonate in our bellies and our very bones.
The second lesson is framed by the knowledge that the two contrasting pentacles of Conquest and Community are extremes that do not exist in the real world. We live in a complex continuum of the dynamic interrelationships between them. Elements of village and elements of conquest infuse our material environment and our psyches at many levels. We are creatures of both abundance and of scarcity. No perfect Shangri-la of village will probably ever exist. So the work of manifesting village is perhaps less about creating a new and separate thing than about infusing the threads of the village pentacle that already exist in the context of modernity with the vigor of purposeful ritual for healing and a powerful call to our ancestors for help. Pick a thread that is in alignment with both our personal medicine and our worldly work and bring the power of village to that thread and watch the magic unfold...
We do not know what a modern world colonized by the indigenous wisdom of spirit, place and community will look like. It is as if humanity has collectively reached a point of initiation in which we have outgrown an overextended adolescence that promotes itself as both immortal and the pinnacle of achievement on the one hand, and yet burns with the unconscious fear of its poverty and lostness on the other. We need to be brought back to our original purpose for being here on this planet, our indigenous purpose. This requires of us both collective and individual "little deaths" and rebirths. The old farm and farmers based on the model of scarcity have died, and a new farm was born, but nothing much appears to have changed on the surface. Perhaps this is a clue about the pathway to the world we want.
Alan Brisley is a farmer of organic vegetables and father of two. He is a reclaiming tradition priest of eight years and has just completed his first year of intensive Dagara (West African) shamanic instruction. Alan loves to share his relationship to beauty in nature with the child in all through "hands-on-the-earth" creation of altars, shrines and other magical tools.
For more information about Cascadia Village Camp, visit the Web site at http://home.comcast.net/~cascadiavillage, e-mail CascadiaVillage@comcast.net, write to P.O. Box 27874, Seattle, WA 9816 or call (360) 379-6579.
Copyright © 2006 by the article's author