It is so awful, what has happened in Japan to the people and the land through the tragedy of the earthquake and tsunami. Millions of peoples lives completely torn apart. And I also have to say I see the stupidity of having 54 nuclear power plants on an island that is the only country in the world that has ever had atom bombs dropped on it and knows already what that is like. Folks here in Germany are protesting the government's decision to extend the life of the nuclear power plants here from 2012 to 2030. I am so grateful that people are trying to learn from what has happened in Japan to the "safest" nuclear power plants in the world.
This was written by a man named Martin Prechtel, who knows very well and very beautifully how to feed the holy, and who says it far better than I ever could, for all of us and what a blessing that is because while we forget every day, he practices remembering to feed, as he says, what feeds us. His inspiration is why I have named my blog "Feeding the Holy" and why I strive to live a life made by hand, or through my hands and heart, every day.
Please do not read the following as a "they deserved it" kind of reason. Open up into the bigger story of the human family and see the pattern of why things like this are happening right now, and traumatic catastrophes- earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.- seem to be happening more and more all over the world. We as a human family have to own what we have done to this earth through our ignorance and the life of comfort we all want. And we have to remember what and who gives us life.
"The Tzutujil never assumed the sun would shine again the following day or that they wouldn't disappear and another life form take their place. They did, however, know that if they were to continue on the Earth, the losses that they as humans caused to Nature and their own natures were voids that dangerously undermined the very matrix of the universe of which they were a part and which gave them life.
The villagers knew that what defined a person as a complete human was our ability to fill those hollow places with sacrifices equivalent to the chunks we pried from the surrounding nature to feed our children...
The sacrifice that made humans useful to the world were the sacrifices of offerings made with what only humans had, namely the products of their magnificent opposable thumbs and the songlike eloquence of their human speech, upon which the Gods who also magically made tangible life with their speech were fed and made drunk and ecstatic. The ecstasy of Nature and the Gods was the fertile tree-filled exuberance of the land.
The land was made to live when fed on the inebriating quality of human eloquence and the beauty of their creations when they were spent only on the Gods as deified nature of the life-giving universe.
This meant giving the best that humans could create to the Unseen powers behind the natural world that sustained us, which also meant leaving certain canyons unexplored, some mountains left unclimbed, certain buildings to decay, fat to burn away, handmade weavings to unravel, carvings to melt, flower arrangements to wilt, songs, dances, and esoteric understandings expressed in elevated language that floated off, none of which was to be given later to humans, but only to the universe, to be consumed as we consumed it. Otherwise, humans would end up as the sacrifices.
To the Tzutujil this was not a philosophical notion or an esoteric daydream, but a pragmatic and scientific fact: that if humans did not consciously create and sacrifice a percentage of the very best their human artifice could make in sincere, elegant, ritual fashion, then generous Nature already plundered, wounded, and in grief from our agricultural sucking, recreational raking and mining of her bones would be forced, in order to survive, to magically inspire such forgetful humans into inventing what might seem to them as some rational project, but which in the end would cause a quota of human suffering and death equivalent to what Nature routinely experiences at our hands.
The old Tzutujil knew that Nature would always come to collect for what humans refused to deliberately give and that was some kind of a blessing, for if the Earth were to continue to suckle us it had to stay alive.
Humans cause wars and revolutions, ethnic cleansings and epidemics by forgetting what gave them life. That forgetfulness caused the voids that forced Nature to invent weapons of mass destruction, pesticides, nuclear waste, and a myriad other things of which humans in their conceit thought they were in control.
The only things that humans had in their control were their abilities to bless and give gifts. All else was rape and war.
So when a war, an epidemic or mass depression rolled in on the village, the villagers knew that the Gods of deified Nature, Time, Sound, and Earth had been forced to engineer the conditions for another lottery of human sacrifice to close the gap caused by human conceit and amnesia somewhere in the world.
That's why the stories of remembrance like The Toe Bone and the Tooth were kept so special, because the stories were the memories of the people and it was the remembrance in the stories that kept people awake enough to remember to fill the voids long enough to keep the world alive and to remind them that they shouldn't take more than they could pay for.
Every child, old lady, ancient man, working and middle-aged man and woman knew that our human bodies were the Earth and that whatever happened on or in the surrounding Earth, good or bad, ended up being played out in our bones, blood, flesh, and feelings. When the Earth was blessed, we lived, flourished, and died and fed the next generation with our passing. When the Earth was riddled, mined, or warred upon, our bodies were made sick, our subtle understandings stunned, depression became a norm and spiritual amnesia a way of life."
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