At Home with Nature: The Kinship Worldview with Four Arrows

Transcript (lightly edited for clarity)

Beth Tener
Welcome back. My name is Beth Tener and today our topic is “At Home with Nature: The Kinship Worldview.” I have with me Four Arrows.

Just to provide some context in season three of the Living Love podcast our theme has been “belonging and what it means to feel at home here.” We’re coming at this from a number of angles and today we want to explore what it means to really feel at home with nature and develop a sense of kinship with all of life. One of the disconnects of modern life is that many people have lost the sense of living connection with nature and we have such a human-centered world, whether it’s with electronics, or cars and highways, or computers or TVs, we’re often sealed off from the vitality of the air, the water, the beauty, and a sense of belonging within in this larger, alive universe.

I’ve talked in other episodes about the way we prize individuality and mobility. Capitalism sees nature as a resource to be consumed, or as a backdrop to human dramas. So today we’re going to be talking about how we break out of that. There are other ways we could be in relationship with the earth.

I want to start with a personal story because this is something I’ve felt deeply for a long time, having grown up in this modern culture. I remember I was on a meditation retreat for many days in silence. And someone read this poem by Mary Oliver called “Wild Geese”. And at the end, she’s saying no matter how lonely you are, the world offers itself to your imagination. And she talks about “the wild geese calling”. This one phrase just so got to me, she said, “The wild geese call you, harsh and exciting over and over, announcing your place in the family of things.” I remember when I heard that, it left me in tears because I felt that spirit of “how do I belong in this larger family of life?” And I could feel the longing for that. And we know the cost of that alienation in terms of the extinction of species and all the harms we’re doing to the environment.

But today, what I want to focus in on is that relationship of “where did those bonds of kinship get broken? And how do we restore that?” And what would it be like to live in a culture, in a community, where the bonds were strong, where people really felt at home, rather than fearful of nature and had living relationships with the larger universe and all of life.

So that brings us to indigenous cultures. The recognition that many human cultures have and have had through time exactly what I’m talking about. My guest is Four Arrows, aka Donald Trent Jacobs, who has dedicated his life to understanding this indigenous worldview and living it, living within communities that are deeply rooted in this. Four Arrows and I had a chance to meet during an incredible trip this spring with a group to Ireland, which I’ll share about in future podcasts. He kept us enthralled with his storytelling and knowledge of many aspects of indigenous culture and history and his experiences. Also with his piano playing and singing and many talents. Every time we talked, I learned more. He’s written 24 books. He is a made relative of the Oglala Lakota and he has a new book that is called Restoring the Kindship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth, that is written with Darcia Narvaez.

Darcia is a psychology professor, at Notre Dame and she has this website I’m going to link you to have called The Evolved Nest. She brought this perspective of child development and child raising and what we need to do for optimal well-being and health and cooperation. The books is amazing, I’m going to be dipping into it today.

But before I say too much more, I want to welcome you Four Arrows. Thank you for being here.

Four Arrows
It’s good to see you again and good to be here. And I guess for the sake of my new organization, I am now with Antioch University, in their new doctoral program. We just got back from Columbus, Ohio, which I made some comments about, you know, in the biggest city in the world named after… But anyway, it was really wonderful to be there and have this really animal and life-centered group of people. They have a new EdD program based on humane education.

Beth Tener
I love it.

Four Arrows
There’s lots of folks doing studies. The last oone I talked to was talking about “how can we overcome the fear of wolf and bear reintroduction into different places”? That’s his dissertation.

Beth Tener
Where are you today? I would like to ground us in relationship to land.

Four Arrows
Today I’m on the far west coast of Vancouver Island on Barclay Sound, a little fishing village called Salmon Beach, just about 15 minutes from Ucluelet. So I got a number of islands out the door and saw a wolf on Sixth Street one street down from me. Some body put a picture of it out on Facebook. Paddling yesterday, I saw a mother bear and her cub and we have eagles everywhere.

Beth Tener
Beautiful. And I’m coming today from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is on the other coast, the Atlantic with a beautiful tidal river near my house.

