Jon Young – 8 Shields

[Music] you [Music] Wow thank you um sorry about what's happening in my country right now I it's not much I can do if I could I would there's a lot of us feeling a little bit of depression around that let's just put it like that but yeah thanks for the welcome it's nice to be here and especially I'm excited to sign the big green chair a lot of fine people have signed that chair and I'm really excited to do I feel like that's the whole reason I've come to the UK this time yeah so what do i do what do i what do I want to say I mean if I look at the the speaker's list and I looked at every speaker that I could find on the program here and kind of tried to figure out what what's going on here at the seed festival and what could I contribute and you know I want to be helpful I want to offer something useful and so I'm kind of looking at all the families and all the children and how nice is it that the Sun came out today right cuz last night it was a little bit worrisome I think when I turned the corner and there was people throwing straw down at the entrance where the cars were already getting stuck and I thought oh no but then I thought wait this is this is England I live in California so I've gotten a little bit soft right I won't see rain in my home until October cuz it really literally won't rain until October and so but then I guess you guys are used to it someone asked me if I'd brought the rubber boots and well I didn't so anyway I just thought okay a lot of young people a lot of families a lot of people wandering around what's you know what is a festival what are we why do we come to them I guess mainly they're fun right said well you come you come because you want lessons to save the world or to change your life or to inspire some big shift or yeah okay I wanted you know I just wonder about the role of festivals because I feel like yeah this is a really amazing lineup I mean the people who have been speaking and what they've been speaking about incredible if if you could just take all of it and just map it out and plop it down in your hometown everything would be fine wouldn't it why doesn't that happen you know why we already know all the answers don't we I mean if you just look at the lineup again and you just read through all the BIOS and read through all the things that people are talking about the whole pattern is already here isn't it it's like there's already a map so we're done why don't we just have fun for the rest of the next couple of days and call it good why doesn't things change you know and this is the question that launched my I won't call it a career because if you asked my family if I've had a career no no they just shake their head and they get real sad I I could have made something of myself is how they'll respond right I could I could have been somebody you know Jonathan you're so smart why are you wasting your time with these things you know that's kind of how I got treated when I was expressing with passion what I wanted to do in 1979 and 80 and so off I went and now I'm looking back over 40 years and saying what was that and was it helpful and how was it helpful if it was helpful right but I started out because in 1979 I was at university and I was so excited to go to college to be with other natural ists you know cuz from a young age you know I was catching frogs and snakes and turtles and you know taking care of a little menagerie of things and beings and my grandmother from Ireland was helping me with that and I was really connected and really in love with the beings of my place and I couldn't wait to be a wildlife biologist when I grew up you know and wander in the wilderness and get paid to do it and look after animals I think a lot of people have that dream when they're in high school and they think that they could do that and they could actually get paid to wander in the woods and be a wildlife biologist and very few people actually get that job and if they do a lot of them tell me that they ended up in an office doing paperwork in reviewing data and they don't get out in the field much right so that was sort of an illusion that I was chasing but I was sensing there must be something out there for us you know nature lovers right so I went off to college and I thought okay well finally I'll get away from my suburban New York City bedroom community consumeristic neighbors and I'll get to go to my University where all these people who are just like me are gonna show up and we're all gonna get to hang out and it's gonna be great and I got to college and my first time I went into the biology class there was 500 people in the auditorium and it was like going to the movies you know the professor was way down there on stage and he had this big screen and he was going through his notes and it was all the same stuff I had got in ap biology in high school and I thought what is this it's just like not only are am I not meeting these naturalist types there's more people who seem disconnected than ever before so I started to look around my state of New Jersey and I started to look around at the places that I had grown up cultivating a mad love affair with all the beings and plants of my place and little by little the bulldozers were taking it down and putting in you know subdivisions and parking lots and strip malls and all that and I noticed the the turtles that lay eggs in the ground the box turtles that walk around on the on the land not in the water we're disappearing you know and I started to notice that every year since I was a little boy I would find baby ones you know this year's babies hatching out of the ground running all over the place and