| When Tapestry tells a story about gathering the lost and scattered bones of kinship to the earth that is every human's birthright, you might wonder what we mean. What, exactly, are these "bones"? Where do you look for and find them? Is 'putting them back together' a metaphorical or literal statement? And what about that whole 'singing them to life again' statement? Our words can be taken as metaphor, but "metaphor" itself means far more in Indigenous worldview than most people realize. |
What are the "bones" of human relationship to the earth? Photo of bones in Namib desert by Neil Gould, Sydney, Australia. |
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The bones are pieces of information or understanding about the ways nature and humans can and do relate, or related in the past. We look for pieces of information about human-earth kinship in experiences we have and that others have had. Such experiences and the understanding that comes from them are often recorded in art, story, ritual, and music.
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Is "putting the bones back together" a metaphorical or literal statement? |
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Both. Our events and resources literally gather pieces of information from different sources (learned and recorded in different ways, by different people in cultures from many times and places), and assemble them in one place. But by itself, that's not "putting things together". There is a difference between a pile of bones and an articulated skeleton. Our staff and board members work with teams of people who have expertise and experience in relevant areas, and who are from diverse cultural, personal, and disciplinary backgrounds, to process the assembled information and make sense of it. This information is then prepared in book, DVD, or other form that allows it to be shared and circulated, as a first step in helping us all restore what has been lost. When you attend one of our events, you participate in this process, first-hand.
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What does it mean to say "singing the bones back to life again"?
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Meaning arises from information through a process of understanding that brings such information into a person and weaves it into the fabric of their lives. When a person takes information that has been gathered and put back together again, and brings into her or his own personal life and uses it to reconnect to the world, then that information becomes alive again -- it generates living relationship.
We use the term "singing" for this process of personalizing and internalizing knowledge because singing is seen as a powerful life-restoring act in many cultural traditions. The story of La Loba, in Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book,Women Who Run With the Wolves, is a particularly apt expression of the human tendency to gather the scattered bones of what has been lost, reconnect them, and sing them to life again.
It's a process familiar to anyone who's gazed at a towering skeleton of dinosaur bones, fit together into a whole once more, and felt the thunder of its living footsteps echo in their souls.
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