So what I wanted to start with was going back to your roots. I know you are Irish and had Irish ancestry, like I do. In your early life, what was your relationship with nature? And I guess where I’m headed is like where that led to with your interest in indigenous worldview. But maybe we start with how are you connected to nature?

Four Arrows
Our family stories are all about how a young girl she was either 15 or 16 escaped in Joplin, Missouri from the Trail of Tears and was adopted by the Caldwell family and given her English name. I lived and grew up with those with stories, but a lot of mixed emotions. My grandfather had committed suicide. And so we didn’t really get to know much about any details.

So I grew up in rural St. Louis County. Fortunately, I had a woods right behind my house – it was small, maybe two acres. That was where I spent all my time. And you know, with all the plants and aromas and birds and snakes. It was being in a rural urban setting. After the Marine Corps Vietnam era, I had a chip on my shoulder about the lies of Vietnam and took it out using adventure sports, whitewater, kayaking and 100-mile horse equestrian racing, and mountain climbing.

Well, I had a near death experience trying to be the first kayak down the Rio Urique in Mexico where we spend our winters. As a result of that, I came upon two animals that turned into a vision that was life changing. We can maybe talk about that, as I call it “the cat and the fawn connection”. That made me realize the worldview of our original ancestors or pre-colonial ancestors was key. My partner and I, we were both firefighters at the time, were saved by a young Raramuri person who kept showing up from nowhere and cutting the trail for us so we can get out. I went back and studied those folks and decided that how they live is how we all should be living.

It led me to quit the degree that I had been working on in health psychology and instead get a degree in education and focusing on indigenous worldview. It led me to travel around the world and be with primal cultures and the pockets of those cultures that have lost, for the most part their language and sadly, their ceremonies, but finding those pockets of people. I winded up being Dean of Education at Oglala Lakota College, where I fulfilled my Sun Dance vows as well and was made relative of the Oglala.

Beth Tener
So, you’re someone who has spent a lot of time with many different indigenous cultures and communities, right? You’re one of those people that can see the patterns across and compare those to dominant US culture.

Four Arrows
Yes and that was a beautiful thing. There was this amazing uniqueness and place-based knowledge, and of languages that were reflective of that particular flora and fauna. But the thing that always blew my mind, after my years on Pine Ridge with Lakota, is how they all had these common themes.

I like to make a distinction between indigenous place-based knowledge, which requires fluency in the language and in the ceremonies and multi-generations of handed down information. And that’s why we’ve got to fight for the sovereignty of these groups.

When folks are worried about misappropriation, that’s where that comes from. This is “you can’t replicate that”. But the common themes were so amazing. And that belongs to all of us, of course, because that’s the worldview. And we can call it an indigenous worldview, a kinship worldview, a pre-colonial worldview.

A nature-based worldview doesn’t belong to anyone, it just happens to be that 80% of all the biodiversity on Mother Earth today is on only 20% of the landmass, sadly. But that 20% coincidentally, is the land that is protected by the 3% of the population we call indigenous people… people who stayed with this connection to kinship, this connection to community and the land. I believe that is the most crucial thing as far as to look at our uninvestigated worldview precepts now have guided us since colonization, and then begin to balance them in a non-binary way. Because the indigenous worldview I’ve learned over the years is a non-binary worldview, which means all things that seem opposite, have some connections to be made…

Beth Tener
…in transcending or connecting. Yeah, exactly. I love that as well.

Four Arrows
I was invited to speak at the United Nations 76 General Assembly on this because the largest study ever done was the UN Biodiversity Report in 2019. In which they said clearly, and they use the phrase indigenous worldview. Where indigenous worldview is still operating and has some control of the land, extinction rates that they put forth, which were quite frightening, did not exist, right? And I have an article in The Nation that people can read called “The Media Missed an Important Message in the UN Report”.

Beth Tener
We will link to all these things that you are naming.