every year you found babies and it was kind of exciting it's sort of like the first strawberries of spring you know when you find him how excited you are when you saw your first baby box turtle it was something to be delighted over because well first of all they're incredibly cute and second it's just amazing to that these little ancient beings are reproducing in more and more every year there they are but as I got older starting from around twelve thirteen by the time I was 19 I was only finding 9 and 10 year old Turtles you know and everybody was older than that there was no more babies so I could see it wasn't gonna be long before there was no more box Turtles I noticed the milk snakes that I grew up catching as a boy were also gone the corn snakes I couldn't find him anymore the rat snakes and you know I could go down the list but I don't want to depress you but I what I basically saw was it was like the tide of diversity in life right in my neighborhood was receding and it wasn't coming back in right everybody's probably knows that that's going on all over our planet yeah I don't need to tell you about that but in 1979 I'm at university I'm thinking about the tide of life receiving and I'm thinking about why do my neighbors not care you know there wasn't a seed festival in 1979 in New Jersey that's for sure okay there wasn't people who would even think about going to a festival like this in 1979 where I grew up they would just think it was ridiculous why would you do that why would anyone want to do that they would say right so you know I thought well wait a minute I was born here 1960 I was raised here why do I care why do I care maybe if I can answer that question we could bottle whatever it was that caused me to care and we could like fly over in airplanes and spray it over suburbia instead of pesticides for mosquitoes right that's what I started thinking about and that's what started my research I wanted to understand why some people cared and some people didn't I wanted to understand it became pretty obvious there was that three word action statement that somebody got famous a long time ago that basically said we only care about what we love and you know we only love what we bond with basically right so the answer to me was like bonding if I could get my neighbors to bond to nature maybe they would fall in love with it at which point they would care right because I think the reason you're all here is because you all love this earth and you all love the the beings of the earth and you all love the possibility of humans having a peaceful coexistence world would you agree or not agree I mean who else would come to the seed festival so I don't think that's the problem here but what about all the people who don't care how do we get them to care because ultimately that's what I'm feeling right so I thought okay I was really mad about the fact that they bulldozed my nature spot and they turned it into a subdivision I was really mad about that and actually more than mad I was crushed obviously really sad about it because I'd spent eight years there at this place and building relationships with all these beings you know and when I got to college and I was standing in at the field ecology course with my professor who a wonderful mentor to me I really really loved this guy and the other professor that was an ornithologist that person who specializes in the study of birds they had brought maybe 30 of us in a bus out to this place to go learn this conservation ecology work and we were gonna go out in the in the landscape and we were gonna learn to read the trees to be able to tell what happened on that land 100 or 200 years ago yes what what this course was about okay and then bird diversity in different habitats and so we're standing just outside the bus and we're standing in this gravel parking lot and we're in kind of a half circle because the professors are standing over here and they're giving us our instructions put your backpacks here blah blah blah you know the bus is gonna pull away can't stay here so it'll be back into edit out here's where we're putting our lunches and things like that so they're given the instructions and we're all standing in this half circle facing them and all of a sudden I see this signature behavior of songbirds coming towards us and I point in that direction and I set out loud with great enthusiasm Cooper's Hawk okay which for you guys would be a sparrow hawk okay the Cooper's hawks slightly bigger than your sparrow hawk so the two professors look and all the students kind of look because I sort of interrupted them in their spiel you know what I mean so it was kind of an awkward moment a little bit maybe I shouldn't have done that but it is New Jersey and we're all rude so it's okay you know so what happens next is that they all look over there and then the professor looks back at Maine he says where and I said it's coming and then the professor says that's impossible you know how do you know that I'm like bird language that's impossible I get so all the students look at me like but just then here comes the Cooper's Hawk just in time well while everyone's attention was just enough there here comes flying through in the ornithologist looks at it looks at the other professor they look at me pissed they're angry at me and then the Cooper's hawk flies on through and the two of them look at me like well I don't even know what the look was because I don't think this look ever had to be issued for a you know 19 year old field ecology student before right this was unprecedented in their experience and I did a few more things like that with these professors over the next