Columbus and Climate Change

Celebrating Columbus Day in America.   October 14, 1492 -- October 14, 2013.     Five hundred and twenty-one years and what is the story still being told.  “In 1492, Columbus sailed the blue…” and other such ditties keep being passed along without any serious objections or other thoughts that might reveal information useful to people around the world faced with a changing climate.

Western scholarship and educated academic study for all of its touted pomp and circumstance continues to blindly follow intellectual pursuits that refuse the sensibility of “spoken words.”  The National Bestseller, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann, possibly brings a new openness to other views most often ignored or found to have no relevance for Western Man’s self-proclaimed superior intelligence and thought process.

Listening Ground and “hunting for a listener,” comes from a source indigenous to the relatively newly discovered continents of the Americas.  What is that source?  The human pursuit of freedom.  Whoa, whoa, hold on there, pardner!  This isn’t some academic debate.  It’s closer to a primal hunt-sensibility.  What makes for skilled hunting?  More than all the presumed skills attributed to the pursuit, is the simple attunement to “learning to listen.” 

This brings us back to the “Slow Story.”  Within the slow story is contained a clarity seldom experienced, except by possibly a few mystics, prophets, poets and other unpublished word-finders scattered throughout the remaining tribal peoples of the world.  Who has time for such an endeavor?  They do. The Real Indians.  This is why their very blood can be compared to the blood of dinosaurs and other supposedly extinct species.  This is why only clues can be found in ancient artifacts world over.  Spoken words are the connectors to every mystery confronting human being.  Culture and tradition in human social orders isn’t about development.  Living the moment is more closely related to sensory attunement.  Could it be our fascination with other warm-blooded species is more relevant to relationship than to gaining information?

Contained in oral tradition cultures are insights or rather hints at Language use and purpose.  The stories don’t explain, they tell the actions of characters living out their roles in activities common to all human endeavors. The telling has only one requirement: rapt attention.  Not so much to the details.  It’s more the sound and where are you, as human voice-sound fills you with a substance found in no other way.  “And what about the deaf?” you say.  What about them?  Isn’t it theirs only to know sound in some way that speaks to them other than our interpretation?  The wonder of tribal stories like this is the way so much information is uncovered.  Little by little it makes clear why the individual is connected in all the events and travels of people.

“1491,” is a timely literary attempt to bring attention to accepted factual information about the Americas. Hopefully, it will prompt researchers of human histories to pay attention to the remnant tribal people and what they have to share through their orality, even as it appears to fade with each passing generation.

With climate change comes an unexpected blessing as people seek to learn to adapt to increasing samplings of shifts in our human view of our common planet Earth.  Discovering who we are, by at last meeting and greeting our kindred humanity we will have to redevelop a primary adaptive ability for staying alive.  In tribal stories, world-wide, this is a common connective thread.  In the same manner, learning to listen then becomes more than gaining amazing insight, its use is essential for slowing down as all around us the planet changes to change once more.  Are the Polar Caps, always to remain the same and always in the same place?  The melting ice will reveal more than a newly forming shoreline.

Who will be the new Columbus, coming ashore this time?  And, who will it be that greets him or her?

Remember, during your watch, make small fires.  A few can gather closely around a small flame where we can then listen to our hearts keep the beat that connects all the People.