The Story Of Sacred Song…
Let me tell you a story…
We love stories.
Ever since our ancestors first conjured up sacred word, leaning in receptively around ancient fire to hear sweet flicker of tongue and strange incantation, stories have brought forth magical stirrings of meaning and imagination.
We’re always engaged in story, whether conscious of the fact or not. Life is a story, waiting to be told in one way or another. We tell stories about ourselves. We tell stories of others. Earth shares her story in an unimaginable array of colours and textures.
Whether we read stories in books, watch them unfold on movie screens, share oral imaginings or transcribe thoughts on paper, stories coax our mind into worlds of wonder and mystery.
It’s said that the very first man and the very first woman to have ever existed, once sat around primordial flames listening to each word spoken and each story told. Since those times, they now live on within the spirit of fire, attentive to our conjurations.
We ourselves still gather around the dancing flames of our hearth, gaze shifting between fiery breath and the shimmer of stars above, inviting storytellers and mythweavers to open portals, immersing us in the magic of imaginal worlds.
Tribes and traditions have long been stitching their own unique threads into the tapestry of myth, weaving story and song to help us remember our purpose and place amongst the greater web of life. Ancestral offerings came in the form of oral tradition, where sacred words would help us walk upon the belly of our earth with grace and beauty.
When we huddled around the fire, these stories imbued us with a sense of reverence; a knowing, of the interconnectedness between all life; all beings birthed from the same womb of our great mother. Nourishing. Nurturing. In harmony with the great sun father; the one who was there from the beginning, as dust formed in the sky and coalesced in union to form our cosmic vista as we know it.
Many of these stories helped us remember how to walk a path of right-relating with our primordial life-givers and all kindred spirits. Story and myth could penetrate our hearts and burrow deep into our psyche, allowing us to bypass the rational linearity of the thinking mind, instead, opening gateways to the sacred, allowing us to carry these feelings of reverence into the smallest of our daily happenings.
Yet, just as our ancestors who shine down from the night sky fade as winter haze rolls in, so too, our memory is cloudy. We forget our old stories, and through forgetting, we listen to new ones.
Like tender sapling ripped from soil, many of today’s narratives are not here to aid in the story of connection, or reconnection, for that matter. The curse of amnesia penetrates the prairie like a thick atmospheric fog.
But somewhere in the distance, the reverberating echo of beating drum and illusory flicker of sacred flame on far away shore calls out on howling wind. Across vast ocean it is heard by few, and heeded by fewer.
The ones to step forth from their domesticated dwellings into the long breath of the wild are the next generation to weave sacred story and song. And so, from one land to the next, they set sail and look to the horizon for the shores of remembrance.
The seas are savage; waves as tall as mast, threatening to sink timber vessel. Creatures of the abyss wait for their opportunity below. The struggles are many, but the courage runs deep.
Daylight breaks. The tides are changing. With compass in hand, they navigate east towards the great rising sun, flowing forward with intentional ripples, hearts lightened in crisp ocean air. They carry the burden and damage of rough seas, yet despite the cracks and flaws, a spark of strength and courage glimmers in rolling tears.
Legs wobble like jelly. A moment of balance is needed after first steps on land. Becoming present to the forest and mountains before them, the roar of the ocean behind them, and the great dreaming within them, they awaken to the knowing of what has been, what is now, and what could come.
Standing tall in numbers, feeling the electric current of living energy shiver from cheeks down through spine, they begin to sing their song.
It begs the question, what songs are being sung?
What songs are being heard? As individuals, and as a collective, these melodies matter. It is with great misfortune that the siren songs of modernity drone us out with monotonous tones and soul-less harmonies.
The song of materialism tells us that the perpetual cycle of produce and consume is how we quench our thirst for lasting happiness. The song of industrialism calls all to fall in rank as compliant worker bees to the draining back beat of a system that pollutes and plunders as it stomps its heavy work boots in force.
The song of immature romanticism lures us into the seductive suggestion that you must sacrifice your own truth to acquire the love of another. And one of the most pervasive songs of our contemporary times, a ruthless vine that threatens to strangle the sacred meaning and mystery found within many a story and myth; the song of science.
The song of science is useful to sing. It aids us in countless ways, from the lifesaving application of medical science to the technological advancement so many of us benefit from.
In all its greatness, science has found its way to the throne of modernity and taken the crown, casting its iron fist far and wide. Ruling all and taking dominion with it’s reductive and linear qualities, this truth serum has become poison.
In its quest to figure everything out, with its straight face and lifeless stare, it marches onward towards the intellectual reductionism of life to mechanical processes, determined by logic, linearity, and the desire to objectively understand the great mystery. As it permeates the minds of modernity, a beheading of the sacred imaginal realms of story and myth are underway, leaving dry parched mouths of desert and sand.
Let us be clear and not disregard science, rather, open our arms to embrace the integration of scientific methodology with other ways of knowing; other ways of living and breathing. Science is not the complete system many make it out to be, for science in all its glory is missing one fundamental element: spirit.
Like the leaves that wrap our earth mother in a warm blanket so she may enter her own dreamtime as autumn fulfills it’s cycle, we too spiral around and rest upon the fallen leaves of understanding.
Not all are carried by this awareness, but the understanding is there; that through sacred story and magic within myth, we’re invited to reflect on our own relationship to the great mystery; stoking our soulful imaginations and nesting in revenant meanings.
In this time of prophecy, we must seek ways to rise from the ashes of the barren landscapes that our forefathers carved out before us, finding gratitude for our ancestors of blood, bone, and spirit.
We can honour and acknowledge their pain, their beauty, their accomplishments and their struggles, knowing that all turns of light and dark on their great cycle paved the path for us to be here today.
Instead of squandering ourselves in shame and guilt for mistaken steps along a dreary path, it is with recognition and connection that we must call in the best of each story and song from mythweaver old and new, helping us remember our purpose and place; helping us reconnect with our lands and the wisdom that lay long forgotten.
So as we strengthen our wobbly legs and nuzzle into the cold of winter's edge, we stand tall and gaze to our ancestors. We beat drum and feel wind against bare skin, listening attentively in ceremony, calling in collective visions for new ways of being.
We journey through dreamtime realms and pathways to the divine, feeling the electric current of spirit pulse through heart and soul, as we sing. our. sacred. song.