As someone who grew up in the US and northeast culture, for me, I felt like the indigenous worldview and people’s was so suppressed and “invisiblized,” which I’ve learned is a verb. Our mutual friend, Eimear O’Neill came to an event being a retreat hosted at a place in the hometown I grew up in. S he’d done her homework and said, “I want to honor the Tunxis people”. And I was like, I was never told that was whose land this was… I know Tunxis Country Club and Tunxis pharmacy. So there was a disconnect.

I would love to hear just from the time you spent with the different cultures, how did you find the sense of home, connectedness and belonging with nature, to be different? Or compared to what I or others who were grew up in the US might have experienced?

Four Arrows
Well, compared to how we all have grown up? I think that we have to recognize that our systems have colonial ways that are based on the idea that only humans have intrinsic value. I wrote a book with Walter Block, an endowed professor at Loyola. I invited him to write the book, because I disagreed with everything he said. And he me. I said, “Look, we’ve got to figure out how two scholars with lots of books under our belts, how can we understand these different viewpoints?” And the name of the book is Differing Worldviews: Two Scholars Argue Cooperatively About Justice Education.

Well, you know, not everybody agreed with me writing the book… I gave a copy to Alice Walker of The Color Purple, and she threw it in a waste can right in front of me and says “you’re in bed with the devil”. But you know, I disagree. I mean, I think that if people go on YouTube and go to St. Louis University put in “Walter Block and Four Arrows” you can see that there wasn’t the vitriol between his fans and mine in a different position… we became friends of sorts.

I think we’ve got to realize that everything we have learned, has actually been based on that idea that only humans have intrinsic value. And that was what he had said, if you want to save animals, as if that was only an option for him, you have to privatize. And as we discuss them further I asked him, “Well, it sounds like you think only humans have intrinsic value?” And he says, “Well, of course, everything else on Earth is utilitarian.”

Well, we have this utilitarian viewpoint beat into us or pushed into us or settled into us from day one. And so how can we be in kinship with something that is simply a tool or something that is there for us to…

Beth Tener
… utilize or consume.

Four Arrows
So in pre-contact, matriarchal indigenous cultures, they deeply embrace this principle of kinship, as it extends beyond human relationships, and includes not only all living beings, but the land itself. I’ve got wonderful, several quotes from Gandhi, and Wendell Berry and Theodore Roosevelt… three people I respect, about the importance of soil. I was at a soil panel on the importance of it. And after my colleagues all talked about the importance of the soil, I said, “saying this isn’t going to work”. And then I showed a slide with the three quotes of these three famous environmentalists. And then I ended with one from Chief Seattle, and I asked the audience, “can you tell the difference between the one by Chief Seattle and the ones by these other three wonderful people?”

People all got it because the first three said, “We’ve got to take care of the soil because it’s, we’re dependent on it for our reasons.” But Chief Seattle talked about dancing on the dust of our ancestors and how the dirt is resonating its feelings in concert with you know, it was like all about it. Instead of utilization and a need for survival, it was about a true, true relationship.

So central to our original worldview, which should be our baseline that guided us for 99% of human history up until around 8,000 years ago, worldview was an understanding that everything’s connected. Every entity, whether plant or animal or water or mountain, it doesn’t matter, holds a role in this intricate web of life. And mostly, our matriarchal leaders (about 76% of pre-contact cultures were matriarchal), they were the revered keepers of wisdom and harmony. This profound sense of place was integral to their identity and the ceremonies and the stories and then (without romanticizing it, because that’s the worst thing you can do)… they have proven to have been able to maintain this balance.

One of the largest studies ever done, a 13,000 year study in the Amazon rain basin, was it humans have a big impact on Earth, just like every other creature does. But it was all positive, black Earth, and restructuring of tree placements and stuff like that.

Beth Tener
That way we can be part of and contributing positively to… exactly.

Yeah, I love also that statistic about remembering 99% of human history. And of course, billions of years of nature history before that are these patterns of life where life supports life, right? I often think of Western civilization is like out one branch and a twig off one branch of the tree of life. So you know, to getting it in proportion, right?

Four Arrows
While people are doing this with our worldview chart, now we have 50 contrasting pairs of what is manifested in our education systems and our media, in our businesses, in our politics. And looking at why are we there? Why are we out of balance with it? How do we get to our original nature based ways of being?

