Stepping into different worlds

- Tweet0
- 0
- Pin It 0
- 0
- Subscribe to RSS
Subscribe

Subject: Stepping into different worlds

Hi Friend,

Every present moment contains within it multiple worlds. Some say the future is always present - it is just unevenly distributed.... and we don't always know which worlds will arise and which ones will collapse. And sometimes, it is truly special.

Sometimes it feels like we in America (and to some extent other parts of the world) are living in some kind of new fiction genre: Trumpian Dystopia. We might say that this could become its own genre - though living in the reality is more than enough....

And then there are moments when other worlds open up. Other realities. Very much of this earth, very much living, very much here. Despite everything. Because of everything.

Recently, Krissy and I had the experience of walking into what felt like a different world. Imperfect because that is the nature of worlds (especially with humans?) And yet - enchanting. Profound. So very simple and mundane.

Sometimes the most powerful sense of magic is in the most mundane ways.

Here's a story of that world. It's not a short story, but it's much shorter than the full story, which would take many sittings to tell you properly. It is just a sketch of a story, really. Perhaps enough to leave you amidst some wonder. It goes something like this.

It started at a waterfall.

On a particularly lovely part of the Catskill mountains there is a river that has, for millennia, tumbled itself over rock, forming deep chasms and pools and eddies, shaping a little canyon around itself as it flows to a valley. Perhaps the river remembers the time when the Laurentide Ice Sheet melted, shaping the river's flow and forming the countors of the valley itself. At some point, when the water had been there for quite some time, people came (quite possibly before the melting of the glaciers). I suspect those people recognized, as I did when I first walked down the banks of what we now call the Schoharie Creek, the sacredness of this place. I like to think that they did ceremonies.

Somewhere over several millennia, the people in that land were known as the Mohawk (People of the Flint) peoples. About a thousand years ago the Peacemaker came to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Peoples of the Longhouse, and the Mohawks, who were the furthest east of the five nations, and they had their own longhouses in those mountains and in the immensely fertile valley below. A Kanien’kehá:ka Turtle Clan village, arose in that spectacular valley, and people farmed and hunted and fished and sang and danced and gathered and lived lives of relative peace and prosperity and abundance.

Then there was the time of that great disruption; that time of unravelling, when the Peoples were forced to flee their homeland by immigrant/foreign peoples, who coveted their land and enacted policies and practices to force those who lived there to move north and west, far away from that sacred waterfall. As they left, walking north up along the banks of that old river, amidst violence and mourning, many forms of prayers were said. A dream or perhaps a prophecy arose of a time when the people would return to Ioskóhare (called by the colonists, Schoharie Valley) in what is known as New York State.

Amongst the people who entered the valley even as the Mohawks were forced to leave were farmers, hungry for the fertile valley, some industrialists, and, at some time later, an innkeeper, who built an inn just far enough up the road into the mountains that it was well shaded, right on the edge of that old canyon and its waterfall. The inn had a big room for dancing, and a salon for drinking, and lots of bedrooms upstairs, relatively small, for sleeping. The memory of the original peoples of the land did not wane: they still referred to the larger area as part of the Mohawk Valley, and the river that the Schoharie Creek led to as the Mohawk River.

It would be quite some time before that inn fell out of business, but it did. At some point, the rambling building came into the hands of musician/artist/activist Bethany Yarrow. Daughter of Peter Yarrow (from the folk music group Peter Paul and Mary), she grew up in the folk-music movement of the 60s and started her own career creating documentaries, including ones about indigenous grandmothers called, 'The Grandmothers: For the next 7 generations'. (You can listen to some of her music here.) In 2014 (when I was at Union), she co-organized the Black Hills Unity Concert; in 2015, she started the Waterfall Unity Alliance centered around the land she stewarded, on the edge of the river in the Schoharie Valley. At some point, indigenous elders from South America (she has a lot of connections with Brazil, amongst other regions) came to her region and recognized and honored the waterfall area as sacred. At some point, she came to be involved with the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, which is where I met her (and a whole lot of other influential earth-honoring changemakers) and where I first learned about the Waterfall Unity Alliance. We hit it off right away, though it would be many years later before we would connect again, and I would visit her home, and the sacred waterfall, at a moment when I needed to hear the voice of the Grandmothers in the mountains and rocks and waterfalls, to soothe some of my own, however small but still painful, experiences of displacement.

