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Holding Our Power

An Interview With Malidoma Patrice Somé

The indigenous world is not interested in the show of power. It is interested in respecting the source of the power. This respect is kept alive by camouflage; the power is protected by hiding it. An elder who has the power to create a light hole — a gateway you can jump through into another galaxy — is not interested in using that power to impress people. He would not use that power to show off.

My First Night At The Initiation Camp

This year the millet fields had been generous and the harvest good. The hard work of collecting and transporting grain from the farm to the house roofs, where it waited to be put into the granaries, was over. Now, in the fallow dry season, the villagers turned their attention to spiritual matters — to initiation.

Stones Of Light

An Interview With David Freidel

One of the wonderful dimensions of shamanism for me is its unleashing of the imagination, the intuition, and the emotion of a person, rather than allowing the banality of the material world to overwhelm one’s life. Making the life experience conform to the imagination is a great thing, and it’s something I would like to see our society pursue actively. Instead of simply consuming fantasy, we should generate fantasy, generate alternative understandings.

Ceremony At Chews Ridge

We gathered in the Round House, a covered amphitheater dug into a hill, and sat on earthen benches. Four huge tree trunks in the middle of the room supported the wooden beams of the roof, which, like a tepee, was open in the center to the sky. Beneath the opening burned a large ceremonial fire.

India: In The Eyes Of A Stranger

The irony of refusing to bathe in order to stay clean ceased to amuse the crew after two days. I was more than dirty. I was becoming one with the relentless grime of India — the smog, dust, and dirt that hangs in the air all day and all night.

The Necessary Plane

Cherokee had worried that Johnny’s top hat might attract terrorists, but they were lucky. He rode out of Lima with money in his pockets. He even gave Cherokee a fifty to hide in her bra.

Conjuring Tibet

Turning youths loose on actual or possible dissidents was probably the shrewdest and cruelest of Maoist strategies. Here were True Believers, lacking life experience to complicate their thoughts, still endowed with the primal cruelty of children. Having internalized the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution, they were empowered to indulge in any form of torture, from breast amputation to castration, secure in the righteousness of their cause.

Wild Heart

Walking alone through a wild land, our perceptions soon alter. We begin to experience the earth anew, know the very place we stand as the source and locus of our own rediscovered wild heart.

Homeland

They called their refugee years The Time When We Were Not, and they were forgiven, because they had carried the truth of themselves in a sheltered place inside the flesh, exactly the way a fruit that has gone soft still carries inside itself the clean, hard stone of its future.

Present For Her

I’m in a shopping-mall restroom in California, where the roll of toilet paper is almost as big as a tire. Three more giant rolls are stacked on a sterile white shelf.