I’m speaking at the Veterans for Peace, and in two weeks, they’re going to try to start doing this with their chapter meetings to see if it changes things. I’ve got a number of doctoral students I’m trying to figure out how to use it. One of them was dealing with compassion fatigue and his employees who are mental health professionals, just by having them look at the chart for about 15 minutes a day. He then did before-and-after psychometrics on that particular disorder, and is making significant changes, just having that reflection, right. And so we have to do that.

Beth Tener
I want to share are some of the practices named in your book: the sacred nature of competition and games, all Earth entities are sentient, high respect for the sacred feminine, nonhierarchical society. Those are the kinds of principles that you are talking about in the book. You contrast indigenous and what we take as “normal”, which isn’t normal, per se, human experience. It’s just one part of human experience. It makes you think, “oh, there’s something outside of what I’ve been told is the only way it can be right.”

Four Arrows
Right. How do we move away from a human-centered… For example, that’s one of the precepts: this idea of human-centered versus nature-centered? How do we move from what is a manifestation of a low respect for the feminine? High respect for the feminine? How do we move into understanding the importance of trance-based learning instead of rejecting it or ignoring it or seeing it as something that’s evil as all three of the Abrahamic religions say.

Trance-based learning is an essential part… we are in and out of it all the time. It may be the most underrated thing because indigenous cultures knew that if they wanted to be more generous, they wanted to support community. They wanted to be better at their hunting or basket weaving, they had to go into a lower brainwave frequency. They didn’t know about that terminology, but going into a meditative state. And with visualization and imagery, well, that’s what all the ceremonies are about, right? And yeah, we’ve lost that skill. And instead, we are, in a sense duped by those who are authority figures, because during times of stress, all creatures become hyper-suggestible to the communication of the perceived trust and authority figure. I learned this from wild horses this before I started teaching it at UC Berkeley.

But if we could get in touch with that, how else can we explain the insanity that’s in our world today? How can intelligent people pollute air, water? Vicious wars? Without there being a hypnotic suggestion that is guiding them that they have not been able to overcome. So there’s several of the precepts that relate to that as well, we’ll get to some of those basic ways of how to utilize this.

I think that your focus on kinship and community is something that I’ve seen in real life and cultures that are full of humor, they’re full of caring for the children in ways that are just amazing. And their interrelationship and respect for an aunt or a frog, or the food that they go out and ask to give itself to them for sustenance. Right? Yeah, it’s just beautiful.

Beth Tener
It’s really touching. And I was noticing in your book in the chapter about “community welfare”, you talk about how “many of the adults in these communities have a childlike inner happiness, even in challenging conditions”. And one of the things that you said was that what you found in these communities was that there was like a vibrational frequency that you feel when you’re genuinely part of a healthy, happy community that is connected to the land and its creatures, and you write that in these kinds of places you feel interconnected. Community health requires a sacred relationship to Mother Earth. So I’d love you to say a little more about what that feels like, because I think a lot of us haven’t had that…

Four Arrows
I think everyone has, I think everyone has walked into a building or an organization and felt just a tension. You know, “just I can’t wait to get out of here”. And at the same time, probably everyone has walked into a place where, “wow, it just feels good”. And so I think this idea of vibrational frequencies is really true, that when you start to feel that you’ll see “Oh, hi, how are you? Are you looking for someone?” You find out it’s about a sense of respect and giving dignity. I think indigenous spirituality is best defined as giving sacred significance to the other. And once that process starts, I believe it is a ripple that gets in the woodwork even.

Beth Tener
In, this series on this podcast we’ve been talking about ways we can intentionally create spaces where people feel at home, where their nervous systems are relaxed, in healthy social engagement. We discussed practices in classrooms that get everyone regulated and tuned in, which would be like a drumming ritual.

