"If you are without elders in your life, or if the older people in your life aren’t the wise ones you are longing for, consider befriending some in your community. Find those whose eyes still sparkle, who carry some gravitas, who are using their lives in service to something greater than themselves alone. Make a respectful courtship of them by showing up to support or keep them company in a consistent way. Listen to their stories, ask them for guidance, learn what they’re willing to share with you.
But also know that it is never too early to practice at becoming an elder. Conscious eldering is about doing the inner work, attending to the soul life before it comes for you. So many people have what we call a ‘mid-life crisis’ in their fifties; suddenly they realize they have been living in false belonging their whole lives and have a desperate urge to scrap everything and start over. However, if we learn at an earlier age to attend to our longing, to take the risks necessary to live in alignment with our soul’s calling, then we are preparing ourselves to be true elders in the second half of life."
~ Toko-pa Turner, Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home
So many of us are so far away from our Elders. So many have ‘issues’ with their elders. So many have ‘Mother-issues’. Parents, families, extended aunties and grandmothers, are almost a thing of the past. We are torn from our histories which include them. We have torn them out of our pictures. We have broken the historical stories of who we were, are, and can become because our oral tradition of passing down knowledge from grandparent, to mother, to us, has been torn from our history. What an incredible life-changing sorrow, how isolating, how alone we feel right to our blood and bones. As a child, torn from her mother’s arms and dumped out into society of strangers (although a blessing, still a tragedy to my story that I am having to retrieve, now, from others who know bits and pieces). Beyond a few stories trickling down, most of the authentic story and lessons and nurturing of stories, is gone.
Close relationships have suffered and stories suffered because it is typically the women who shared, by living, culture and the rich knowledge of how family fit in to that history. They are the ones who spoke of nurturing children, partners, parents, siblings, extended family. They taught about the environment and how we fit into that/those. Women were the storytellers. They were responsible for passing down the stories of their life and their parents’ life. Oral historical stories are not passed down., any more, and women are responsible for making sure those stories are passed down. Much is neglected. Much is forgotten. The children, when asking, are told the parent/s forgot now. Traditional knowledge about land, forests, waters, traditional medicines are becoming lost. Those of us who know any of the history, culture, traditions of our families, must make time to share that knowledge.
As you have heard, there are many many unmarked graves found around government and church residential schools and the children (some as young as three) were torn from their families, by constables who were in charge of grabbing the children and bringing them to the residential school that was nothing more than jail for children. Children were not allowed to go home. Families could not visit. Punishment was raw and real and atrocities have been told by survivors. Now, suddenly, what the survivors had buried because it was never brought out into the open, are having to face all those things they hid within their souls and there is an outpouring of grief and hurt and the social assistants were not ready for such huge gatherings of people who are begging for emotional help, for fairness, for justice. The pain is, again, palpable. Hurt people hurt people. We are going to hear more than churches being burned and statues torn down. What was not talked about must now be so. Survivors who still live, are telling their families and others the stories and some, as I said, are horrific. It is as if a boil has ruptured in the nations of people who were treated so ill by the conquerors who conquered and walked away and went on through the decades as if none of it had happened. Stories will be told by those children torn from their families, their communities, their traditions. There are a few who were successfully hidden. They ae the ones who have kept some of the stories and ways of being alive. They were never acknowledged and helped and nurtured. Some were never able to go home even when they got out, they did not fit anywhere and so they swallowed their pain and did whatever they could to deny. Genocide of traditions and stories were buried with those hundreds and hundreds of children. I am gutted that it took this proof, of finding all these unmarked graves of children, for Society to not be able to turn their hearts away from what happened in Canadian history. It is taking this for our society to understand the ‘trickle down’ effects that our elders have said would take seven generations to heal. We are there. It is also said that it will the women who heal Mother Earth and its people. That is a great responsibility as each must do what they do best to help.
Women are “fixers”. We patch up torn skin with a kiss and a bandaide. We fix torn clothes. We fix broken anything or find someone who can. We give solace to broken hearts. We are responsible to take torn relationships and, since we are kinkeepers, we tend to forgive more easily. It is time for us to become soldiers of peace and healing. Yes, we carry our own battle scars. Use those scars as gifts. Be grateful for them for it makes you more easily understand those who walk beside us, behind us, before us, that have had their own lives torn into shreds. It is time for us to turn away from our selfies and our memememememe sense of ourselves and give the gifts we were born with to those who need them. I blogged before about each of us being the answer to some ancestors’ fervent prayers, that that is our purpose and we may not know what it is, but elder’s stories give us this hint.
Be the answers to someone’s prayers. ‘Attend to the longing’ of those who have had need of us. ‘Take the risks’ that it takes to live in alignment with purpose, prepare yourselves to be healers. We have long enough worked on our inner child. Now we need to work on preparing to be sacred Elders. Let no one wounded person be passed by. Look for the WHY of all things in wounded people, not the what they do.
Be that!
©Carol Desjarlais 7.4.21
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