My Intiation
6th February Posted by Trackers Teams on Feb 06, 2009 in Newsletter -by Laura Zerrra For as long as I can remember, I've been drawn to dead animals. Moments stick out in my early memory. There was the time I found the doe, melting in the ground after a hunter was unsuccessful in tracking his prey. I remember standing, transfixed, coming to terms with how fleeting life is. The raccoon, warm spring day, pale bones sticking through matted fur, shot for target practice by a notorious farmer. Or the robin, eyes turning cloudy as I held her carefully in my hands on the side of the road. I always wanted to do something for them, somehow make use of their senseless death, but I felt incapable, even ignorant. I was an alien in the strange world my ancestors had known, a world that understood death and interacted with the sacrifices that sustained life. I was intimidated.As I grew older, my helplessness became anger and frustration. Somewhere in our culture, something had been lost. So came my meeting with the beaver. It was Easter morning, and my family drove past his collapsed form on a busy road. He was the second one hit, in that exact spot, that week. I couldn't leave him. I returned alone, with a trash bag and rubber gloves, and delicately removed his lifeless form from the pavement. I'd heard of braintanning, but knew almost nothing about it. I walked into the woods with the beaver, my dull Kershaw, a pick axe, and a pickle jar. An hour later, I walked out with my objective. This simple act changed everything. I became obsessed with tanning, got a license to pick up roadkill, and eventually learned to butcher and eat the meat as well. I began to understand the sacrifice that food is, whether it be carrot or carcass. It was my doorway into the world of relearning ancient skills, of developing a real, give-and-take relationship with the Earth. I began to understand what we've lost. Laura Zerra is a friend of Trackers and an instructor at Roots School, an incredible wilderness school in Vermont. They offer the awesome 1 day a month Wilderness Survival Immersion Project. From the Editor: Initiations
4th February Posted by Trackers Teams on Feb 04, 2009 in Newsletter It is difficult, in this culture, to imagine an effective initiation, when so much of initiation depends on the life leading up to it. In tribal societies, initiates were only equipped to face the often life threatening conditions associated with initiation because they'd received the totality of childhood in a cohesive village or tribe. They had completed their childhoods as their parents and grandparents before them, with the extended protection of their tribe, which is often described (albeit in languages freed of the verb to be) as a seemless extension of self. They set out to face death with the knowledge that their ceremony had been and will be practiced for millennia. A million years of information isn't such a bad thing to have on your side when you starve, freeze, face the knife, or walk through fire. The purposes initiation serves have been documented in lengths too large for library shelves or tiny closets such as the mind, but suffice it to say, an initiation has gone well when the initiate is so profoundly changed as to be unrecognizable, even to themselves. There can be no going back. What then, if in your village those who came before you were so lacking in having their basic needs met, needs more fundamental than hamburgers and petrol, that they never graduated infancy, let alone the contrived state of adolescence? How do you welcome future generations, who arrive whether we're prepared or not with the non-negotiable momentum of a river? How do the blind lead the blind? I don't know the answers to these questions, but one only need take stock of the toxic mimics of initiation; gang members, soldiers, frat boys who, so desperately desiring that basic rite, initiate one another only to step out the other side to discover the world just as broken; to know that our guts still yearn for that ancient connection and that the body will produce the stimuli it requires no matter how clunky the parts. That's hope to me. Because beyond the magnetism of the machine lies a hollow and a couple hundred years, behind our belly buttons lies all of human history.
This month's theme is Initiation. February's theme Right and Wrong, send submissions to submissions@trackersnw.com Once again we welcome you to write in with personal stories, between 200-400 words, based on our theme. Hope you've all enjoyed the big freeze, From the editor, Lisa Wells |
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