Seeing through the Glass, Receiving a Gift, Letting it Crack Me.

Today I head out for a journey that has been 5 years, if not a lifetime, in the making.
This morning I cracked. A little more, a little deeper, I am seeing the shell I have been carrying on my chest for most of my life.
Many of you know that I have swam with issues of poverty. This has made Receiving very difficult, because in receiving I feel a double punch of guilt and shame for not feeling worthy of someone's love, and for feeling bad about myself because I wish I could have provided for myself better.

So this morning I cracked, and saw through the glass, for a brief moment.
I saw and Felt the armor on my chest.
I saw how, for me, having money and being able to pay for a hotel room instead of being a guest in friends' houses, can be a way OUT of relationship.
I saw how money can help me be less in relation-ship, and more in transaction.
It's more efficient and fast, and also a LOT less scary.

Today I felt how hard it the armor around actually RECEIVING a gift, a gift of food, a gift of company, a gift of being hosted. The chest shell felt hard, rigid-jaw, defending against the scariness of a tough world. Under it, I felt scared and small, not truly trusting of other people. I felt how scary it feels for me to survive in a world where I have to go-go-go, because it's not safe, because I forgot the gift that Life gives me constantly, feeding me, clothing me, breathing me. Giving me her children to eat so I may live. And instead of being blasted with tear-filling Gratitude, I am wearing a chest armor of fake "thank yous" to my friends.

This morning I let the Grief of Gratitude touch me for a few minutes, watched by the loving eyes of my brother Pieter Van Winkle who stayed with me, holding me here, helping me feel into the grief-and-praise I feel for the gift he has given me, financially and emotionally, edging me.

To allow myself to truly Receive. To set the shield down and Feel.
Actually Feel. Feel the Grief that comes with a gift, the grief of my own inadequacies stories transforming into an "I am worthy, I am loved". The Grief of receiving gifts (from people, from Her The Earth) that I can never truly re-pay, and That keeps me in relationship, in-debted, connected and interdependent.

And when it is time to re-pay back, to gift back, to give some money, to do the dishes, to take out the trash, to let that come, like Marshall Rosenberg says, from a joyful place, from a place of vulnerability from a place of acknowledgment of the deep Gift I received.

Today I head South to enter a Kitchen. The fire is hot. I think I will be cooked alright.
http://www.floweringmountain.com/

The NeverEnding Stories

I have always been fascinated with stories.

As a young kid, I would lose hours flipping old dusty pages of words  could not yet read, fascinated by images of the ancient mytholgies of Greece, Northern Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa.

I would envision Hermes, Zeus, Odin, Thor, I would play with them, I would converse with the elements imagining I was in conversation with the Old Gods. 

And then there were the New Stories. The ones about webhead Spider Man, who taught that with great power comes great responsibility. I was so fascinated by the hero that I engaged in daily conversation with house spiders, asking them to bite me and bestow upon me their powers.

The moon and trees also held great mystique in my eyes. 

Beings I would converse with, open my heart to, express my longing, visions and desires.

One story that stays with me, specially after reading the book (which I strongly suggest reading, as it is much deeper and widly captivating than the movie) was the NeverEndgin Story.

It’s an 80’s movie about a young child, Bastian, who, after hiding in the school attic from the local bullies, begins reading a book, the NeverEnding Story, a book that tells a story strangely familiar to the Story of our Time. I won’t retell the whole story here, but I will highlight a moment in the movie.

This moment, in one of my absolute favorite novels and movies, has become iconic in my life and in my work. I also thinks it speaks to our generation and to what we are going through as a planet.

Despair gnawing at your feet, feet that sink into the muddy waters of stagnation and dark grief. It's hard to come out, all seems lost. All feels so dark, there is no direction other than the swamps around us. 

We must keep believing. We must not give in.

As Joanna Macy says, "Active Hope is not something you have, it is something you DO". Hard, swampy confusing times ahead and all around. 

But the tribes are gathering. 

The passageway is narrow and the hero/heroine's journey takes us to the underworld of who we are. There is Hope. There is way.

(Also don't fight the sadness, Artax. Grieve instead, let it transform you. The soil needs your waters.)

G'mork serves The Nothing. The moving, relentless, stories eating Nothing. As people forget the old stories, as human people forget to tell stories, to dream stories, to share the New Stories, the Nothing advances. Fantastia dies. 

 Like the best stories, the living stories, the ones that are alive as we speak, this scene tells of the Great Turning. Pay attention, Shambhala Warriors, pay attention. We are dancing in this together.