You were talking earlier about humane education and that now we understand more what creates this level of dysregulation, but in a lot of that, I still don’t fully see that we’re weaving in the Earth.
In the groups I start with, I do sort of an invocation that I learned through Diane Longboat, who’s got Mohawk lineage. It’s grounding people’s energy into the earth, feel the lineage of your ancestors, you are part of the living Earth. Here we are in the moment. And it’s been remarkable how often people come up to me and are just so moved by that because we are not connected. The normal thing is to just do, do, do and be productive, like we’re floating little orbs, as opposed to people connected and aware of the relational web that we are part of right?

Four Arrows
Yeah, whenever Diane plays drums, she’ll always evoke recognition and awareness of the non-human world. And that’s just a natural part of it. And that, you know, just like walking into a room and seeing a picture of nature, it does something to us, right? It starts a new flow of focus that we have forgotten but it’s in our DNA.

Beth Tener
It is in our DNA. Exactly. And I wanted to ask you, I heard you on another podcast, but I’m remembering… do you kind of work with people who are wanting to reconnect to that? Or is could you share a story maybe of how you’ve seen people reestablish that connection to come out of feeling fear or disconnect from the earth to reconnecting to that?

Four Arrows
Well, there’s so many stories, but now people are coming to the island in Mexico where I put people out on a vision quest. They spend a couple of days making tobacco ties with prayers. They make their own pipe. And then I’ll take them out to the island, and they’ll go up on a particular spot on the island and they’ll sit there in the elements, with all of the wildness, crying for a vision. Sometimes that is a profound thing and there’s been a lot of people change that way. But that’s sort of on one extreme.

I think that this going back to the trance-based learning that I had mentioned to you and I think previously, I had a near death experience on the Rio Urique in central Mexico. That really got me started all in all of this. Because David and I, after my kayak disappeared into an underground hole where all the river drained into, that was my near death experience. When we got out and rescued the boat… it was so dangerous to be in this canyon with straight up and down walls. We were over our head; when all of a sudden there was a slit in the side of the of a big ravine of granite. And it was a cave. So in a cave every day we had to go higher and higher because the water kept rising until we were on the top ledge and knew that if the water rose significantly, we would drown. Then a mountain lion walked over our sleeping bag, just walked over our bags, but it didn’t come back. There’s a way out!

Another time when we would have gotten lost had a Raramuri kept coming back from someplace and marking a trail. And one day he came, and we saw him and he was carrying a dead fawn, a baby deer. He had run down until the deer’s feet were bleeding, because there’s such great runners. But later I had this vision of cat, the mountain lion and the fawn turning into neon lights in downtown New York by the Mama Leoni’s.

Long story short: cat stands for what we had talked about earlier… this trance-based learning is concentration activated transformation (CAT). And it’s such a crucial factor in what’s happening in our world and how to transform. I’m talking about self-hypnosis. We’ve got to learn how to do it reframe and change, right? Well, what do we do? What do we change to will FAWN (Fear, authority, words, nature) – it’s a shortcut to grabbing hold of some of those worldview precepts we were talking about. The dominant worldview sees fear very differently, it sees authority very differently and it sees words and nature very differently. And really briefly, in the indigenous approach, once the fight or flight thing is taken care of, and you got it, that’s over, you can’t go one way or the other… it becomes an opportunity to practice a virtue, like courage or generosity or patience or humility or honesty.

Beth Tener
Okay, so just to pause one sec… so when you’re dysregulated, and we’ve talked about this in earlier episodes, right? Feeling fight flight freeze, then that’s you’re saying..

Four Arrows
“I can’t fight it, I can’t fight it.” Now, instead of just be eaten by it and angry and all these things. “I’m going to practice a virtue.”

Beth Tener
Okay. So that’s the first piece.

Four Arrows
That’s what I’ve seen indigenous people do as they move from fear to courage to fearlessness.

The second one is authority. In the dominant worldview, everything outside of us is the authority: the pauper, the preacher, the Pope, you name it. But in indigenous cultures, no. The highest authority was your own reflection on your lived experience.

