(Western) Culture orphan
Depleted void of connection
I feel orphaned by (my western) culture. Sometimes, I feel I’m alone in the deep feelings that flow through my body and soul, like all these ancient and visceral needs have no place to go. I am landing on a depleted void of connections instead of benefiting from the land and elders' guidance and embrace. Instead of actively participating in the reciprocity for the emergence of balance keeping, humbly and communally mending the web of creation.
Although I hope this feeling is not real, we are all interconnected.
The culture I was born into forgot its built-in/in-depth transformative tools, experiences, and wisdom for the individual or the collective. So usually, when searching for more in-depth meaning, we get inspired and essentially learn/borrow/steal from other cultures (which is different from the real-life experience of the sacred exchange of wisdom between cultural groups)—taking the knowledge out of context from the land and the sentient beings that compose it, usually without saying thanks or recognizing its origins and flattening the profound complexity of the wisdom, continually looking for absolute truths arranged in easy-to-read lists.
People feel they need to act this way for many reasons (entitlement, ignorance, or rudeness), but mainly because of the hunger for deep-rooted metaphor. Even the information (not usually wisdom) available today in western culture is fragmented, normative, biased, sometimes superficial, and almost always dogmatic. Usually, it does not sustain or embrace all the nuances, paradoxes, phases, and unique diversity of the complex living systems we belong to.
This culture is afraid—so afraid of its deep-rooted fear, of loss, scarcity, difference, and death. So, it tries to control, subdue, normalize, simplify, and sever connections that may bring chaos to its illusion of neat safety and control.
I also see much of this profound loneliness in my work with others. When speaking about personal challenges, defeats, losses, griefs, and sorrows, we always get to the normative culture that cages us, confronting what it asks of us and challenging what makes us neglected. How it shuts us down, confining us in walls of soulless exile.
Of what we need to show superficially, forgetting who we are, despite our cyclical nature and our real needs for guardianship, connection, and deep relation, that forge our ancient, rooted responsibility for caring.
It is a deaf culture that lives in mind, afraid of being overturned by ambiguity, paradox, diversity, and complexity. So, the solutions are usually recipes to make lists and superficial positive statements.
The domesticated mind forgot the ancient heart, gut, and body power. This modern mind lives and creates this culture of pillage, walls and fences, and strict good or bad.
It forgot its roots, its belonging, its abundance, and spontaneity.
It left us all without foundations to care deeply for all reality.
(These simple words speak about the inner emotional and soul violence of western culture alone. Although I certainly don’t deny or override the intrinsic systemic violence of western culture towards Other Peoples, cultures, civilizations, and nature — just no name a few -.)
