Yesterday John asked me to post some thoughts I had shared with Tanja and him via Email. They had just informed us all the residency I would present to next week had been cancelled because of coronavirus.
In my Email reply to the news, I wrote:
I remember a dream I had many years ago, while still living in New York state. I think it was right after the 9/11 attacks in NYC (one of the jets flew over me during my commute to work).
I had been living there in New York state for a few years. I was regularly helping support and participating in two Native ceremonial communities. This was in addition to my participation in a longhouse on my grandfather’s Mohawk reservation outside Montreal.
In my dream, a large group of people from the larger ceremonial community (based on the Shoshone ‘Ghost Dance’, called Naraya), strode over a gentle hill, and began approaching our encampment where I was with the other, smaller group.
In the dream, all of us instantly understood why that other community had come, and why they were approaching us.
We all understood that an emergency with Our Mother, the Earth, was approaching. We saw we must combine our efforts, work together, to help ‘push bad things’ away in the world, to keep them from happening.
In subsequent real world ceremonies (not the dream), the elders in the Shoshone ceremony, and my own Mohawk elders, regularly emphasized an identical warning and prophecy that had been foretold: we were approaching the time when things would rapidly grow more difficult and challenging for human beings each year. However, we should not despair, nor fear, nor panic. Eventually we would realize this was our Mother’s way of guiding us through changes we need to make in ourselves, our way of seeing and living. Those changes are needed to return us all to healthier relationship with our Mother, the Earth, and with each other.
So, I admit I feel conflicted now.
The wisdom of minimizing coronavirus’ impact makes total sense to me. I do not quibble with the decision to postpone. However, as an artist, I’m also mindful of my responsibility to continue working to help others learn, grow, explore themselves and their place in the world. I have plenty of creative work to do right now – alone, for a separate project I’m working on.
Yet I also do not believe in ‘accidents’, per se. I have learned to pay very close attention to coincidence.
Indeed, that attention, or mindfulness was to be a central message I would share with my group in a couple of weeks: to be sensitive to what is happening in the world, what is happening with our fellow human beings, what is happening across our planet. And, finally, to explore – together – ways that our listening can guide our creative endeavours.
In my dream, a large group of people from the larger ceremonial community (based on the Shoshone ‘Ghost Dance’, called Naraya), strode over a gentle hill, and began approaching our encampment where I was with the other, smaller group.
In the dream, all of us instantly understood why that other community had come, and why they were approaching us.
We all understood that an emergency with Our Mother, the Earth, was approaching. We saw we must combine our efforts, work together, to help ‘push bad things’ away in the world, to keep them from happening.
In subsequent real world ceremonies (not the dream), the elders in the Shoshone ceremony, and my own Mohawk elders, regularly emphasized an identical warning and prophecy that had been foretold: we were approaching the time when things would rapidly grow more difficult and challenging for human beings each year. However, we should not despair, nor fear, nor panic. Eventually we would realize this was our Mother’s way of guiding us through changes we need to make in ourselves, our way of seeing and living. Those changes are needed to return us all to healthier relationship with our Mother, the Earth, and with each other.
So, I admit I feel conflicted now.
The wisdom of minimizing coronavirus’ impact makes total sense to me. I do not quibble with the decision to postpone. However, as an artist, I’m also mindful of my responsibility to continue working to help others learn, grow, explore themselves and their place in the world. I have plenty of creative work to do right now – alone, for a separate project I’m working on.
Yet I also do not believe in ‘accidents’, per se. I have learned to pay very close attention to coincidence.
Indeed, that attention, or mindfulness was to be a central message I would share with my group in a couple of weeks: to be sensitive to what is happening in the world, what is happening with our fellow human beings, what is happening across our planet. And, finally, to explore – together – ways that our listening can guide our creative endeavours.
One ancient Mohawk story I was going to share is the foundation for one of our most powerful, important and surviving ceremonies today. The story tells how two children, a girl and a boy, from different families, had an identical dream. Their dream instructed about a song and a ceremony that the entire village needed to learn. The ceremony must be given and the song sung to the spirits of ancestors. This would invite those ancestors to come help the people endure a grave environmental threat to their survival.
Indeed, we dedicate most of our songs, dances, stories and even our clothing and visual handicraft to supporting our ability to ‘Dance’ in harmony with the world around us, and its constant change. You can conceptualize it as our art evolved into a means of helping us listen to and manage our relationship with our environment, amid all the change it manifests.
Certainly, constant change is a good description for what we humans may expect to face for the next few future generations. Climate change has only begun to manifest its subtler effects. Those effects will grow stronger in coming years: sea levels will rise, weather patterns will shift more chaotically – and novel disease outbreaks will grow more frequent.
Epidemiologists regularly point out that rapid environmental change predictably triggers disease. This phenomenon has been seen and known for centuries. The 6th century advent of plague in Europe started with massive disease-carrying rat migrations in Africa. They were driven by
uncommonly heavy, unseasonal torrential rain. Ivory traders from the East African coast carried some of those plague rats north to ports in what remained of the Roman Empire.
Epidemiologists regularly point out that rapid environmental change predictably triggers disease. This phenomenon has been seen and known for centuries. The 6th century advent of plague in Europe started with massive disease-carrying rat migrations in Africa. They were driven by
uncommonly heavy, unseasonal torrential rain. Ivory traders from the East African coast carried some of those plague rats north to ports in what remained of the Roman Empire.The torrential rains that caused this entire chain of events was triggered by a massive volcano eruption in Iceland in 535 AD.
Our world today remains just as sensitively and massively connected as it has always been. Coronavirus is merely the latest reminder. I remind you: plague resurfaced in Central China last year because of drought. We have entered a time of rapid change.
So, the caution TaikaBox is exercising deserves our wholehearted support.
Yet, I also feel this event should heighten both our attention and our sense of artistic responsibility.
So, the caution TaikaBox is exercising deserves our wholehearted support.
Yet, I also feel this event should heighten both our attention and our sense of artistic responsibility.
Think about that word: response – ability. We are responsible to one another, but that extends out to all our fellow human beings, and to our entire planet.
So, I, a fellow artist, ask myself, ask you, “How DO we move forward from here?”
There are no accidents.
So, I, a fellow artist, ask myself, ask you, “How DO we move forward from here?”
There are no accidents.
Dancing on the Margins of Climate Change 