couple of weeks and then they started to ask me a whole bunch of questions like how do you know all this stuff right because I knew all the tracks and sign of the animals that were moving around I knew the bird language I could tell where the Fox was and where the Hawks were and and what really troubled me was I'm looking around at my peers asking the question what so DM please yeah why don't you all see this and of all people why don't my professors see it I look up to these two men and I still do they're amazing and they taught me so much why don't they know it another question why do I know it how do I know it how did that happen there's no chance I would have accidentally learned bird language not a chance I've been all over the world studying bird language I've been all over the world studying people who know bird language indigenous people and I've been all over the world with bird conservation people in bird experts and I have not met yet a modern bird language master who came from the modern world and who knows bird language intimately I've only met indigenous people who know it intimately and they have the same response when I asked him about it they're like why are you asking me about it and I'm like because it's fascinating that you all know all of this and then they say to me everybody knows this and then I say to them no not where I'm from not everybody knows it so I'm fascinated how come I learned it I know why because I'm a genius I was born savant genius for bird language right that must be it nope I know it because my neighbor 7-years asked me questions everyday about bird language he just asked me questions that I could answer easily and then when I ran out of easy answers he asked me questions right on the edge of my awareness that made me have to guess and then his BS meter would go into the read he'd get that look on his face he'd shake his head and he'd say go find out and the next day he'd call me and see if I found out every day for seven years I had no idea I signed up for bird language I didn't have any idea but at 19 I knew all the burden language like I haven't learned more bird language since I was a teenager all I'm doing is refining the 90% that's already in here you get it my nervous system is totally tuned for it and all the rest is detailed how did that guy do it my neighbor I started to look into it I started to study I was studying Natural History I realized I wasn't gonna get that biology job where I get to walk around in the woods I started turning my attention towards cultural comparative cultural anthropology and started combining Natural History learning and comparative cultural anthropology because I'm trying to understand why do some people connect every single person in the entire village to nature and get them super connected and other villages like the one I grew up in don't that was my C thesis question for my entire life the next last 40 years it's all I've been thinking about I'm not very fun to talk to on the airplane okay nobody really wants to hear what I do for a living they get really glice glazed-over pretty quickly and maybe it's not even like a living is probably also a stretch so when I started to do is I started to collect you know let's just call each of these to guess if Legos in the UK Legos little plastic blocks so clipped together okay who here has stepped on a lego barefoot okay that's I'd want to know that because that's important so little bricks LEGO bricks ok Lego bricks so you know Lego bricks hurt when you step on them in the night when you're moving through the room where the kids have left them all over the floor and when you're trying to build something specific with Lego bricks and all you've got you know back in the day when I was a kid when a refrigerator by the way our refrigerators in the US are so much bigger than yours just saying you know and and I'm not proud of that but we used to get our refrigerators came in cardboard boxes okay why would you put a refrigerator in cardboard box I don't know but we used to do that okay so then you get home with a delivery a cardboard box or the refrigerator in it and then you have to get it out of the refrigerator box out of the refrigerator for out of the box but then the kids got to play with this giant cardboard box and that box was awesome right and you'd play with it until it finally just gave out right the thing would finally just give out but I want you to imagine Lego bricks of all sorts and kinds in a refrigerator box to the top and it can be a UK refrigerator cardboard box it doesn't have to be a US refrigerator cardboard box but the only Legos you're gonna really play with first of all your mom and dad aren't gonna let you take that cardboard box and dump it on the living room floor because that would be a nightmare they'd all they can imagine is the four am stomp on the Lego brick experience in bare feet on the way to the bathroom they're not gonna let those Lego bricks spread out all over the house keep them in the box play with the ones that you can get on the top and the rest of the ones that are way down on the bottom are never gonna be touched right you'll never see them again you with me on that as I started to collect Lego bricks for what these indigenous communities were doing to connect everybody to nature I started throwing them in a ridge box pretty soon I had thousands of these things in this box and these were things that indigenous people were doing everyday that modern people weren't doing anymore and I wondered which ones were responsible for connecting people bonding people to nature so that they would not only gain knowledge but they would fall in love