What are cultural roots?
In our mixed-up world, where very few truly grounded and rooted groups of folks - in living, indigenous purity - are thriving, it is an important question to ask ourselves, in terms of our identity and of our individual (and collective) life purpose. And it's a vital question regarding our creativity.
Creativity - our true potential as divine co-creators in the intelligent fabric of the cosmos - is not supported in contemporary 'cult-ure'; at best we are given some crayons as youngsters, or some paints at high school for a few blessed hours per month... But for the most part, few of us are exposed to pure creative play, creative chaos, creative autonomy and space to really make things, to evolve our vision and ideas, feelings and energy....
I was blessed indeed to grow up in a place where at least part of my true creative education was vibrantly healthy and real: I was exposed to folks who worked with natural materials and who painted from life on the wild mountainside; I was immersed in fire-side story-telling and spontaneous music-making, and my (summer, at least!) days were filled with outdoor self-initiated pop-up events like theatre and den-making, hunting and exploring.
And though there wasn't really a time where we weren't being creative, nevertheless there were myriad aspects of our upbringing that severed continuity of our inheritance and stopped us from flourishing fully. Language in particular was Anglified from the beginning in our home, as both parents had been educated in the cities, and they had moved to the island between the births of my older brother and myself. And just two years after I was conceived, the last fluent Arran Gàidhlig speaker passed, purportedly. A combination of parental neuroses and brain-washing from schooling meant that that any minimal influence of the original tongue, the music, the stories, the characters, was filtered out or squashed aggressively - at the house, in the (rapidly-increasingly English) community and throughout the education system.
Despite all this quelling of natural influence, I had a strong embodied instinct that my voice and the words I was speaking were not properly in harmony. I could feel my throat and tongue around the words but it felt uncomfortable, out-of-kilter. It took well into my third decade of life, and a move to the north of Scotland before I finally even had any experience of folks speaking Gàidhlig with me, and explaining a few words here and there. Before becoming familiar with Gàidhlig, it was relegated in my 'educated' mind to 'foreign', whilst the people around me were referring to it as a 'dead' and 'useless' language, and denying having any connection to it (!) It wasn't until I delved into it further, spoke it and found my mind immersed in it, that I began to recognise what had been locked away deep inside my mind-body-spirit-cosmos... And as it woke up, the flowering of my spiritual life and creative vitality, my inspiration and my living identity, gently and without fanfare, returned. I am not at all fluent in Gàidhlig, but am activated by recognition of what it represents and how strongly it has been oppressed.
The disruption of (all of) our inheritance via interrupting our senses is a great assimilation tool: a means of cutting us off from community, land, the elements and the freedom of all kinds of creative power. This is methodically done by multiple norms in our cult-ure these days: distracting our attention from the riches of our environment and our community, our collective power and vitality and potential... by TV, internet, celebrity, writings, chants, superficial stimulation, lies and shadows.
When our senses are interfered with by all this trickery, it accumulates in dissonance, as it separates our senses from holistic natural rhythms and brings us instead into mechanical and artificial patterns; with the loss of our mother-tongue, we lose our natural self-expression as an inherent aspect of the fabric of consciousness and the interconnectedness-of-all-things. We lose not just the fluidity and flow of our connection with the past, with those around us who are rooted, with the things that we are interacting with naturally, with our environment and the weather - but we might even find less ease of connection with food, taste, quality of life, capacity to easily identify what is right and what isn't right (or is less right)... We are knocked out of kilter with e v e r y t h i n g and as a result we become very malleable and, well, very deeply, deeply distracted from Real Life.
This in turn builds a LOT of detritus between us and Nature: Nature and The Way are never far from us, but between us and them is a perceived mud of non-sense: between us and our senses, our inalienable rights, our natural wealth, we have simply a lack of clarity. All that is ours is all still there, right in front of us; and it is still ours, yet our voice is tuned into other strands of thinking - unlinked to the fabric of our history or landscape, or God or the Cosmos - and we are fixated on the new thrill of that shiny vibration, different and seemingly the key to all these conveniences and fabulous instant gratification things.
Meanwhile, we are numb.
With the loss of our senses and the loss of our (rooted connected) tongue, we begin to fade spiritually, and our creativity becomes an action lacking in poetry, less full of wildness and freedom, fundamentally removed from the upwelling immensity of presence that it once rippled with.
Finding our way back to Connectedness is different for each of us, but it has certain pillars that we can trace the form of, and through them find again our rootedness in elemental Wealth Of Being. There are myriad paths for each of us, leading back to core and cosmos, and perhaps the return to our family home, the nature of where we were raised - the place where we set out from into adulthood - perhaps this is one of the things that can provide inspired reflection on what we are, so that we can reclaim what we have lost.
We don't necessarily become empowered simply by seeing what has been stolen from us, nor in identifying who stole it or how, but my own journey certainly has involved a deep dive (at several key points in my spiritual growth) into what got knocked out of synchrony in my own lifetime, as well as that of parents and grandparents. We might be the first in our lineage to be able to gain a profoundly expansive overview of reality, of recent history, and of how jumbled-up life has become by the great explosion of information that has exploded into our lives... So there is potential in our taking this information, gestating it, and then grounding and reconstructing with what we know - by returning to our 'roots', we are able to immerse in information richly.
