Lexie Carroll > Recent Status Updates

Speaking and thinking in English may indeed somehow grant us permission to disrespect (exploit) nature (if nature is an “it”). A grammar of animacy could lead to new ways of seeing the world: other species a sovereign people. A democracy of species, not a tyranny of one- with moral responsibility to water and wolves, and a legal system recognizing the rights of rivers. It’s all in the pronouns.

In Ojibwe asking about objects often takes an animate form. Re: an apple: “who is that being?” “Mshimin yawe. Apple that being is.” Fascinating that Yahweh of the Old Testament and yawe of the new world both fall from the mouths of the reverent. Isn’t this just what it means, to be, to have the breath of life within, to be the offspring of the Creator? The language reminds us of kinship with all the world.

In Ojibwe many “nouns” are actually verbs: “to be a Saturday”, “to be a hill”, “to be a Bay”. A bay is only a noun if water is dead. To be a Saturday, a hill, a bay, are all possible in a world where everything is alive. This is the grammar of animacy. In English it would be disrespectful to refer to your grandmother making soup as “it is making soup”. Indig. languages address the world as family.

In a gift economy, objects will remain plentiful BECAUSE they are treated as gifts. A gift relationship with nature acknowledges our participation in, and dependence on, natural increase. We respond to nature as a part of ourselves, not an alien or commodity available for exploitation. The market economy story has spread like wildfire, but it is just a story. We are free to tell another story.

Gift economy vs. Private property: sweetgrass & wild strawberries belong to themselves, to Mother Earth. Gifts grow richer in value as they pass from hand to hand. The more something is shared the greater its value becomes. Indigenous people understood the value of a gift to be based in reciprocity and would be affronted if the gifts did not circulate back to them. Gifts come with responsibilities (to give)vs rights.

Fungal networks underground connect trees and re-distribute nutrients, weaving a web of reciprocity, of giving, and taking. Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual. How generously they shower us with food, literally giving themselves so that we can live. But in the giving their lives are also ensured. We reciprocate the gift by taking care of the grove, protecting it from harm, planting seeds.

The generosity of nature: the pecan groves give, and give again. Such communal generosity might seem incompatible with evolution, which invokes the imperative of individual survival. But we make a grave error if we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole. The gift of abundance from pecans is also a gift to themselves. By satisfying squirrels & people, the trees ensure their own survival.

When Skywoman arrived here, she was an immigrant. It was through her actions of reciprocity that the original immigrant became indigenous. For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered and to take care of the land as of our lives depend on it. Hopefully we can understand the Skywoman story, not as an artifact from the past, but as instructions for the future.

Creation stories give us identity and orientation to the world, & shape our view of it. Skywoman vs Eve: one story leads to generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment & subjugation. In the western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy with human beings on top and plants on the bottom; in native ways of knowing humans are the “younger brother” of creation. The other species are our teachers.

The echoes of my own life will likely die away in that way thunder does. But this life, of what a shining thing! It is enough. I gaze into the far distance and sing…
I am a voice!

Diadora arrives at the Theraputi and Skepsis invites her to stay, to live a quiet life keeping God’s memory alive. Diadora says- “but yours is the God of the Jews, I know nothing of him. It’s Isis I serve.”
Skepsis: “We will teach you about our God, and you will teach us about yours, and together we will find the God that exists behind them.”

“Oh Ana, when I tell you ‘all shall be well’ I don’t mean that life won’t bring tragedy. Life will be life. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. If [the worst & painful thing] happens, you will be devastated and grief-stricken. But there’s a place in you that’s inviolate, it’s the surest part of you. It’s a piece of Sofia [God, etc] herself. You’ll find your way there when you need to.”

Spiritual awakening is often described as a journey to the top of a mountain where we transcend pain. The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all others behind while we personally escape. The true process is a journey downwards, not up. Instead of transcending suffering of all creatures, we move toward the turbulence & doubt, not pushing pain away. At the bottom is healing water, love that will not die.

We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves. The truth is, we only become more fearful, more hardened, and more alienated. We become separate from the whole, an imprisonment that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears, and only caring for our inner circle. Yet, when we don’t close off, and we let our hearts break, we discover our kinship with all beings.

