Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Who or what carries the lost wisdom?

About the Bari people, described in Ethnobotany and Conservation of Biocultural Diversity (Carlson and Maffi, 2004)

For now, and for the time to come when the wisdom is even more scattered to the winds, what do you think happens to that knowing? Do the trees carry it? Is it only alive while the Bari elders are alive, in the interactions/relations of the trees and the people? Or is it held by the Earth somehow? By the ancestors of the Bari who have passed? Or perhaps in the bodies or epigenetically or in the field of the Bari progeny?

Sometimes I think the air, every molecule that was ever a tree or Bari or the light that passed through a chloroplast, is quivering with this multigenerational knowing. Is this what sustainability education is, to re-member how to access this knowing?

This seems to me to be the greatest loss, the languages that have passed into air and branch, the biocultural, co-evolutionary complexity. The peoples whose millenial ways have passed through tortuous means from the vital living cultures of Earth. Is there some way we can summon the knowing in this time when wisdom, particular, specific, clarion, could help guide us?

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