And the third one is words. We’re in a post-truth world and words are deceptive… little children are lying all the time, and it has become a common theme. There’s a book by Thomas Cooper called “A Time Before Deception.” We thought that when people broke their word, that they had a mental illness. So we would pray for that, right? Yeah. So words have to be accurate and honest. Right? So if a woman is looking at herself, and she says, “I want to learn self-hypnosis, so I can get healthy because I’m so fat.” I say, “So, if you’re naked and looking in a mirror use, what do you say?” She says, “I’m fat”. I know your intent, you can’t use words in an accurate way. And the English language is a noun-based language, it’s hard to do. That would be saying you’d be a jar or something.

Beth Tener
Because it’s fixed. You’re saying it’s a fixed state?

Four Arrows
Yeah.

Let’s say she says, “Oh, I see a beautiful woman who happens to have too much adipose tissue for the kind of health she wants.” Now we can work with that, right?

So, words are crucial. And we are self-taught. If you say I can’t do something, or I have to do something versus I want to do something. It changes the dynamic of stress.

And the last one, of course, is nature. We see nature as utilitarian as opposed to all the things we’ve talked about, right? As a teacher, right? And so, somebody who sits down with a problem in life, and we got a lot of them now, if they just say, “Okay, what am I afraid of? And where did it come from? On whose authority do I have this fear? And where did that come from? And should I have accepted that? What words do I say when I relate to this problem? And are they honest? And how have I used nature?” Even if I’m New York City, and I got to look at some pigeons, or a cockroach in my bathroom, or a leafing blowing through a crack in the concrete? How can I learn from nature?

If you do those four things, all of a sudden you go, “wow, I see another path forward for kinship and harmony and community”. Now, what do you do? Well, willful determination probably won’t work. That’s when you go and you do a meditation. Visualize on exactly what it is that you’re going to do. And go do it. Yeah, that’s a two week course I just gave you.

Beth Tener
Well, I am grateful… my mind is going in so many directions from everything you said.

I was remembering a story of someone who you had with you there in Mexico because in your book, you talk about “fearless trust of the universe”, which I love that phrase. And I think if we’re to look at what’s happening right now, there’s such a pervasiveness of fear and anxiety underlying everything. It’s understandable because we have a society based on competition with a lack of resources for so many. And it’s baked in – designed for insecurity.

Four Arrows
That’s right. And nature ultimately is noncompetitive. People don’t think that you’re attacking a deer, but it’s definitely a symbiotic system. It’s a cooperative system, even Darwin said so.

Beth Tener
So how do you help people find that again, when fear is so common?

Four Arrows
Starting with fear, once you identify the fear, and that’s when that process starts. And to move into courage, which is one of the virtues.

So Beth, if I were to take you on this beautiful place I have not too far from here where the bears grab salmon on a waterfall and we go up 30 feet on this cliff and it’s easy to climb. And I say, “Come on, let’s dive into that waterfall.” Pretty scary, right? Just 30 feet off of a cliff, most people would be scared of that. And yet, you know, I could show you how safe it is. I could go dive under it so there’s no logs, it’s all that’s deep water. Here’s my grandson who’s seven who’s going to do it. You can watch that. And now there’s no rational reason for your fear. But you still have it. I could encourage you to jump and when you jump, you go, “Oh, you jumped down!” And you did it. Well, you do that often enough, it wears you down.

Courage is an emotion that burns out a lot of people. But now I bring you back up and say, Okay, you did this, I want you to do something else. This time, I want you to use some self-hypnosis here. I just want you to visualize your knowledge that this is safe, that this was an experience that has really some benefits if you allow it to happen. And as soon as your feet leave that cliff, you don’t need courage anymore. Trust the universe. Oh my gosh, now, you see an eagle flying overhead, you see a salmon swimming in the water, you feel the vibrations of the air moving past you like in slow motion, you hit the water, you hear the plunge of the bubbles, and you feel each bubble and it’s a different feeling.

You know, someone asked me when I was at the University of British Columbia just before the pandemic… I gave a presentation on this. Do you think we can turn things around if we all begin to re-embrace our original nature-based kinship worldview? Just came out to me, Beth, I said no. And they went from loving me to hating me in that second, you can just see it. “Why are you here? We’re doing this work?”

