Waking

I'm visiting my birthplace in Phoenix, AZ with my daughter Cybela.  She's 17 now, newly graduated from high school and possessed of a depth and earnestness that always leaves me proud and teary. We're looking at the summer stars under an inimitable desert night sky and at her request I'm pointing out stars and constellations, some of which she remembers from past nights like this.  Some are new.

I tell her the Tlingit story of how the lights of the Big Dipper got caught in the sky when the people used long poles to push it up above the earth from the four corners and we trip over the topic of Native wisdom and European colonialism.  She tells me "Sometimes I picture the old villages and how they used to live, without the modern world touching them or knowing about them.  It's sad that's gone." 

I tell her that there are still some left.  I tell her about the Kogi people in the Sierra Madres, who rolled up their bridges and pulled back into the mountains when they saw the Spanish coming.  They've lived the last 500 years as they always have, unknown and untouched by the mental illness of greed and environmental opportunism the Europeans brought with them.  Elder brother, as they call themselves, came down from the mountains in the 80's to urge their Younger Brother to wake from this illness, to take better care of the earth and the water and the air.  Younger Brother is what they call people of European descent and all those who live like them.  The Kogi, I tell Cybela, choose their medicine people at age 7, and train them for 7 years in caves to learn how to dream clearly.  7 years of darkness so they can learn how to See.  Like aboriginal Australians, they believe that the dreaming world is the real world, and this world is the dream.

I'm filled with gratitude in these moments I share with my smart, caring, shiny daughter.  My mom gets teary watching me pass on teachings of the constellations that I received from my dad, and I'm overflowing, too, with this precious gift of finding my place in the long chain of generations, of anchoring my existence in Love and Duty and Relationship.

Looking up again and listening, with Cybela's eyes looking parallel to mine, somewhere in the black fabric between the stars I think I see the Kogi dreamers looking back at us.  She feels it too, and comments about how much time we spend in our little bubbles of awareness and self-centeredness, how much of our lives we spend focusing only on taking what we can for ourselves, while we can.  In that moment, we share the realization that, when we step out of that little bubble, our awareness expands and we feel the fragile gift of this life, the gravity of responsibility we have to take care of each other and the world, the water and the air.  

For that moment at least, I wake from the dream and I know without doubt that the Kogi are right.