The Walking Lost

How colonial history, lost traditions, and a fractured relationship with nature shape the Western soul.

Sunday musings in this weird and wonderful world. Grief, disconnection, finding bearings in a map-less world.

It seems this year is one of mixed signals - go, woah, move, sit, create, integrate... I am feeling it, and I am seeing it reflected in the external field too. What is happening for you?

I want to move forward and create structures in my business. However, I find my own personal enquiry taking front and centre. My work is rooted in re-connection and the message seems to be on mapping my inner understanding and healing before I can externalise it and there is still work to do. Is this frustrating - hell yes! All systems in me want to build and run forwards - but I am sitting, observing, and discerning. It is still Pisces season, and Mercury retrograde, so all is exactly as it should be!

So what is going on beneath the surface? A grief process. Enquiry into accountability and wounds that precede this life of mine. That is so much bigger than me. It certainly includes me (as my last share with my daughter describes). And it is deeper - so much deeper.

My sociology studies made me aware of the global impacts of colonialism, the capitalist mindset and the devastation it wrought on the so-called 'third world'. But, as a white South African, I am a product of this colonialism, and I have benefitted from it over my African brothers and sisters. As this awareness seeped through me, so grew a deep grief and shame that so much harm, pain and suffering was brought to this country by my people. 'My people' - who I have no real sense of connection to, as I am fundamentally born of Africa. This created a further sense of separation.

I have been watching the powerful documentary series by Science and Nonduality which tells us of the process by which colonisation disconnected the First People's from their land, their language, their culture and how this laid the ground for abuse, addiction, mental illness which is still so prevalent in these cultures - AND of course, our own. In ours it is just a little more hidden, because we are 'above that', aren't we?

My heart cries.

I sat with this - the guilt, the shame, the grief, and it pulled on a thread that was deeper still - the question of 'but what about me and my people - what was the root of our suffering that we could do the harm we did'? And we go back to the roots of religion. We go to the separation of women from nature. We go back to witch hunts. We go to the Druids who were the wise ones - men and women both, no separation, no polarisation, no domination - wise people who lived in deep connection and reverence with the land.

When Christianity took over, these people were hunted, driven out, killed - all those who lived in harmony with nature, with the rhythms and cycles of organic life were obliterated. These people too are my ancestors! And what wounding are we all carrying - us of European descent, due to this?

We were once all living in connection with ancestral wisdom passed from grandmother to mother to daughter. From grandfather to father to son. We were woven with the land. We understood Her. We knew how to work with Her. We had rituals, we had ceremonies that marked the cycles of nature, that connected us all together.

We KNEW OUR PLACE.

We no don't know. We have no idea. We are the walking lost. We are betwixt and between. Not this nor that. The Western mind is one that is deeply disconnected and we are seeing the cost of this. Consumption. More, more and more. We need more to fill the gap, to plug the hole, to keep our pain at bay. This pain is primal and personal.

The solution? The only way forward is awaken, and to remember that we ARE nature. We ARE connected. The seeds of the sacred are still in our hearts - we have just forgotten. If we can remember our hearts, if we can rewrite the code of living to honour our bodies - these incredible biological beings that our soul inhabits - we can start to listen and to see in a new way. We can decondition, we can let go, we can detoxify ourselves of all the lies we have been fed over the centuries.

Now is the time of purification. Now is the time of letting go all that is not in service of life, of love, of reverence to organic life.

Let us weave ourselves back into connection with our own selves as well as this beautiful, sacred Gaia collective that is Humanity.

So much love <3

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