Joanna Macy tells of the prophecy of the Shambhala Warriors, the ones that will rise up in a time of great darkness, the ones that will rise up when all hope seems lost. 

As the Old world crumbles, the New Story emerges. The New Story takes form, the OldNew Tale is told again, the world keeps on living.

I have been noticing, watching, naming, dancing with, dreaming with, laughing and crying with a new tribe of younger and elder warriors for a few years and this fills my heart with joy. 

We are here, Tribe.

Please watch this short clip of the Shambhala Warrior Prophecy as told my Joanna Macy: (Begins at 2:40 min.)

UPDATE: Blogpost from my dear friend Meagan Chandler:

Meagan Chandler 

Okay, dear Fabio, I finally got to re-watch The Never Ending Story this week - wanted to see it again before I read your post, and was itching to see it again anyways. I literally have not scene it since I was a child, and it was a completely new experience as an adult! So fantastic. 

There were critical pieces that I had forgotten, like how the boy's mother has died and his father is ignoring the grief, shutting down the imaginative world and calling the child too quickly to grow up and leave behind the feminine, the death principle, the imagination, the world of soul, his inner hero, his dreams. The boy, we see, lives in fear and always runs when he faces danger. 

What an incredible painting of egocentric culture.

 Then, seduced into the quest of Atreu with whom he identifies his own hero self, to save the dying Empress (the feminine principle, soul, life-death-life, heart of imagination). A
nd what must he do? 
Give her a new name - the name of his mother who passed away, a gift from his young grieving heart. 

I just happened to read a portion of Women Who Run With the Wolves (HIGHLY recommended, if you have not yet read it, and want to explore the feminine principle, power, gift and mythology, and how it interacts with the masculine) right before seeing this movie again. And I am reminded how our egocentric culture is absolutely terrified by death, which is exactly half of everything. We are limping around with only half of ourselves! 

This story so beautifully paints a picture of how life and death form a cycle that is never-ending. Fantastia is destroyed, and then with proper courage, grieving, owning, and re-embracing of the imagination, it is rebuilt, on and on, out and out, from Bastion to those watching Bastion on the movie and so on. So yes, I love what you've written in your blog. 

I just wanted to add the piece I felt so strongly about the Life-Death-Life feminine principle that was so present for me in the re-watching.  Such a treat - thanks for the inspiration to revisit that world, and so perfect coming up on Day of the Dead. This year, I shall honor the Death half of the cycle with immense respect, gratitude, tears, adventure, and celebration! New Orleans, I'll see you soon. 

The Beat of a Hundred Hands Clapping

I can hear it,

the beat of a hundred hands clapping

I can hear them

the steady melody of a thousand voices singing

I can feel their rhythm

thumping through thundering earth beat

the sound of indigenous resistance

the indigenous spirit of Life 

Always thriving
always beating
never resting
maybe hiding at that

like a sly fox

hiding in the dark and forgotten place

hiding from the conquerors reach

till the time is right

passing on the stories, passing on the songs

passing on the myths of Who We Are

and How It All Began

Songlines of Remembering

Telling us again and again

how to be Human 

How to be Free.

One Big Sweaty Dance

Maybe this is all one big dance.
Maybe the deaths, the acidity in the sea, the holes in the earth,
the cracks in the heart, the generational trauma,
maybe it is all one big fat sweaty dance.

Maybe the music is thumping, beating so loud and hard,
Maybe we are all dancing so fast and furious,
our feet red from hitting the floor with passion
our voices rising with ecstatic fury as the music goes up and up

and maybe I am so tired to hold onto my own sense of separateness
that I put my sweaty arm on your sweaty shoulder
and just maybe you do the same
because you don't care about my sweat anymore

maybe we all start jumping together
arm in arm
in a big room, in a big circle
in big rhythm, thum thum thum thum
feet all beating together
that a smile cracks my heart

Maybe these times
are all one big sweaty dance.

Woman

Women mysteries fascinate me.
For years I felt this pull, this longing to go closer to the Feminine, to her wild, dark, enchanting, witchy, moon bubbling cauldron of mystery.

I have hidden it, to myself and to the world as well, my mind a product of years of patriarchal influences- don't go close to artsy things, stuff with flowers on it, or with those weird "Goddess" drawings.

The pull was so strong, though, that the journey back to Her had already begun before my resistances could catch me.
I would feel a strange jealousy for the women renaissance.
I would wander into Rebecca's Herbal Apothecary and look for hours-seeming moments through the shelves of books, herbs, oils, and creams.