Beth Tener
Hope… we’re here for you to give us hope!

Four Arrows
I said, “you know, I’m here because I want to be a human being.”

I was quoting Sitting Bull, actually. In spite of the horrors of the buffalo being gone, and the smallpox and the war and loss of his people… he still played his music, he still did ceremony. He still was generous. And somebody asked him and he said, “Well, I want to be a human being.” He said, “I’m a spirit in this body, I’ll be back again, somehow, maybe not as a human maybe as a tree or something.”

And so I think we need to look at trusting the universe as a way to redefine hope. And instead of saying hope is the certainty of an outcome, hope is the certainty that what we’re doing is the right thing to do, regardless of the outcome. And with that kind of attention to things a lot of these people have written me back saying “At first, I was really mad at you because hope was what I had, but now with this definition, I’m not burning out anymore, right?” It’s a different kind of way of thinking about hope. And I saw that in the many of the activists that are indigenous people, I saw it at Standing Rock. I saw it at many, many, many places.

Beth Tener
And what did it look like? How did you see them?

Four Arrows
It looked like you know what? We’ve made a commitment and now let’s see the beauty all around and stay on that commitment. And whatever happens, you know, Obama’s probably not going to turn it around. Probably the oil pipes going to go in, you know, but we’re going to do everything we can to stop it and while we do that full tilt, we’re going to be seeing the beauty that is all around, we’re going to be doing ceremonies, we’re going to let the women sing the songs to the river every morning with us and guide us in every morning. And so that’s what it is.

Beth Tener
Yeah.

Well coming back to our theme of feeling at home with nature, I kind of want to bring us back to that deep disconnect. I’ve been thinking about the story that we’re, in the bigger story all of us are in, that if you look at so many cultures, the European cultures that went through thousands of years of wars and invasion, and people taking you off your land or taking your land, right, all that trauma, enslaved Africans, the same thing, a lot of the folks that landed in North America, and then taking the land of native peoples. There’s a lot of disconnect from land: that lived relationship of people living in the place where their ancestors lived, where the language they speak is of the land and the plants, where it’s all connected. And I feel like that disrupting of kinship networks is a lot of what we’re now in the time of dealing with the consequences of. Also, if we really want to look at healing, it’s the courage but also like, “how do we reweave those bonds, that kinship connection?”

Four Arrows
We don’t have our original ancestral lands, for most of us. Yeah, most of us are in a different place. So we have to re-indigenize ourselves to that place. And so what does that mean? That means, okay, I don’t know people that have expertise in the animal and the flora and fauna kind of knowledge. But I can learn it… I can learn it to a degree, it’s not going to be that difficult. I can begin to recognize the kinds of nature in terms of weather, wind, stars, even in some of the most dismal, polluted places we can do this, if we have the mindset. If we say, okay, there’s an ant, in my room right now, maybe I’m going to have to take it and put it outside, maybe I’ll have to kill it even. But I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to do it mindlessly.

And once you start getting mindful, then you begin naturally to touch into that DNA we were talking about earlier, that allows you to start seeing, so maybe next time, you will be more careful, you’ll take that ant and put it outside maybe or maybe you’ll be thinking more compassionate about that ex-wife that you have or ex-husband that you have, that you were yelling and screaming at a few minutes ago or whatever, right? Because you are kind to this ant.

I think that the DNA will emerge once we start to break the habit of our anthropocentric, materialistic way of being in the world, that spirit.

Beth Tener
I want to echo that ant story, because that happened. For me, one of my profound breaks with the way of being that I was brought up in was when I first did a weeklong silent meditation retreat, in a Buddhist tradition. It was a beautiful retreat center in Western Massachusetts. It got to be beyond words, essentially in silence for day after day, and be present and mindful. They had a precept that you had to agree not to kill anything.
We would be doing walking meditation outside. I was walking on a little sidewalk and I had to always really pay attention to not stepping on an ant, all week. And then it was like everything came alive again, because I wasn’t in my thoughts. And I remember at one point, I had to meet a teacher. And I was so patient, it wasn’t like I was attached to time. And I think it took an extra 20 minutes and I just watched a little ant climb up the stairs. I was so enthralled and ever since I’m like, “I have to carry this little spider outside, it’s not hard, it takes two minutes with a cup and an envelope, you know”, but we can shift back into that innate connectedness and care for life.

