Zayin Neumann, M.A.

A Letter to our Elders

by:  Zayin Neumann

            Our elders are reprimanding us.  Our elders know that we have made some great mistake.  They can see it in our eyes, we are scared children, the uninitiated West, that is so quickly sweeping across the East, the South, and the North.  We are afraid of death, obsessed with comfort, and want nothing more than to belong.  We do not want to be part of  an age old lineage of wise grandparents who are rooted in the ground, in tradition, in the movements of Father Sky and Mother Earth.  No way man, we want to play, we want to run.  We want to build better games, faster cars, cool phones.  We want to be free of all that earthly stuff, free to wander in our visions of science fiction and Paris Hilton.  We want to lust after the young hot bodies of Hollywood, we want to belong, we want to be left alone.  We want more, and better, and damn it, you can’t tell us what to do.  No!  We won’t listen to you!  You elders from the past, you ancient wise beings… no!  LEAVE US ALONE.

            And the elders watch in dismay.  They feel the pain in their bones as we come to take them away.  We feed their children with these new ideas as we pave their sacred land, running bulldozers across their souls.  They feel the excruciating force of our will-to-be-free ripping their time honored stories apart.  They look at us and they see uninitiated children who are spreading across the world.  But if they look a little closer they see the demon spark in their own children’s eye.  They step back in horror as they realize it is in them, just as it is in us.  They wonder aloud, and in ceremony, “How can we bring back our ways?  We must remember the sacred relationships and sacred the times, when we walked with Mother Earth and Father Sky, with Sacred Corn and Maestro Tobacco.  These uninitiated people have forgotten from where they come!”  What is happening to this world, where the children have left home before they could become adults?

            Something has happened in the in between.  At the age of twelve young boys across the world used to be taken from their homes, young girls began to bleed.  The children began their rites of passage, and returned adults.  Adults cannot be made so quickly any more, for the in between has come to change the world.  The in between brought a kind of freedom never before expressed by an earthly being.  The child leaves home, but does not.  The child, no longer a child, remains under her parent’s roof.  While under this roof she wanders toward new friends, new tribes and clicks.  The child has become adolescent, and in the freedom of adolescence the no longer child can turn around and say, “I know what is right and good.  Your ways are old and dry.”

            Notice that this teenage being does not have to get a job, find a partner with whom to marry, or in any way test his dreams against the hard ground of Mother Earth, or the clear vision of Father Sky.  Notice that this no longer child can dream and play while not quite adult.  Without adult responsibility, without initiation, a freedom to stand apart from family and tribe, this teenage being opens to new possibility.  This is a time of fitting in, of healthy narcissism, a time for finding oneself, apart from elders, family, and strong group bonds.  This is Life itself, waking up to unexplored possibility.

            The elders tell us we have lost our way, and we have, and we must integrate this yet unimagined potential of Being.  There will continue to be adults and elders, but they will forever change.  They cannot help but risk the gauntlet of self-exploration engaged as not yet adults kept safe within the home.  As we nurture the radical nature of our teenage teachers we will find the world expanding, opening, blooming diverse expressions.

            Before we turn to our teenage teachers, we must realize that these not yet adults are running our world, for our ancestors are right, we have not been initiated.  As teenagers spread across the earth, becoming older but not more mature, our planet spins out of control.  Teenagers who do not become adults become obsessed with fear.  They want to live never having faced death.  They want more of everything, designer dresses and porn, with matching condos in Mumbai, Dubai and Paris.  The over grown teenagers that have taken over our world want more, and they will stomp on you to get it.  They have not faced death, and they are scared.  They must accumulate in order to emulate the grandeur of our past.  And don’t think for a moment this has not happened before.

            There was a time before the mother tongues, the sacred languages, the great stories and our indigenous wisdom.  There was a time before elders, before tradition, before we walked in groups more than three.  There was a time when the stories were becoming nothing more than stories.  They became fairy tales, mythologies, repetitions of phrase.  There was a time when we met so many other traditions, so many other stories, that we began to drown in gods and goddesses, and so we made One, or none, Emptiness or Self.  If you believe your wisdom is or was the wisdom, if you think we have gone off track, or that we were off track, then you have lost your faith in Being being what it will.  Your wisdom, whichever one it is, will come and go, like all wisdoms, all seasons, all beings must do.  And yet we need our elders, because something does remain.

            That something that continues, its Being gets forgotten when we point our fingers at the humans.  Not these humans, but those humans over there.  It is not just the humans who have lost their way.  Our indigenous elders would also tell us we have forgotten Sacred Corn and Maestro Tobacco.  They would tell us that we have taken advantage of their power in our thirst to power, but maybe Corn and Tobacco have forgotten themselves.  There are no relationships that go one way.  We have not overpowered Corn, but fallen into unhealthy partnership.  As we have disassociated from our bodies and the Earth, so has Corn.  Corn has forgotten from where it came, and in its own lust for pleasure, power, and individual freedom it has become the syrup that runs through our veins.  The same is true of Coca, Tobacco, and of all the sacred plant-etary beings that became so close to the human beings.  It is not human beings that have invited this devastating plague upon the planet.  It is the earth beings, the ones that dared to dream.  They, we, have gotten lost, but have not fallen off the path.  Getting lost has always been the only way.  There is nothing but the path.

            We are in it together, as we all forget ourselves, lost in teenage obsessions and addictions.  We objectify each other, lusting rather than reciprocating, becoming crack-heads and crack, alcoholics and alcohol, smokers and cigarettes.  As we become a world full of diabetics and corn syrup we become unhinged from reality.  We wander in rarified worlds of uninitiated not yet adult video games, iphones, smart phones, and pda’s.  We are lost, but we are not alone.  The earth beings have found the freedom of adolescence, and need to be initiated.  We need our elders, and our adults, but ones that understand what has happened.  Our indigenous wisdom, our nomadic wisdom, our feminine wisdom, our animal and plant wisdoms, none are lost, only forgotten.   

            What you have in your hand is a prayer.  It is a prayer to all the earth beings, the other beings and to you.  It is a prayer that we find our wisdom, both new and old.  It is a prayer to our elders, our adults and our children.  It is prayer above all to the beings of the in between, the teenage beings.  It is a prayer that we hear their raucous laughter and that we pay attention so that we might become a world in which they can become adults.