Three years ago I considered becoming a male doula (I would have been only the 2nd person to do it, in the U.S.). I have been lucky to find my way many times as a guest of a revolutionary year-long Midwifery school in Asheville thanks to my sisters Dakota and Camille.

As a male-bodied person, I will never to actually experience the pain and gift of birthing another human (What?! Women make HUMANS. Let's breath on that for a second) and there are mystery that, as millenia-old traditions hold, I should never be allowed to enter into.
Yet the pull towards the mysteries of the womb, the vagina of creation, the witch arts, the moon mysteries is undeniable in me.

With this New Moon in Cancer, I celebrate the Goddess, Her who I am feeling strongly in the Waters of the MEditerranean sea, She who birthed me and can take my life in a wave of a heartbeat, She who gives gives gives. Here is to the Goddess. Here is to you Women, Females in all shapes and forms (human and other-than-human). Thank you for your constant teaching me. As I did as a child completely mesmerized by the Moon, staring at her for hours and then howling with both lungs, I will keep my howl song to you.

The Gift Unique to You

The Earth, the Soul of this World,
longs for me, for you,
to find and express your unique gift.

Human, you are NOT an accident.
You are not a sin.

You are a poem,
A song,
Within you the force
of hundreds of years of thrusting
Life pushing through
Like a wild river

Be still in the confusion of the forest
silent in the darkness of the maze
Connect with the song of soul
Find the Gift
and share it with us.

We need you.
The health and Wholeness of the World
depends on it.

Animist

I consider myself an Animist, and I am proud of it.
Look at ShEA
Of course ancestors
heard songs of mermaids
of course ancestors
paid their respect

Look! at ShEA
Spirit of the Seas
TakeLife - GiveLife
Feeding my dry mouth
Enormous belly
Wild, Untamed waters
Depths that shall never be touched
That's where the Magic is born
There are places where Human eyes have no business

I consider myself an Animist, and I am proud of it

The Gods are Still Here

May 25

I believe in a spirituality grounded in the Earth, connected with place, seasons, and the more-than-human others all around us (foxes, bids, rivers, mountains, trees,etc.)

My research takes me down the roots of ancestral knowings and flip through the literature to find out which Gods and Goddesses my ancestors venerated. 

But the spirituality of the Earth is still here. 

In the ground. Under my feet and all around me. 

Whether they be Krishna, Jesus, Buddha, Diana, Apollo, Thor, Odin, or any other SpiritGod that manifested in a specific time to a specific people IN a specific Place. The Gods/esses are STILL here.

In the bones and in the mountains, probably waiting for us humans to remember our place of Human Beings, and give gifts of Beauty and Tears.

So yes to ancestral reconnection and yes to spirituality of place.

The sacred is all around. Praying that my ears may open enough to hear the thousand voices sharing their song.

Trust Your Path

October 27, 2012

You will be born as a seed and sprouted like a flower onto the sacred, hurting Earth.

You will come at a perilous time.

Despair and confusion in the eyes of your brothers and sisters. Sacredness and beauty forgotten.

The forest will whisper your name.

Indigenous songs will remind you.

Have faith. Breathe. Hold onto signs, smells, intuitions.

Follow the path; like a hunter stalk your pray. Dream. Dance. Sing.

Your every step will become a prayer.

Shoes, socks will fall. Your naked feet touching moist soil.

You will begin to remember.

Trust. Trust.

Your path.

3 Causes for Cultural Appropriation

I see three causes for the cultural appropriation, romanticized emulation and stealing of other peoples spiritual practices, culture and regalia:

1) There's a deep hole within me as a person living in [blanket word forthcoming] Modern Western World. The hole was created by various forms of enslavement, colonialism and trauma in my culture through the centuries. Deep Forgetting. This painstaking longing the hole creates leads me to seek, like an addict, quick fulfillment. Intact or semi-intact indigenous cultures can provide that, (the risk is here to plunder a culture like Earth's resources-no respect, asking or acknowledgment.)

2) Looking for my own roots is HARD. I need to sift through centuries of bloodshed, fear, forgetting, and the reality of coming from a line of both colonized and colonizers. For me this is scary, and brings up a lot of anger and heartbreaking grief.

3) If, as Tia Oros Peters (Zuni Nation) says, the language and culture come from the Land, to reconnect with my culture, my practices and my Self, I need to learn to Listen to the Land. To Listen to the Living Earth. Whaaat? That is Hard. It requires me to slow down and get in touch with a whole array of tools and perceptions I have not been taught to engage.