Four Arrows
When that ant was climbing up that staircase, think about how he has a relationship with a family somewhere, he’s doing something that’s helping the community, you know?

Beth Tener
And then nature meets you.

I mean, I remember at the end of that retreat, I had fallen in love with the practice and with this nature there and I remember I was like crying to leave that space and go back to “normal life” and I was walking out and there was all these beautiful Buddha statues that had really started to like, just move me what they symbolized and it was outside and this little chipmunk was perched on top of the Buddha. That’s just like, that’s a perfect “goodbye.”

Four Arrows
No coincidence… that was a teaching… he did that to give you a final lesson. Trust me. We have to look at it that way. We can’t go, “Oh, what a coincidence. There happened to be.” No, this happens. And I know it sounds New Agey or something but after many years of seeing this, it’s far from that.

Beth Tener
It’s real, you know.

I also wanted to share a story just echoing what you’re saying about the courage. So this also just becomes the way. Like Mary Oliver (quoting this poet again). She says “attention is the beginning of devotion”.

So I think we all have these choices of where we put our attention. And so certainly all the social media companies and advertisers, they’re craving our attention and making very enticing things where we can just tune out and spend hours on our phones, right? But like, you know, I made this practice about a year ago with a friend to start going swimming in the ocean and try this cold water swimming. And we did it all the way through the winter. And God does that take courage to get in a cold ocean, but it also feeds your courage, I felt so alive. We do it three or four mornings a week and to say, alright, we did something really hard. We connected with the ocean, but it was remarkable like that. It did build up my courage because I’m like, “I can do this”. And then it gets easier, right?

Beth Tener
Any other things you want to make sure we cover in our time?

Four Arrows
We’ve covered a lot, right?

You know, I think that we are in a situation of desperation, that require us to be fearless, and to help others and to help others adjust. And to help others get through this. And we really should be bringing our focus into the future generations, we call it the seventh generation, and of all creatures.

And, you know, it’s so hard for someone that has the luxury of being able to think about things that isn’t working 10 hours a day seven days a week, with all the kinds of problems that people have, certainly those in war zones. But for those of us who do have the option, to begin to be aware, we’ve got to start getting those vibrations into the world. We’ve got to do it soon, even if it’s for just the rebuilding, because we don’t want to have people rebuild in the ways that these apocalyptic movies show it’s just the beginning again of what caused it in the first place.

Beth Tener
There’s never a tree in those movies. There no trees in futuristic worlds. I’m like, how could we ever want to move towards that? It’s so sad.

Four Arrows
We have a lot of work to do. Vision work that is, I think, followed by action. Those two things, whatever action is that we can take, and it’s going to require courage.

I’m in a situation as a university professor, that I’m very critical of university presidents and their neutrality on these important issues that are facing us. If they think neutrality is good for the students. “Well, what is it teaching the students right?” So I think Howard Zinn says it in his book called, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train”. Let’s not be neutral and let’s remember that we all are a family. And we have an amazing, beautiful planet.

I’ll close with a Cherokee lullaby that was sung of the Trail of Tears, which is an equivalency to the kind of problems that we are having today. And yet, even though so many people suffer and die, every night, though, women would sing a lullaby to the children saying things like, “but did you see the beautiful clouds and the animals in them and how the clouds are keeping their responsibility and giving us rain? Did you see the dancing grasses in the prairie and how they’re serving the four legged who are serving us? And did you see the beautiful colors of the fish in the trout? And the stream we crossed and how it’s keeping the water clean for us to drink. And did you hear the beautiful sound of the mockingbird teaching us our songs?” That was what was being said by the women to the children in this lullaby.

So, I’ll play the melody and maybe you can just fade out with it like in a movie.

Beth Tener
Thank you so much for hours for this and for being here today.