A Well-worn Path to Becoming Human
When I stand back and look at it, I realize that my traditional work with elders and with my path has made me more truthful and ethical. It has also given me a deeper perception of the world as living and aware, not aware in the same way we are as human beings but aware, nonetheless.
After all, my friends and family are alive and aware; why should that vital engagement end at the boundaries of humanity? My tradition inspires and requires me to honor and celebrate the intricate web of nourishment and interplay around me, with its dangers and competitions, with its bliss and deep connection, with its profound and inherent meaning. Humbled, I remember not to take anything, or anyone, for granted, including the weather, the trees, the insects, the birds, the stars, the unfolding of time.
The worldview of the ancestors in my spiritual tradition works. It has worked since long before written history began. Their ways might seem alien to us, with our training in the Objective Way. It’s easy to say, “What they did and believed seems strange and unscientific; therefore, they’re all wrong.”
Science, a relatively new view, has brought us twenty-first-century-dwellers great benefits by defining what things are. However, it strikes me that science is unable to teach us what anything means. How do we find meaning in life, in actions, in experiences, in our plans, in working on ourselves to become better people? We are most deeply motivated by meaning, not facts.
Those ancestral ways, so cryptic to us, must be worth studying. After all, they have stood the test of centuries and millennia. Will our ways do the same?
Our culture in general seems to think this: that the world of spirit these ancients embraced is just the world of matter we’re familiar with, misconceptualized by primitive people. Perhaps that view is mistaken. Perhaps these ancestors were exactly right in the ceremonies they performed, in devoting their lives to walking well-worn paths of connecting with living spirit. Perhaps we simply don’t understand the radically different way they experienced the world.
Could this be about our philosophical ignorance, not their philosophical blindness?
Many discard spirit as irrational and try to believe themselves entirely objective...or attempt to invent new spiritual paths without crucial guidance preserved from centuries of lived experience. However, scientists and researchers are finding that these ancient ways, stories and spirits — these myriad variations on themes that echo across cultures — lie at the basis of our very nature as human beings. The old stories are within us; this is the way we are made. No matter what we explain away or make ourselves think, we can’t dislodge our mysterious nature.
Tribes and great nations worldwide, including our own ancestors, walked with these gods and life-ways whose narratives and ceremonies guided people on a path of becoming successful humans. By trying to turn our focus strictly toward only what we can objectify and away from the wisdom of many generations of people, are we losing touch with ourselves? Their paths to becoming truly human were constructed, stone on ancient stone, by centuries of lived tradition, and they are guarded by elders. Fortunately, even in these seemingly objective times, ceremonies are still taking place and traditional ways are still upheld. As long as these conveyors of generations of wisdom are available, we can do what our ancestors have always done. We can tap into the deep inherent mysteries of life, self and purpose, which will aim us and our efforts at what's most important.
Initiated as a tradition-holder in the Nahua/Mexican weather worker lineage in May 2003 by don Lucio Campos de Elizalde of Nepopualco, Morelos, Mexico, Erin Everett is a weather worker, ceremonial leader, and traditional healer. She is known in Nahuatl as a quiatlzques and in Spanish as a tiempera. As are many in this tradition, she was struck by lightning in her youth, which is a known calling to this path. A native of western North Carolina, she and her colleagues work with weather in the Asheville, NC geographical region. More information about their work, tradition, and teachers can be found at seedsoftradition.org.