I stumble in finding the right words, a way to express myself that is nourishing to your ears and mine.  I am in a process of finding my language on these topics.
I will likely be messy, botchy, make no sense at times, piss someone off, or annoy you with these writings. Hopefully there will be inspiration and beauty as well.
I have an intention of moving from an inspired and inspiring place and I need to move through my anger, grief and impulse to blame.
Thanks for staying with me.

Whiteness. Privilege. Belonging.

PERSONAL POST COMING:

Whiteness. Privilege. Belonging. 

What does it mean to belong? Where does our/my pain spring from?

The question of belonging has been with me since I was a young child.

I feel an unspoken solidarity and kinship with "poor people". 
People who have struggled with financial hardship and who have had do with less. I know this place, I have felt the struggles, wrestled with the anger of financial oppression, with the feeling of belonging to a "lower cast". When I hang out with friends that have known that pain, there is a sense of "yeah, you get me".

I feel an unspoken solidarity and kinship with people of color (POC). 
This is deeper and subtler to the external eye.
This has two layers:
I am an Italian living in America land. I have seen the looks directed my way, the struggles in articulating myself in a broken English, a mainstream culture of people seemingly different than me, and when I first landed here, a group of new cool people that I so longed to belong to.
Even considering my struggles and levels of internalized oppression, my skin is still white and I enjoy a lot of the privileges that white peeps have (ex. the media culture is mostly tailored to people that look like me).

On Italian soil, a similar story repeated. Mom and Dad from Southern Italy, me born and raised in Northern Italy. 
The prejudice for having a last name ending in A (meaning you and your family are from the South - and likely to be poor, uneducated, lazy, and dark). For being called a "Terrone" (a derogatory term that literally, and ironically, means "of the Earth").
Internalized racism. Subdued anger and confusion.
When I hang out with friends that have know the pain of marginalization and oppression because of how they look or because of the legacy that one carries in their last name, I feel kinship, there is a sense of "yeah, you get me" (AND I have No idea of what it is actually like to have experienced what they have).

And, at the same time, I feel a kinship with White (gigantic, mono-cropping term) people. After all I have been raised in a industrialized culture, I benefit from my language dexterity, and from my looks and skin color. 

Yet when I hang out with White folks (like me, and at the same time, not-like-me) I sense a tension, a fear in speaking about cultural issues such as cultural appropriation and racism.

What may be going on with white people?

In my experience as a white person, I often feel tentative in speaking about these issues. I do not want to offend others or mis-speak, I want to be and look "evolved", politically correct and personally respectful.
It's easy to feel like I'm walking on eggshells. 
These topics are new and no one has really taught me how to face them fully, I'm learning as I go and meet others who teach me and I'm bound to make mistakes.

Let's go a layer deeper:
My experience of white culture and white people is of facing the loss of connection to ancestry, roots and land (and this is, of course, true of many POC).
The trail is lost in a past of colonization, slavery and enslavement, industrialization, and the frenetic run towards progress, towards bigger and better, and the cancellation of the past, the roots, the family, the simple, the slow. It's easy to feel like I don't know who I am, where I come from, and it's even easier to mask those confusing feelings.

I hold a white-person guilt from what has been perpetrated and continues to get perpetrated from people of my same skin color. The pain and injustice continues unconsciously through me, by me participating in the structures that keep the power imbalance the way it is today. I am working to change that within me and without me. I am thankful to those that help me see my blindspots.

May I remember Roots..connection with the Mother. The Earth. 
To know I am basically held, that I am safe. 
Let the healing continue. Lots of work ahead. 
My sleeves are pulled.

A Poem

I want to know about the Grief

That lives in the shadow of your bones

I want to know if you remember

When the troops came to your people's land

How they set fire to huts

How they took your grandmother's ancestral tongue

How they split the trees, broke the bones, spilt the blood

How they impregnated the People with New Gods

How they buried what was Holy and Wild 

And aught you to Hate the Untamable 

Eradicating the memory of being Free.

How the arrogant, violent frenzy

Destroyed everything is Sight in Mind in Heart.

Conquered. Colonized. 

Strip Mined.

I want to know if you can 

Shed the tears that

the wrinkles around your grandfather eyes could not.

I want to know if you can let your Tender Heart Heal

If you can let your tongue re-member

the people, the land, the culture, the waters, the wild, the songs, the sun, the food, the prayers, the screaming cries of new life

That relentless Force of Life 

Bringing the Seeds of your People to new Shores

the Indigenous song that still lives in you.

I want to know 

If you can connect to Dirt once again

and to the heartbeat 

under your feet.

                             ~Fabio Fina