This was initially posted on Might 6, 2017
Sure, instances are powerful. However a greater understanding of our interconnectedness might help us transfer past the cynicism, frustration, and despair we could also be feeling within the fashionable world. A better take a look at timber, and at girls’s conventional circle dances, can provide precious classes about friendship, neighborhood, and the interconnectedness of all life.
The sacred Tree is present in just about all cultures, typically recognized with the life-giving determine of the Goddess. Each motifs seem abundantly in archaeological finds relationship again to the early Neolithic period. Dance archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel affirms that people have been dancing in circles since then and possibly for a lot longer.
The Tree of Life is central to the ladies’s conventional circle dances of the Balkans and the Close to East, which I’ve been researching for over thirty years. The sample of the Tree of Life is encoded within the steps of dances, many dance songs discuss with girls as sacred or magical timber, folks typically dance round or underneath sacred timber, and Tree and Goddess motifs are featured on the textiles worn whereas dancing. Moreover, every dancer resembles a tree, along with her ‘trunk’ upright and centred, arms symmetrically prolonged like branches, and palms joined in order that we help one another within the circle.
As we dance, we study to combine and internalize the picture of the sacred Tree. This helps us develop precious expertise: quiet energy, inside calm, a deep-rooted sense of being at residence on the earth and within the physique, and the upright and majestic posture of the dancer. Via observe within the dance, we study in the end to embody these qualities in day by day life.
In addition to particular person dignity and beauty, the dances train us connection. We don’t dance alone; we’re a part of a circle. Historically, dancers additionally dressed alike, in a unity of costume which emphasised commonality slightly than distinction. On this approach the ladies’s ritual dances create a tradition of partnership, slightly than domination, to make use of Riane Eisler’s terminology. This can be a tradition of mutual help, primarily based on linking as a substitute of rating. It’s a tradition of affection and loyalty, generosity and equality, friendship and peace: ‘energy with’, not ‘energy over’.
These are the values of the Goddess, as articulated by Carol Christ and others. They predate, and supply a substitute for, the fashionable worldview primarily based on hierarchy and inequality. Mainstream Western society rewards people who fill their very own pockets no matter any hurt it does to others, to the atmosphere, or to society as a complete. However we can’t proceed indefinitely down this path of exploitation and destruction pushed by particular person greed. Our planet will be unable to face up to it, and future generations will be unable to heal it.
So we see the significance of selecting another approach of being with every one other and in our world. This various doesn’t need to be newly imagined or invented. It already exists, in a worldview rooted within the oldest civilizations, together with the earliest indigenous cultures of Neolithic Previous Europe, and surviving within the final practices of conventional circle dance.
To raised perceive this historic worth system, and the rules of mutual help and friendship at its coronary heart, allow us to flip with new eyes to the knowledge of the timber.
Western rationalist science perpetuates the misperception that particular person timber in a forest are in fixed competitors for scarce assets of area, mild, water, and meals. This concept mirrors the outmoded Darwinian template of human society – that ‘survival of the fittest’ implies that ‘just a few can win and all the remainder should lose’. The truth of the forest, as extra open-minded scientists are actually in a position to show, is vastly totally different – and this reveals that we will assemble our society in a different way too.
Timber in groves and forests reside longer than solitary timber. That is partly as a result of forest timber assist one another. They’re pleasant, sharing vitamins and knowledge. Mom timber acknowledge, defend, feed, and talk with their very own kin and offspring. These descendants, in flip, might nourish the stump of a fallen mom tree by sending it vitamins, preserving it alive for a whole lot of years.
Unrelated timber – even timber of various species – additionally share assets and help. Every particular person tree is necessary, since if one tree falls within the forest, the hole within the cover can disrupt the balanced microclimate and endanger all inhabitants. Though timber usually photosynthesise at totally different charges, woodland timber stability the wants and talents of stronger and weaker timber to be able to preserve a constant price of photosynthesis all through the forest. Forest researcher Suzanne Simard has proven that birches and firs take turns to assist one another develop, sharing vitamins by way of the community of microscopic fungi that join their roots. Sure, timber, like girls, lend one another sugar when somebody of their neighbourhood is operating quick.
Forester and ecologist Peter Wohlleben says, ‘a cheerful forest is a wholesome forest’. Like us, I feel timber are happiest when they’re permitted to reside in a tradition of peace. One may query whether or not timber actually expertise their mutual help as ‘friendship’, however the level is that timber don’t assist solely their ‘pals’. A wholesome forest requires variety, due to this fact forest timber reside by an ethic of mutual help no matter variations. This may be a wonderful instance for human beings to comply with, as a approach to create a wholesome human neighborhood.
The forest thus demonstrates the precept of interconnectedness, or ‘interbeing’, within the phrase coined by Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Economist and thinker Charles Eisenstein reveals how realizing the reality of our interbeing can present ‘an antidote to the cynicism, frustration, and paralysis so many individuals really feel within the fashionable world’: by way of understanding our important interconnectedness, we will transfer past the damaging worldview of separation and competitors which has led to our current planetary disaster, and at last create ‘the extra stunning world our hearts know is feasible’.
Friendship, shared help and mutual respect are the keys. We will study it from the dance, and we will study it from the timber, and we will train it to the world and to future generations. We who dance recurrently know that each time we be a part of our palms and hearts in a circle, we’re already working towards this mutually supportive approach of being. We’re already creating that extra stunning world.
References:
Barber, Elizabeth Wayland (2013). The Dancing Goddesses. New York: Norton.
Christ, Carol P. (1987). Laughter of Aphrodite. New York: Harper & Row.
Eisenstein, Charles (2013) The Extra Lovely World Our Hearts Know is Attainable. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Eisler, Riane (2002). The Energy of Partnership. Novato, Calif.: New World Library.
Garfinkel, Yosef (2003). Dancing on the Daybreak of Agriculture. Austin: College of Texas Press.
Gimbutas, Marija (1982). The Goddesses and Gods of Previous Europe. Berkeley, CA: College of California Press.
Göttner-Abendroth, Heide (ed.), (2009). Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Previous, Current and Future. Toronto: Inanna Publications & Training.
Kelly, Mary B. (1989). Goddess Embroideries of Jap Europe. Winona, MN: StudioBooks.
Shannon, Laura (2011). ‘Girls’s Ritual Dances: An Historic Supply of Therapeutic in our Time’, in J. Leseho and S. McMaster (eds.), Dancing on the Earth: Girls’s Tales of Therapeutic Via Dance. Findhorn: Findhorn Press, 138–157.
Shannon, Laura (2015). ‘Tanz & Image: Die Göttin im Tanz’, in Neue Kreise Ziehen, Heft 2-2015, 10-13.
Shannon, L. (2016), ‘Girls’s Ritual Dances: Secret Language of the Goddess’ in She Rises! vol. 2: How Goddess Feminism, Activism, and Spirituality? Helen Hye-Sook Hwang and Mary Ann Beavis, eds. Mago Books, 311-322.
Simard, Suzanne (2016). Afterword, in Wohlleben, The Hidden Lifetime of Timber.
Simard, Suzanne et al. (1997). ‘Web Switch of Carbon between Tree Species with Shared Ectomycorrhizal Fungi.’ Nature journal 388, 579-82.
Tudge, Colin (2006). The Secret Lifetime of Timber. London: Penguin Books.
Wohlleben, Peter (2016). The Hidden Lifetime of Timber. Vancouver, Canada: Greystone Books.
An extended model of this text was initially commissioned by the German journal Steadiness, the journal of the skilled affiliation ‘Meditation des Tanzes–Sacred Dance’. A German translation might be accessed at www.fachverband-mdt.de.
