Gather round people, I'll tell you a story
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Where to begin with the first post on a new blog?
When looking for inspiration I sometimes start by checking what others whom have gone before me have seen and said in such a way that their views and their insights are kept alive in our culture.
On this occasion, the beginning of this new blog, I looked at what others have said about beginnings and I saw this pearl of wisdom:
“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.”
And, the first thought I had on seeing that was: Where are we?
Think about it. We must know where we are if we are to decide we are not going to stay where we are. To know where we are need not entail some exhausting exercise to determine a precise location, but surely we do need to have some sense of what it is like to be "here" in order to decide we are not going to stay "here" and then take those steps to get somewhere else. So I start this simple blog as an opportunity to explore this very simple question: Where are we? I invite you to join me and see how it is that from little things big things grow. Together we can walk about our world, talk about what we see and explore the story of our present human condition through our conversations. Together we can try to get to something closer to truth.
Glaginye! [Welcome!]
orana gelar
1 comments:
Congratulations on an awesome website, and particularly the subtleity of your choice in naming your socially active site in honour of the Inapertwa. For decades, I was raised to view Aboriginal Totemism as a 'primitive religious concept' whereas, properly understood, it is a most sublime concept, and the Inapertwa are pivotal in it. The key point is that we individually start our journey in life in an undeveloped, rudimentary state but our destiny is to journey towards greatness.
In his "Mysteries of the Dreamtime" James Cowan says of Totemism and the Inapertwa (pp105-6):
"According to Aboriginal belief, mankind appears on earth as a reincarnation of a primordial being from the Dreaming. He comes into existence as the manifestation of a more rudimentary form of life to which he nevertheless owes his allegiance while he lives on earth. Man is, in a sense, incomplete, living the life of a shade in the stygean realm of the Dreaming. Until he is TRANSFORMED (my capitals) by the self-existent Sky Hero known as nambakulla (Arunta language) into a true man, he is condemned to living the life of an Inapertwa, possessing neither limbs nor senses, unable to eat, yet inextricably contained in an amorphous human sphere in which the limbs and body are only vaguely discernible. This condition of SHAPELESSNESS (my capitals), when a man is little more than a small red pebble, is known by the Arunta as Kuruna, a term that suggests man's pre-existent Form, his archetype....
Possessing a totem, or having been conceived in a particular totemic environment, is a form of baptism. A man is ‘born’ into the witchetty grub or emu totem, for example, the moment his mother acknowledges conception within that totemic environment. Even if she happens to be of another totem herself, a woman must acknowledge where the spirit children, or Kurunas, chose to enter her body. From that moment on, the unborn child is an embryo of an ancestral being in the process of transformation from an Inapertwa – that is, an incomplete man – into a divine human being. For the revelation or divination of an Aborigine as someone intimately identified with his dreaming ancestor is far more important than acknowledging the accident of biological parentage. Man is not conceived, as such by other individuals, but by the willful act of the Sky Heroes. A man’s conception is the result of a desire on the part of these ancestral beings to bring into being a more complete spiritual entity.
Once a man’s divine origin is acknowledged by way of his totem, it is encumbent on him to revere his ‘alter-ego’ for the duration of his life. He ‘is’ a sea eagle, or a dingo, fire or a crocodile even as he is a man.”
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