Podcast:  In This Moment

In this podcast, Glenda Taylor sends a quieting voice during the pandemic, recalling the words and wisdom she heard once from an elder that have steadied her through many years.

Podcast Transcript:

Hello, this is Glenda Taylor.  Welcome to the OneAndAllWisdom Podcast.

Rain today.  I am tucked inside, comfortable and quiet.  Earlier today, I was able to go for a long walk, with only a gentle touch of raindrops falling on me just as I reached home.  Now I am inside, stilled and meditative, sitting, reflecting.

The stillness takes me back to a special memory, a moment I experienced years ago in California.  My family and I were spending a rainy weekend in the company of some Native American elders.  We were all seated on the floor of a teepee, watching a small fire in the center and listening to stories told by a gray haired grandfather.  His face, smooth as burnished metal or polished wood, yet showed the carved  marks of time and experience;  when he smiled, often,  wrinkles showed up, and his face in the flickering firelight then looked like the bark on an old old tree that had witnessed much through many years.  And his stories did carry the wisdom and weight of his long life and experience.

I was grateful to have an opportunity to participate in this quiet listening circle, there in the teepee, the sort of  event that has happened through all the generations of humankind.

For countless people, during the bitter cold of frozen north winters, during the harsh summer desert windstorms,  when the driven sandy winds send everyone inside of whatever shelters they can reach, during nights in caves and longhouses and everywhere else on this earth, there have been these times of quiet withdrawal from the hectic activities of the busy day, when everyone was simply quiet together, and the elders told stories.

The stories were, of course, not just entertaining.  They were also instructive.  They were teaching stories, even the ones that were funny or riddling.  Stories were meant to build character and confidence and connection.

Stories about animals, so that the children could learn the ways of the creatures they would encounter often outdoors.  Stories about lineage, where and who you came from, lest you forget yourself in your own narrow sense of self-importance.  Stories about heroes and heroines, to reveal the difference between bravery and tyranny.  Stories of skills acquired through diligent practice, patience, and also stories about skills given, as grace, through vision quest or because of devotion paid to the gods, or the powers that be, or the weather, or the ancestors…

Many kinds of stories, all given in bits and pieces, stories told here and there, becoming embedded in the souls and psyches of the tribes, stories told by those who had lived long enough to know what needed to be said.

And always, I am sure, there were stories about nature, about the vagaries of chance and circumstance, stories that taught that one must take nothing for granted, must be flexible and supple enough to deal with whatever strangeness might suddenly appear to test one’s abilities and one’s understanding and one’s connection to allies, to family, to spirit.

I think about all that today, as I, an elder, am here on this quiet rainy day.  Many times I have sat here in circle at Earthsprings with my own “tribe,” sharing stories and seeking to pass on what was passed on to me.

I think about all this now, when this latest pandemic has driven us all to ground, into our own modern caves and huts and teepees of sorts, sheltering in place till the storm of disease may pass.

Although the blessedly innocent young may think of this as “the first time ever” that such a challenging and serious thing has happened, the truth is that it is not.  It may be the first time for this particular virus, but those with any sense of history will turn in their minds to other devastating events, world war, the black plague, one holocaust or another.  Times when those who came before us had to bear with whatever occurred, with whatever became necessary, whatever it was, had to discover ways to be with what was difficult, uncertain, perilous, when many died, when life was turned upside down, when character was needed and sometimes character seemed nowhere to be found among those who had not benefited, perhaps by stories and legends, those not taught the meaning of heroism.

So I come now to speak into this microphone, into these airwaves, in this modern time, when, though deprived of the ability to sit in circle with you, in teepee or medicine lodge or around the fire, I may yet be heard to speak again, as has been done down through the ages, to say to you, “Be strong, be patient, be wise.  Bring your best self to this challenging time, and draw on all the resources you have been given so that you can add your own participation to the creating of a new future, a future that may have the best of the old and the necessary newness and change that is required.

I won’t go into my own version right now of what I think that newness may look like, for it is also the given nature of the storyteller to leave open-ended how the old ways may be used and reshaped to meet the future.

It is for the younger generations, imaginative, innovative, adventurous, not yet jaded or cynical, it is for the young to explore and discover and expand, while us old-timers could possibly sit quietly and rock and reminiscence, speaking out as called for.

The elders were once left behind with the important task of protecting the children and the home fires while able adults went off to war or to hunt for food—as so many adults now, in this pandemic, go off to the other room to work on their computers to make a living.  The elders were valued and essential in those roles, as perhaps we are not, now.

But most of us elders eventually find reason to speak out occasionally, when we feel the pressing need to share some wisdom or knowledge, or when we just can’t bear to be side-lined or discounted anymore.

And it is right for us to speak up, and to be taken seriously.  That too is an ancient tradition.  The oldest woman in ancient tribes most often had the final word in serious life or death debates.  She was turned to after all the options were laid out in the tribal circle, when the peace chief and the war chief had both spoken, when the wild young thing who didn’t want to be constrained and the cautious one who demanded delay had clashed, at times like that, it was the sacred job of the oldest one, the oldest woman in some tribes, who would decide, because she made judgements, it was believed,  based on what was best for the next seven generations to come.

Those values, what is best for generations to come, values concerning the earth, the air and water, the abundance or lack thereof of the food supply, whatever it might be, the protection and care of the lives of the weakest and least capable and least appreciated among the tribe—human and animal and plant—any and all of these values played into making decision about matters that concerned the whole tribe.  They these values are perennial, concerns still with us today, as we make choice about how to survive, how to proceed, how eventually to thrive in new circumstances, during this pandemic.

So again and again, I try, here, to speak up for those values, and hopefully to give comfort and courage and determination and perseverance and patience to all of you in this time in which we are being tested.  Tested in ways that are new to us, but not necessarily new to generations not so long past, such as those times when in the harsh winter isolated families must be indoors during deep snow drifts for periods of time, until, perhaps, they too think they will go mad with this insular existence,  or when during  the dust bowl, winds blew away, for many, all means of livelihood and all that had been treasured as a way of life.

What is new for us are the new tools we have available to us, not least of which is the internet and the digital possibilities that make us into a global community and give us means of communication far beyond sitting around a fire in the teepee or the longhouse or the cave.  If we can learn to use those tools, taking into account the values that I just mentioned that are so important, I think, to the overall survival of—everything—life itself.

Yes, others in other circumstances have faced challenges and have endured, and learned and changed, better to meet the needs of the times.  We will too.  We may not all learn our lessons instantly, but we will learn.

During that rainy evening for me in the teepee in California, as the old Native American man spoke to us for so long in a quiet voice, several children, including my own, gradually got lower and lower to the ground, some falling asleep.  Grandfather just smiled, lowered his voice even further so that we adults had to lean in to hear, as he said to us, “Don’t worry.  They’ll get it in their sleep, or they will hear the same stories again and again, and they’ll be fine.”

We’ll be fine, too.  Living and dying, in joy and sorrow, in this life and in life eternal.  We are all fine.