with nature because the bird language thing was not my goal are you with me I didn't care about learning bird language I loved nature that's all but that man who was cultivating my relationship with bird language was also cultic cultivating my relationship with plants with trees with what's edible what's poisonous what you can make string from what you can how to find the tracks and sign of things right so I was literally raised as an indigenous hunter-gatherer tracker in New Jersey and I had no idea that that was happening I know that sounds really far out there but I'm telling you I had no idea that was happening he was coming from a lineage that he calls coyote teaching coyote in America and all the indigenous lore and legend represents kind of what the Fox does in the UK which is you know the trickster right trickster Transformer always on the edge always playing tricks with you and your awareness Raven raccoon coyote spider all of them have the reputation in North America as the trickster what does the trickster do in one old song from my from the land where I live one old song the song for coyote for wolf and for Fox it's the song that honors the nation of the dogs okay it says around the edge I am traveling around the edge I am traveling in a sacred manner I am traveling so I start to wind my way into that song what does this song mean and I asked one of the elders and he says to me and this guy grew up with grandmas and grandpas as an indigenous man he did not go to the reservation schools he didn't go to the you know he wasn't he was raised traditionally with his language and with the ways of his people one of the last of his kind in North America and his name was Gilbert walking Bull and he says and and by the way when he before he was born his grandmother said we know his name and his name is Ashna Louie Chuck which means he who will walk alone and he was named in honor of a great scout scout being somebody who learns all the ways of the animals and the plants and the trees and the tracks from the bird language who has the mission of going out gathering information and bringing it back to the tribe right so he's the eyes and ears of the tribe the scout okay so they spent a lot of time alone but his name had multiple meanings because being the last one who had the knowledge he would also walk alone because all those who had been raised on the reservations didn't have the knowledge anymore and when he went back to the reservation to try to teach it to them they kicked him out and chased him away and told him that that wasn't our knowledge meaning the knowledge of their people because they now had something which is called Stockholm Syndrome you know what that is you know you basically begin to identify with and have empathy for your captors and actually you become like them right they were no longer in their knowledge base he tried and then he found people like me who basically were I would basically hang on every word and write down everything he said and record every conversation because here was a voice from ancient knowledge that was hold in this lineage of understanding and I wanted to know everything this man knew and when he passed away in 2007 at 78 I was like oh my god he had 20 more years in him for sure he was so healthy and fit but I think he was just done he was so lonely right he was so in between these worlds yeah I loved that guy I said what is that song mean Gilbert what does that song mean you know he said oh he said around the edge I'm traveling around edge I'm travelling in a secret manner I'm travelling Mike yeah I read the translation governor's already think oh you mean what does it mean I'm like yeah what does it mean he said oh I thought you wanted to know what the translation was I'm like no I already got that part he said no he said you know my people we travel around like nomadic people you know in the back in the day when my people were free we wander this land and we set up a camp we set up our lodges and so we spend their time because buffalos are not too far away next Valley over we set up camp not too close to them so they don't get afraid of us and our scouts go and watch over the Buffalo and we make a plan how are we going on some of them for our families you know and he said but do you know when you set your camp up he said the grass is so tall everywhere you have to make flatten the grass down like this he said because otherwise your children get lost in there and he said we have rattlesnakes all over a prairie and it's dangerous so we have to flatten the grass for our people here said so we have these dances everybody thinks they're fancy dances for powwows he said but nobody even remembers where these dances come from fancy dances were that people are whirling their legs this way and swirling everywhere he said that was to flatten the grass in a way that was fun everybody would enjoy it he said right nobody even remembers this anymore all right he said but that's what it's for he said but once you flatten out all the places around you set up the lodges in the fireplace for the community lodge and where the elders meet with the village headmen and the head women over here he said pretty soon all these little footpaths from people forming into grass if you could fly over and look down be like tree branches can you picture this he said so I want you to imagine this here John lemon the scouts are coming in to the village he said they walk from place where the grass is waist high for as far as your eyes could see and you start to see animal trails forming in the that our new trails that are I was old formed only as old as our people have been camping here