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I recently read one of my favorite thinkers and writers passed away last month as a result of a long battle with lung cancer. I’ve been out of touch from “that world” and it occurs to me how sad it is when we have separate worlds we loose touch with as we move our lives about the world. There is no reason writers and thinkers like Paula Gunn Allen shouldn’t be known by millions, yet they seem to get lost, relegated to separate entities of thought and being. I was lucky enough to have been in a world where she was able to enrich my life and my soul so deeply and while I miss those days, one can only hope the worlds don’t need to be so far apart.
I’ll leave this post with Paula’s words and a link. I can only hope people will take an opportunity to move outside of themselves for a moment and visit the links and allow Paula’s words to touch someplace where their body has missed them for so long.
“In the beginning was thought, and her name was Woman. The Mother, the Grandmother, recognized from earliest times into the present among those peoples of the Americas who kept to the eldest traditions, is celebrated in social structures, architecture, law, custom, and the oral tradition. To her we owe our lives, and from her comes our ability to endure, regardless of the concerted assaults on our, on Her, being, for the past five hundred years of colonization. She is the Old Woman who tends the fires of life. She is the Old Woman Spider who weaves us together in a fabric of interconnection. She is the Eldest God, the one who Remembers and Re-members; and though the history of the past five hundred years has taught us bitterness and helpless rage, we endure into the present, alive, certain of our significance, certain of her centrality, her identity as the Sacred Hoop of Be-ing.”
Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Sacred in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon, 1986), 11.
“Faced with the terror of our situation vis a vis the sacred, perhaps we can learn what we so urgently need to know: the powers that inform our universe must be treated with respect. The transformational process is sacred and is to be approached cautiously, humbly, and in awareness of its actual nature. At the very least, perhaps we will realize that it is futile to imagine ourselves as threatening the Earth’s survival, when the truth is quite otherwise. Should we attempt to nuke the planet, we can be sure she alone will survive.
I die, but the earth remains forever.
Beautiful earth, you alone remain
Wonderful earth, you remain forever.”
–Kowa Death Song
– Paula Gunn Allen, from her introduction to Gossips, Gorgons & Crones, The Fates of the Earth, by Jane Caputi, 1993.
http://www.paulagunnallen.net/
Thanks for stopping by!
Toni
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