Hi Friend,
Talk of ReMembering is growing.
Not just my own ReMembering Course - I'm not that famous - more the ideas themselves.
About the importance of... well, there's a lot of ways of talking about ReMembering.
Usually people mean that we are connected to - well, everything and everyone and all time and space. The kind of re-membering thats a somatic/spiritual practice connecting us with ancestors and Spirit and waters and earth herself. At this most recent Bioneers gathering, I heard it in almost every session. honestly: when one speaker talked about how she *just realized* that one could understand re-membering as the different members of the body coming together, I absolutely rolled my eyes and sighed. Really? You only now just realized this? Why are you on stage? The friends I was sitting next to laughed at me. C'mon Sara Jolena, give them a break. Not everyone has gone down these same routes as you.
People love the feel-good aspect of re-membering. Which makes sense! The connection to Spirit. To bodies. To ourselves. The intuitive knowing that there are ways of knowing that are not just intellectual and that can help us find our own kind of internal tuning forks, alignment sensing, compasses, or whichever metaphors you prefer.
Yup. This is important. Even essential. Which is why almost every religious tradition talks about some version of ReMembering. In Christianity, it can sound like this: Eat, this is body. Drink, this is my blood. Do this in remembrance of Me. - the instructions by Jesus for what Christians now refer to as communion. Totally embodied. And, if you know what you are looking for, utterly Earthy.
Less comfortable is the kind of ReMembering that I tend to lean into. (Which is why I lean into it. Cuz it's not as much out there.)
The wound. You know the wound: the wound of separation and, with that separation, domination. Tending to it. Cleaning it. Understanding it. Not necessarily full of details - though some people find it really helpful to get granular, I don't think most people need to.
I had one of those "aha!" moments at Bioneers this year, prompted by conversations with friends and colleagues about the nature of interdependence and independence and democracy, which, as you know, stems from indigenous traditions. I realized that we can't really talk about independence without first talking about interdependence. Interdependence is actually the condition that is necessary for independence to arise. Kind of like you can't have a baby without first having relatives/family/parents. You need both parents. Regardless of what happens in a child's lifetime, you need two to create one. One does not arise from one. Not for us humans, at any rate. Our existence as individuals only arises from pairs/from multitudes/from coming together.
Which is the message of peace, always: come together.
Which sounds a lot like ReMembering…
What I find is that as we go deeper into the hard histories of colonization and how that led to climate change and to this current moment, which is to say, a kind of shadow integration work on behalf and also with the collective, that kind of work that is absolutely necessary in order for the super-cool light-work to occur, is that people actually experience greater depth in their spiritual beingness. Even if they aren't so sure what that is. The different parts work together. I always find it amazing.
Yes, I'm getting ready to start another ReMembering Course cohort. Which is So enlivening. Every. Single. Time.
Back to the story I was telling you. I found myself sharing about another form of ReMembering at the Bioneers conference. It was towards the end of the gathering we were co-hosting, where Krissy and myself and a few of our friends/colleagues had put together a private side-event at a fancy location near the UC Berkeley campus. It included some of these Haudenosaunee elders - namely Katsi Cook and Chief Beverly Cook, and Dr Jose Barreiro, himself Taino who has worked with Haudenosaunee elders for many decades.
Earlier in the conference, Baratunde Thurston had moderated a panel with Jose Barreiro and Oren Lyons on some of the Indigenous roots of American democracy, the legacy of Haudenosaunee diplomacy, and the global resurgence of indigeneity and its first principles of self-governance. That panel had a great title: How Indigenous Roots of American Democracy Can Regenerate the Practice of Self Governance. You bet both Krissy and I were there, listening intently to what was said, what was not said, and what we can continue offer to this generations-long conversation. There is so much to be done in this space. that session was one of the most over-full session, and far too many people were turned away (and I feel for the challenges of the conference organizers in this). My main point here: this topic is hot right now, and I think it's only going to get more so as the current state of the American State keeps becoming less democratic and more and more overtly resembling the longstanding monarchy and oligarchy tendencies that have long been present. (Afterall, Andrew Jackson didn't let Congress's disapproval of forced removal of native peoples stop him from enforcing what became the Trail of Tears. Has America ever been a "nice" country?)
So in this small gathering that we co-hosted, I found myself sharing about these three forms of ReMembering - the third one which I keep thinking as ReMembering indigenous truths/knowledge. That can mean a lot of things, including indigenous peoples reMembering their own languages, traditions, songs, dances, dreams, livelihoods, trade patterns, etc. It can also include, in the case of Americans, reMembering the indigenous contributions to our own culture(s), especially to governance systems, diplomacy, peacemaking, calendar systems, temporal understandings and temporal technologies, and the deeper matriarchical and life-orientated cosmovisions that my ancestors left out all together.
In this particular gathering, the three elders all spoke on some aspect of shifting our relationship with time and delving into cosmovisions. It might sound abstract, but it is not! Katsi Cook dove into some of the cosmovisions of her people, beginning with the creation story. Too often we try to get into conversations about democracy without getting into conversations about cosmovisions. It left me wondering, is it possible to create better forms of governance without also engaging with different cosmovisions?
In this moment, I want to lift up something that Barreiro, himself having walked alongside indigenous movements from Central and South America, kept pointing to: that these are dangerous times. We cannot approach these times assuming that projects and programmes by themselves will be enough to keep us safe, because those programs and projects will be destroyed. Don't assume you can work with everyone and be 'nice' and they will respond in kind: there are forces here that do not respond with kindness. There are forces at work here that seek destruction. We have to go deeper into building communities and movements of solidarity.
Later, a young woman shared how relieved she was to hear him say this, because it fits her own understanding of reality: these are not "normal" times and it makes no sense to pretend that it is so.
In recognition of the work that these elders keep doing, I want to lift up (again, because it really is good) Katsi Cook's recent edited book: Worlds Within Us: Wisdom and Resilience of Indigenous Women Elders
And some of the books by Dr Jose Barreiro:
And just in case you were wondering, here are two other books I'm digging into (I'm preparing for some upcoming talks I'm giving):
And YES we are having another informational webinar for the ReMembering Course which is starting SOON! End of April!
