ANGST - Part 3, or The Land, The People, The Traditions...

Recently, I've been speaking with a Scottish lady who is extremely proud of her heritage and country, and this started me thinking about how people are tied to their land.  Speak to anyone who has come from Europe or The British Isles or Africa, and you will find something very deep and mystical about their connection to their land.  Not just the country - but the land itself!

Pagans everywhere talk of this, but somehow here in North America it's not the same thing.  We're too new here.  This land in Canada really belongs to the First Nations people.  (I'm not trying to make any political statement here, only a spiritual one.)  They know every grain of sand, every tree, every body of water, each insect and bird as the connective sinews that bind them to the land and to The Great Spirit.  We can barely discern this yet.  We see the same trees and lakes, but only superficially, only on the surface.  They have not yet yeilded up their mysteries to us completely.

My father has that quality when he speaks about Russia and the Ukraine.  He speaks about the birch trees and that particular colour of blue the sky has in the autumn; it is not found anywhere else!  When he said that the Old Testiment of the Bible was written by the Jewish people for the Jewish people, there it was again - he recognized how strongly those stories spoke to the Hebrew people; and although adopted by people everywhere in the world, still these stories remain uniquely Jewish.

My recent angst and rant was fueled by the frustration that the true sense of community is still missing from pagan circles today, and perhaps this is lacking because we are all so new to this country/land.  We do not know how to totally connect with this part of the Earth and each other.  Our parents and their parents before them have brought their strange ways over to a land that is steeped in its own traditions and we are all trying to fit into it.

Transplanted values, transplanted Gods and Goddesses, transplanted traditions always take time to work themselves into a new setting.

A few years ago, I had the great privilege of harvesting and processing sweetgrass.  This small act has brought me understanding and connection to the native land.  It was very superficial - barely a scratch on the surface - but I sensed something here that was truly of this culture and tradition.  As elusive as it was, it opened my understanding of something not transplanted, but genuinely "here".  

Now that is true tradition!