We (she and I and Krissy) became friends. She came to our house-blessing ceremony, which was also our (first) handfasting ceremony, and we sang and drummed and created ritual and magic together. (Indeed, I was rather overwhelmed by all the magic of that moment, leaving me with no choice but to simply enjoy it.) Now, four years later, I am still blown away by the way that Creation showed up for us, especially the winged ones - hawks and eagles and birds' eggs and turkeys, welcoming us to the circle of life that was our new home - on this land, in this house, and with one another.

Just a few months later, on an Easter Sunday gathering we were hosting, Bethany brought her friend Roger Jock. Roger is a man who, even when he is not in ceremonial dress, walks with ceremony swirling around him - in particular, that of the Mohawk warrior lineage that is his heritage.

Amongst dogs (four dogs accompanied their human companions on that Easter Sunday's feast) and old friends and new friends and a lot of trading of stories, and quite a fair amount of delicious food, Roger sat at our dining room table with other friends of ours, and told of his vision of the return of the Mohawk people to the Mohawk Valley, and of a very specific property, a berry farm, that was up for sale, just down the road from Bethany's, amidst other farms. Many who heard him speak heard the Instructions in his words, and felt moved. Some of those who were gathered later offered different forms of support.

I will never forget watching Roger and another friend of ours in particular talk, their bodies leaning towards one another in deep attention, not just to the words being spoken but to the spirit behind the words, from just inside the kitchen, where I was getting the (many) desserts ready. I felt the potency of that moment: tingling crossed my body, and that feeling I get when Spirit is present, and I could feel that somehow, somehow, this possibility of #rematration was actually possible.

Much happened next, as you may well imagine, and many people were involved. The owners of the farm had no interest in anything less than the full market price for the farm. Money was raised and that is rarely easy or without drama. Through a lot of hard work and phone calls and meetings and musical fundraising events, in the summer of 2022, it happened: this Mohawk family became the stewards of a berry farm in their own homelands. It became the first landback farm in New York State. In this new contract, a new name arose: IOTSI'TSISON (Sky Woman) FOREVER FARM.

Immediately the next part of the journey began: to become viable .... and to also bring back the language and culture to the lands that had for so long been missing the songs that had for such a long time been sung to them. So much more work, and community, and support was needed. In this part we were not involved at all, except that occasionally we would hear some stories. The following is from a blog post that they wrote in 2024:

"Wahianiióntha Tsi Iohontsiaká:ien (Hanging Fruits on the Old Land) Language Center at Iotsi’tsison Forever Farm. The time has come. Our children now have a teacher to strengthen their roots of Kanien’kéha (Mohawk language). Our language vibrates at a frequency that connects with the innate flow of all of creation. To be in a place where our children are being nurtured and taught our language is a gift for which we are eternally grateful. It is a gift that keeps on giving. The teachings of the land and the transmission of our language to our young people are both central pillars in the restoration of Onkwehonwené:ha (Original Instructions). The seeds of Wahianiióntha Tsi Iohontsiaká:ien (Hanging Fruits of the Old Land) Language Center have been planted with love and gratitude from our ancestral bloodlines. The land has nurtured these seeds since the beginning of our return to Ioskóhare. We are home, bearing witness to the gifts of the full moon as these seeds sprout and are nourished by our rematriation work here in the Valley."

And then, just last week, Krissy and I and Krissy's grandchild (Monty's child) and the child's mother, Jodi, decided to go up to visit the Waterfall. It was our first time bringing family up there. As you may know, Monty was a linguist; he and Jodi learned the Mohawk language as young adults, and subsequently decided to do what had not been able to be done (due to the violent histories of boarding schools) in their family lines for several generations: to raise their child to be a fluent Mohawk speaker. Not only did they successfully do that, but the kiddo, as I sometimes call Krissy's grandchild, now goes to a Mohawk immersion school on the Six Nations reservation in Canada. On the way to Bethany's, I texted her to let her know that both the child and Jodi speak Mohawk.