he said these are the trails of the wolf and the coyote and the Fox they only come so close to our village and then they start to turn left or they turn right and they make a circle around edge of our village only the scouts know that they are there most everybody is clueless inside that village that the Fox is so close by or wolf is just watching from the edge that's what that song means my coyote teaching John what did you do today I went fishing Tom where'd you go I went down to the catfish pond which way did you go when you went there I'm like I walked down past warblers corner and then down over past the hinge tree and then I walked down by the little frog pond I went up the hill got out into the Strawberry Fields in Locust Grove and then I walked down towards the sand cliffs he said which way did you go from there I don't remember what do you mean you don't remember the last hundred yards to the pond you don't remember oh my no I don't remember he said so you got to the top of the sand cliffs and you don't remember what you did from there did you fly I'm like no I'm fly how'd you go I said I don't remember he said what does that mean you don't remember were you in your body who was in your body that walked it down to the catfish pond go tomorrow and tell me which way you went because he knew at that place very well he made me name every place and then he said go find your tracks so the next day after school I'd go down to the catfish but I don't really need an excuse to go to the catfish pond because I like the catfish pond I like fishing there it's super fun I go down to the catfish pond and that's I'm going down to the catfish pond I get to the top of the cliffs and I see my footprints and I had walked down the horse trail I didn't go down the shortcut I walked down the horse trail and then I turned left went across and then as I saw my tracks and started walking over my own tracks I remembered being there but then I started thinking why didn't I actually remember being here yesterday cuz now I'm remembering being here so when he called me that night I told him what happened you know and he said you're gonna let that happen again I'm like what that your body's walking but you're not in it and I'm like I don't know maybe well he kept working on that with me one day he said hey you came in from the catfish pond what times you pop out of Drucker's woods cuz I told him which way I came back which what times you pop out onto the cul-de-sac and I told him what time it was he said it was getting dark wasn't it I'm like okay I was just starting to get dark he said what did you hear as he stepped out of the woods like nothing was there birds I'm like no it's quiet quiet he says quiet are you sure well maybe now I'm not so sure why he says tomorrow night at the same time be at that same spot I'll call you tomorrow night click next night I pop out of the woods come down that little hill and to my horror it is a full-on cacophony of bird sounds you know like when the black bird goes to sleep at night and how much noise they make just as it's getting dark okay so several species of birds have that behavior but they were in a group roost in this hemlock hedge and the hemlock is like a tree in North America when it's small it makes a good hedge and then it grows up into a forest canopy tree well there was a whole hedge of these hemlocks that were parked on the edge of this yard and they were full you know they were from here to the big green chair thick and maybe they were about this tall and they made a really good roosting spot you know sleeping spot for the birds there's probably 25 or 30 of them in there making their noise and they were noisy and I'm standing there at the edge of darkness at the edge of the forest looking at my parents house with the front light on listening to this hedge going off and realizing how busted I am my best hope was that they landed there today you know what I'm saying because I knew what questions were coming already well the phone rings and he is absolutely amused by the story I'm telling to try to get myself out of this one but he says well because how about tomorrow in the daylight soon as you get off the bus you go straight to that hemlock hedge and tell me how long have those birds been in there so I did that and there was bird poop on top of feathers that fell out of the bodies from preening in the roost layers of them and they're only in there from sunset to sunrise I'm like oh no this has been going on for weeks in the worst part is I've been passing by every night at this time and for weeks and he knows that because he's called me every night and he only talks to me for 15 minutes how efficient is that you could do away with the education system left one friend told me he said if a teacher could spend 15 minutes with you every day and ask you good questions like that and then send you on hours worth of adventures were self-directed learning think of how much money we would save for the Board of Education that's coyote teaching around the edge I am traveling in a sacred manner I'm traveling he with me on that where's the edge in this story it's the edge of my awareness of myself it's the edge of my awareness of my connection to the world around me it's the edge of my awareness of my understanding of the people around me because all three of those territories are fair game for a coyote teacher they ask you questions about you they ask you questions about your relationship to the things around you the wild beings the earth the stars the Sun the weather the wind the four directions all of this was fair game for me growing up all of these questions were asked and