How do I communicate with someone who is hurting me or hurting a lot of people? How do I speak to someone so that change actually occurs? It starts with being willing to feel what we are going through, willing to have a compassionate relationship with [disowned] parts of ourselves. Over time we open up more and shut down less, our protective shells melt, more areas of life become workable; the circle widens.

Being compassionate is a pretty tall order, especially if we are people who want to help others. Sooner or later all our buttons get pushed, our own unresolved issues come up; we’ll be confronted with ourselves. What we hate in ourselves, we’ll hate in others. Having compassion starts & ends with having compassion for all those unwanted parts of ourselves, all those imperfections that we don’t want to look at.

COMPASSION: One of the most advanced practices. Really communicating to the heart & being there for someone else means not shutting down on that person, which means not shutting down on ourselves. This means allowing ourselves to feel what we feel, not pushing it away. It means accepting every aspect of ourselves, even the parts we don’t like. Only in open, nonjudgmental space can we acknowledge what we are feeling

Softening and lightening up on ourselves (when faced with triggering truths in the mirror) is the beginning of growing up. As long as we don’t want to be honest and kind with ourselves, then we will always be infants. When we begin to accept ourselves, the ancient burden of self-importance lightens considerably. Finally there’s room for genuine inquisitiveness, and we find we have appetite for what’s out there.

In the end, each of us can see only a part of the picture of Truth. Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other, and the world. And still, it is never complete. And Truth comes somewhere above all of them.

Like Brighde at Imbolc (Spring), we must emerge slowly from our wintering, unfurling our new leaves gradually. There will still be the debris of a long disordered season. These moments need the most grace, when we have to tell truths we’d rather ignore. Sometimes we will have to name our personal winters, and the words will feel barbed in our throats: grief, rejection, depression, illness. Shame, failure, despair.

To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. Nature shows that survival is a (repeated) practice. It flourishes, and then pares back to the very basics of existence in order to keep living. It doesn’t do this once- resentfully assuming one day everything with smooth out- it winters in cycles again & again, forever.

If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness then we miss an important cue to adapt. We live in an age when we’re bombarded with entreaties to be happy, but we’re suffering from an avalanche of depression. We need friends who wince along with our pain & tolerate our gloom…We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on. That sometimes everything breaks.

“Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is in pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”
-Alan Watts
Believing in the unpredictability of my place on the earth (radically & deeply accepting it to be true) is something I can only do in fits & starts…. Change will not stop happening.

Regarding Aesop’s fable of the hardworking ants and the grasshopper: we all have ant years where we’re able to sustain ourselves, save, be self-sufficient. We all also have grasshopper years: lean times where we need extra help & support. Our true flaw lies not in failing to store up extra resources, but in thinking that a grasshopper year is an anomaly, visited only on us, due to our unique human failings.

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no man’s land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. Death is wanting to hold onto what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together.

Seeking security/perfection, rejoicing in feeling confirmed & comfortable is some kind of death. We are killing the moment by controlling our experience- this sets us up for failure because sooner or later we’re going to have an experience we can’t control. From an awakened perspective, trying to tie up all the loose ends and finally get it together is death, because it rejects a lot of basic experience.

Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. We can run 100 miles/hour to the other end of the continent and find the very same problem waiting for us when we arrive. It just keeps returning with new names, forms, and manifestations, until we learn whatever it has to teach us about where we are separating ourselves from reality- how we are pulling back and closing down instead of opening up.

Perhaps sadness is a skill that’s been neglected by our culture. As adults we often must learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness; of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.

The Night can be a claimed, sacred space to metabolize the events of the waking hours. Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness. Winter offers a kind of night, where we can access our innate ability to digest difficult parts of life. Over & over again winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit, yet still we refuse them. The work of the cold season is to learn to welcome them.

“In the dark I am struck by a dark bout of conservatism: I should have a years worth of savings, I should have life insurance. I have almost nothing to show for my 40-odd year’s time on this earth. I have squandered something somehow- I’m not sure what, or when, but I despise myself for it. The precariousness of my life bites me hard, I can feel its teeth in my gut. I am nothing; I am no one; I have failed.”