And so it was that we walked down to the waterfall, through the woods, sparkling in all the colors of an emerald glittering in sunlight and dappled shadow, til the edge of the pools above the waterfall, where Bethany was sitting with a friend of hers, whom I didn't know. Whilst the child and I were playing in the pools, I saw this lady and Jodi strike up a conversation in the middle of this pool of water in the middle of the rocks where you look up and see the greens of algae and the roots of trees which grow, seemingly impossibly, from the outcrops of the dark rocks. Swimming closer to them, I heard them speaking Mohawk together.

That in itself was precious: to be in these sacred waters and hear the original language of these lands. That in itself would have been more than enough to feel the blessings of the ancestors.

But the ancestors were not done with their blessings!

She invited us to visit the berry farm on our way out: today, it turned out, was the first day that they were open to the public!

And so, after much playing and some singing, as the shadows filled the gorge, we went to the farm. They were closed, but we met up with the woman we met in the cool pools just up the road and another friend (who of course was the granddaughter of someone that Krissy knew from Tuscarora).

You must go back and see the berries, and please pick them, they are so beautiful and ripe, they told us, switching between Mohawk and English, clearly ecstatic that we were there, and that this child who grew up speaking Mohawk was there, on this auspicious day, when the berries were ripe and the sun was not yet passing over the mountains surrounding the valley.

It's a different world back there, they said.

We drove past the farmstand on the side of the main road and past some of the buildings at the end of their driveway and turned a gentle corner, and, suddenly, a new vista opened up in front of us.

It was as if we had walked through a portal and into (another) magical land. Suddenly, we could see the green and gold valley and the blue mountains surrounding it in the evening sun, and the sense of aliveness as we passed over a small stream and into fields and fields of berries made all of us giddy with delight. Surrounded by rows of berries (oh, how I love berries) that were ripe and just ripening - red raspberries showing off their tantalizing bodies from amidst soft green prickly leaves and branches; blackberries flowering (they will ripen later in the summer) their sweet white flowers (blackberries are so different when they are not taking over the creek in the backyard!) and then - the blueberries. Oh, the blueberries!

And then there was another moment I will never forget.

We were making our way towards the end of the fields, and we saw someone walking towards us. As we neared, the person became a woman wearing a white dress holding a basket. In the evening light, it looked like a picture out of an old film. (Or rather, films want to look like this!) Krissy joked to Jodi that she should talk in Mohawk first, since this lady might be uncertain about what a strange car was doing in these fields after hours, and we wanted her to know that we were here by invitation. As we slowly got closer, Jodi leaned out the window to say hello to the woman who was smiling at us - and both of their faces exploded in surprise and glee with recognition. Jodi was bouncing out of the car before it was fully stopped, both of them hugging each other - they had both studied Mohawk together in a different area altogether, and had not seen one another for several years. Who would have thought that they would meet here?

Listening to their happiness, hearing the language, picking berries (my inner bear was so content.... and we even picked enough that some made it all the way home!), surrounded by the abundance of sweet summer fruit ... and the realization of a dream, a prophecy, a prayer. That this could happen at all, despite all the hurdles and difficulties and drama (I mean, humans!!!) was a miracle.

That we could be part of it?

How did we get to be so lucky?

The next morning, before we went to our local lake, we made two berry crumbles, combining the blueberries and raspberries with black-caps that have been growing abundantly in our own backyard. Our moans of delight were our offering of praise and thanksgiving to the berries, to the land, to the people. To the dream/prayer/prophecy. And then we went for a swim at a local lake.

The land. And the language. And the delicious berries.

I don't know if any of us have ever had a berry cobbler that tasted that good. (I had local cream and locally made vanilla bean ice cream to share with it all, too. Cuz me, well, I come from a very long line of People of the Cow and the Cream.)

See - there are many worlds.

Worlds that came in and worlds that go out again.

And some of which are back amongst us.

So let us put our energy there.

Amongst the dreams of Earth.

Amongst the realities that have been growing for quite soite some time, not quite out of sight or fully out of mind.

Blessings upon you and your many worlds - Sara Jolena

Subscribe

Subject: Stepping into different worlds