then when I had in issues with my sister with my parents he'd always ask me questions until I saw my own relationship to those issues so even there's questions for how we are with each other around the edge I am traveling coyote mentoring we put a lot of this in a book called coyotes guide to connecting with nature which came out in nono 2007 or 2008 and that books been slowly but surely going around the world and and people are using it quite a bit because I basically took a lot of the research on coyote mentoring just put it in there like a recipe book do this do this with your children even if you don't understand how it works just do it anyway and be amazed at what happens for those children because human beings are hard-wired to connect with nature we're hardwired for it we're born and our nervous system goes like this these little buds come up and they start to stretch and they get about that far on their own if the culture doesn't meet them the brain says invest the energy somewhere else it's called pruning so that little being there in stripes smart stripes all say right has all this unconscious stuff going on all these little nerve fibers coming up and reaching hoping the culture will meet them well I unfortunately said yes to this microphone Victoria so I can't do my usual thing which is well I'll do it like this I hope I didn't just turn it up oh good so here comes the bud like this here comes questions like I used to get on the telephone and they grab that little hand and they stretch it up and tomorrow new ones are coming up questions come in they grab him and they stretch him up don't make sense to you my grandmother grew up on a farm and she was from Irish culture and tradition and her grandmother her great-grandmother all did the same kinds of things when I asked her questions basically when I went out as a little boy when I was that age when I came in my grandmother was attending my sister and I but there's enough trickster left in her culture that she actually knew what to do with my sister and I to build some basic fibers and strengthen him so by the time I was ten years old when I met my my neighbor on the street corner he looked at me and realized that I had more connection going than all the other kids in the neighborhood I can credit that directly to a threat of culture that was still going in the Irish culture he with me on that and I'm sure it's here too because all of you are sitting in this tent right now because you love the earth you wouldn't love the earth if someone didn't cultivate that we don't automatically love the earth we're born loving the earth but if the people in our household don't love it and don't cultivate that in us we won't get it the hardest thing in the world is to fix a culture that's broken the hardest thing in the world is to go back and put back two things that caused the culture to meet the growing nervous system and to stretch it after it's been taken away because Stockholm Syndrome is a real thing and the crazy thing about it when I pushed the research as far as it would go the thing that I realized was that oh no the Western world is actually a giant ecological Laird Stockholm Syndrome how do we repair that the answer is go back and look at the playbill for the day here for this stage and the other stages and look at what everybody's offering and make sure that every child in every neighborhood grows up that way and we're good I'm telling you we already know how to do it it's already there the problem is the connection is gone how much time do I have days perfect we'll get this I've got seven minutes to tell you what the word sacred means around the edge I am traveling around the edge I am travelling in a sacred manner I am traveling Gilbert I'm looking at these songs these healing songs and it says sacred what does that word mean because it makes no sense in the way that it's being used in this song according to Webster's dictionary sacred pertaining to sacrament the chalice the host the altar it's all kind of linked to religious thought in the Western definition this doesn't make sense to me Gilbert he said oh yeah he said my people have different understanding of that word he said trouble is a priests Episcopalian priests and Catholic priests and the ones who translate our language for us to English said what they're doing is to changing meanings of words so they end up controlling us I don't know if they do it on purpose but that is the effect it had on my people they don't understand meaning of their own words anymore I said well what is sacred in tell me things that are sacred in your language in your grandfather's language and the way that you understand that word what's sacred oh he said babies see mothers that are pregnant mothers in general are sacred also elderly people sacred and sannyas sacred moon is sacred stars he said little birds animals deer Fox all the creatures all the things that creator made that is wild oh these are all sacred things they say well pretty much sounds like oh he said certain songs are sacred songs he's if these words prayers are sacred prayers he said these are sacred stories these stories are more just like entertainment he said but in Bible itself he said there's a few prayers in there that my great-grandfather brought into ceremony he said what's with these guys into black robes who are they what's this book they're carrying in spirit of my ancestor told my great-grandfather okay inside that book there are a few sacred prayers no Lord's Prayer is one Sermon on the Mount is another one these are sacred rest is like stories like we use in educating our children educational stories he said I'm like