The place where we grew up shouldn't be seen as The Solution or it won't necessarily provide the fixing of all wounds... but it certainly can be like a gateway and a great concentration of clues, as to what we really are and where we really are going - or CAN go.
My first days back in my family home and village were strange and very uncomfortable: it is shocking to me, even having lived abroad for decades because I need to have a good distance between myself and my family and culture, how far unrooted folks and lifestyle have become as the decades have progressed.
Having delegated all the major areas of life to external bodies, which over the years have transformed from services into corporations and finally, authorities... folks are now deep in non-sovereignty - baffled at what is even happening around them, and apathetically accepting of all manner of inconvenience and successive harvesting of their sacred attention-energy-resources.
Though this process proceeds unrelentingly worldwide, it is still very jarring to see a wild and previously unhindered-by-modern-trappings place like this island, become so damned domesticated and urban: things which used to be free, local, natural and whole are now piped into the home in a completely perverted and compromised state - at higher and heightening costs. The cost is literal, metaphorical and metaphysical; it is a great cost to our spirit and freedom, our health and autonomy, our capacity to express ourselves and to love...
And yet, the warmth of creativity, our true culture and our positive future, shines through regardless. Even the immense weight of cultural oppression is forgiven - even briefly, occasionally forgotten - as we share meals and drams, are welcomed into the homes of those who have bought up the local property at grossly inflated prices (an economic system which dictates that I would never be able to own a home here, as should be natural Right) and dance together into the dark night to celebrate midwinter passing...
In Every Single Moment there is infinite creative potential, and this can be realised - in every single moment - through our attention. It is free, it is beautiful, it is Right: our glorious loving connection via senses and responses: our capacity to make more energy than currently exists - between us and around us and into the future. Our willingness to pick up the threads, even if they are tattered and torn apart, and reweave them, rather than leaving them so, and rather than further tangling.
With this sense of being part of a living fabric, with energy and love flowing through me, I can let go sufficiently to allow my other senses to return: the sovereign sense of that-which-is-so-much-more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts: The Mystical Self, the psychic and visionary, the finder-of-things, the seer and visioner of solutions-connections-directions.
This is the highlight of my return, of my finding a 'place' for myself in my own rootedness and awakeness; Feeling The Whole Self As Intimate Aspect Of All Things, and being consciously able to livingly and lovingly weave creatively. Creativity in this context becomes profoundly meaningful and ...particular... it comes in great fluidity, and yet it is free very specifically in choice moments which are ripe and where the 'other' is receptive. There are no words wasted, no breath unnecessarily blown through cheeks, no chant or spell cast without great respect for All Things. No resistance to a greater Will being visible through the human form.
The ego falling quietly like a finished leaf in autumn, a pebble shifting in a tide; falling effortlessly, the elements carrying me, down to the earth and down to the sea. The illusion of 'lost' culture being the important thing, also falls away, and I embrace 'refound' culture and community as a temporary cloak to warm me against the biting wind. The cloak is increasingly colourful, with increasingly neatly embroidered edges and seams: the more it is sewn, the lighter it gets, and it moves as if it were my skin, a part of me. My throat opens, the fact I am using more foreign words than my own is not a weight I carry, and there is only energy flowering: only the purity of natural order and spontaneous rightness, through mastery of even an unnatural tongue.
I am reminded, walking on our shore, how the powers of nature give and take away; erosion is such a powerful force, and yet it creates new form, opportunity, habitat and challenge. Not all of our life is meant to be easy and comfortable: nature reminds us of this continually: reminds us that even the destruction of entire cultures can bring the gift of new life. A wild and calming morning, digesting what I am riled by in our new 'culture', as I walk the newly-reordered shores, layers of pebbles, seaweed and waves piled together along our steep village shoreline; the first time since being a child that I've been excited to get out for the low tide after a storm, to see what has been revealed and gifted by the alta marea.
Culture and creativity seem solid and real (something to save and hold onto tightly) whilst simultaneously they are ephemeral and intangible: they are like the wind; invisible until they hit something and the movement of that thing expresses the dynamic power of each gust and buffet, ripple and flow make marks through our movement and through our stuckness. All is dynamic and all is power, at the core of it.
We want our 'culture' to stay the same, to be distinct, to remain how it was when we were young, like the shoreline, now in places weighted heavily by sandbags... "attempting to hold back the tide"...
But WE are much more than our culturation; our culture is usually a tight bundle of norms which help the mechanics of our civilisation to tic-toc along BUT what our real identity is, and what our real roots are, is much more than even ancient story, landscape familiar as our own hands, and meeting with the elements together singing and dancing... Our deeper identity is more than the sum of the parts that we know - and our consciousness of what we are will always be expanding, so long as we are open to learning, growing, feeling more...
And our creative power springs from this.
I wish us all, all the courage and vitality that is naturally ours, in finding our ever-new culture, creativity and home.
all photos taken in High Corrie, Corrie and Sannox on the Isle of Arran, Scotland, by myself
