I think that before Europe invaded the new world, the Americas were like Eden. The people who lived here had not yet been cast out, but were living an unbroken life in an unbroken land.
As for Europe, Europe was conquered by Rome and eventually by the political Church, and group after group of indigenous were controlled, or cast out, or quenched, or enslaved, and sadly much worse, once the Church fell to politics and murder instead of conversion, until all of Europe seems nothing but a confusion of trauma and abuse. With such history, how could there have been anything but tragedy for the American, the New Zealander, the Australian indigenous?
They came upon people who were unbroken in unbroken lands, and did not recognize the new world.
I come from European stock, mostly English, Irish and German. These are all fierce people in their own right, and in their own lands, Celts unbroken from their sacred lands. Dispersed for every reason now to other corners of the world, the call of the homeland is still audible in the heart.
My ancestry in America goes as far back as the mid 1600's, when Josef Bartels got tired of the border fighting between France and Germany over Alsace Loraine, and gave it up. And there is a huge assortment of bloodlines and countries all in my genes, yet my ancestry is here, in America, for between 12 and 20 generations. Is this long enough? Once here, many families suffered further as their particular group was singled out for prejudice, even though we all came here from somewhere else. Is it any wonder we live tentatively, on the very top surface of this land? Insulated in houses and barely connected through various cultural impositions? Displaying the shattered patterns of our lost souls in our inability to connect?
My quest over my life has been to retrieve the connection with the land, and to dream of living here imperceptibly. To dream of community there. My success has been slow and gradual, marked frequently with the stories of how cruel we are, and how devastating.
I watch in deep sorrow as the first people are dispersed and harried and all their words, wisdom and knowledge lost, replaced with the mind functions of science, chemistry, gadgetry, machinery, and the people who have lost their souls to a colonial church/government that sanctions such. For whatever Christianity was in the Deserts of the Middle East, by the time the title was assumed by Rome, and a single man was ever ordained as the only representative of Christ, every particle of spiritual reality seems to have evaporated in the edifice.
For people who have lost their souls, there is God who restores the soul. I have met this God. In my own personal life, I have evidence of the love of this God, and the slow restoration of my soul that has been, in this lifetime, scattered in the winds of this age. I have experienced the gentle power of this God. But this is not government, or parties, or denominations, or gerrymandered territories, or mandates, or loud culture, or warring religious factions. This is a foundation grid that predates all that, rendering them unnecessary, or obsolete. There is a river in the desert, that brings the green life back.
I cannot make a difference, anymore. That is, I must conform to this foundation grid, realize that this is holy, that this time, this place, this soul, this is holy. This ground, this very ground, obviates the need for a built altar, a temple, a ritual. Because I am the altar, my body is the offering, we are the temple, and breathing... Breathing is the ritual. The beating of the heart, this is the ritual.
Such is the state I am in.
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