Gilbert sounds like everything in the universe is sacred he said yeah pretty much then I said well what isn't sacred he said oh he said we don't use that word to describe adult human beings with children from about age of early 20s into their late 40s 50s I'm like what yeah we are practical people John he said we don't have the same use of that word like your religious priests in all these guys used that word sacred but they're using it like control for you but we're not we're practical people we don't think like that he said I'm like well how do you think he said well everybody among my people know that once you get married and have children you go crazy you lose sight of yourself and you said so for that phase of your life you know between age of 23 24 and maybe 40 50 years old you're insane cuz you don't get any sleep your children keep you up all night they're always pulling at you yelling at you screaming and you pulling your hair out you don't like your wife anymore she don't like you you don't like anything you don't like your life you can't wait to go hunting with the men for two weeks at a time just so you can get yourself back again I'm like so sacred doesn't apply to that that's it he said pretty much that's how it is I'm like whoa what does that mean he said well he said you know what practical people he said that way all the elderlies remember that that person is crazy we have to support them you know we have to look after their children for them we have to when you see mom about to pull her own hair out and her tears are starting to flow elderly women come and grab her and bring her aside and help her to cry some and remember a little bit about who she is now my people know this we have to look after the little ones and raise them because parents are too crazy to help raise your hand if that sounds familiar yeah we need a word for that anyway around the edge I am traveling around the edge I'm travelling in a sacred manner I am traveling what is sacred well only thing I could come up with when Gilbert and I talked about it long enough he said we have a word walk I'm in my language he said this is what they say means sacred he said but walk huh it does not mean like sacred in the way you use it he said these things these blue lines and my arms veins you called him he said these are Klunk Klunk he said bowstring kind he said lightning you know the line or stripe is calm anything in the universe that is in a string or a line is calm walk on means all of them some like connection he said yeah connection to things he said that's what that's what this word means he said we build connection to his creation over time we raise our children such that they build relationship with all the little beings little insects when they're young and butterflies and bees and things like this as they get older we ask him questions around what is that animal doing over there they go and watch and they come back and tell us what that thinking we ask him good questions in return till they build a understanding for themselves this is what we do it's how we raise our children I'm like BAM right there that's the missing ingredient everybody we can't shortchange that journey because those antennas that I'm talking about that gets stretched by the culture grow and grow and grow until a person has love for everything around them has love for everything around them that's one of the attributes that comes when somebody's raised like this they fall in love with everything in the natural world they fall in love with the human beings they fall in love with their ancestors in the future generations it's all hardwired but it needs to be cultivated the hardest part is to figure out how to scale it so that we can get it back into every single neighborhood again because if you weren't raised this way you don't necessarily know how to do it and so we have a layered problem of remediation do you know what I mean like you can't fix the parents without fixing the elders you can't fix the elders without fixing the children so to speak right and so now I put all those Legos in that box on a map and I said well from zero to five this is what they seem to be doing from five to about nine ten this is what they seem to be doing from ten through the teen years into early adulthood is what they seem to be doing and so I layered the map this way stage of life age of life because they're not the same in America you go through the stage of life - you reach out a lessons and you never get initiated so you go through your entire adult life as an adolescent in indigenous cultures adolescence is met with adolescents initiation and rite of passage and then young adulthood is met with a an initiatory thing and then adulthood is and so there's initiations all the way all the way till you pass away the last initiation rite we don't have that in America we don't even get to be initiated as adolescents so I basically layered all this stuff and found it all put it all on a giant map and I've spent the last 40 years trying to figure out what to do with this map and I don't want to die with it so I'll probably spend the next 40 years figuring out how to make sure you all have it before I'm gone and then you can all stare at it and try to figure out how to fix globally make stockholm syndrome by bringing back the old ways of mentoring with nature no thank you [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Hawkwood

Views: 1,618

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: SeedFestival, sustainability, hawkwood, environmental, eco, wellbeing

Id: x2ib-O2pPZc

Length: 46min 14sec (2774 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019