Visioning a New World

I have been thinking a lot about vision lately sitting here at the eastern door of the medicine wheel. How do we soar up high like the hawk or the eagle to gather a vision that shatters the boundaries of our dominant culture’s group vision and allows us to see the possibilities of a world outside of those constraints? Many of us have dreamed of a different way of being in the world, a way of being in relationship with all around us, but how do we bring those dreams into the daylight?

One of the most powerful tools I have found is to seek out new languages whether it is the language of music, of art, or the language of a different culture. In many creation stories it all begins with the void and then there is a thought and then a word which is just thought manifested through breath. The world is spoken into being.

I had always felt like I did not fit in with the world around me. As I grew, the education I received seemed to dim the joy, the magic that I had known when I was a child and wandered the woods talking to the trees. Imagine my wonder when I began the study of the Ojibwe language, the language of my ancestors. Ojibwemowin is the one of the Algonquin languages of the eastern woodlands. It holds many teachings and lessons in how to live a good life. One of the immediate gifts I received is in the gendering of the language. Instead of nouns being male or female as they are in many European languages, nouns are animate or inanimate. Oh, the freedom of dropping the assumptions created by our duality of male or female. Oh, the joy of validation – my beloved trees are animate, my rocks are animate. They have the same standing in the world that I do. This was the world that I knew as a child. This one concept shatters the dominant world view that creates a world of isolation from the natural world around us.

I invite you to find your own ways to shatter the constructs that restrain you from living in relationship on this beautiful Mother Earth, to be able to soar high above and envision a new way of being or perhaps bring back an old way of being that makes your heart grow and expand.