My Love of Germany

Friday, September 5, 2014

Yesterday I wrote about a film I saw this past weekend entitled The Book Thief.  Watching movies set in Germany often stimulates my appreciation of my mother’s culture of origin.  They also tend to remind me that the world is simultaneously a very large and a very small place.

When I was younger I had a dream of finding an opportunity to live and work in Germany.  Upon being awarded a McCloy Environmental Policy fellowship from the American Council on Germany in 2012 this dream awoke within me.  In the weeks immediately after returning from my trip to Germany in May, 2013 I found myself once again fascinated with Germany.  I found myself reading about the history of the Berlin Wall.  In some sense I was seeing an internalized Berlin Wall; the wall was something of a symbol for how I felt separated from my Germanic identity.  Though I do not have dual citizenship I nonetheless have felt as comfortable in Germany as I have in the United States.  And more recently the scales have tipped in favor of Germany.  With political gridlock and the ridiculous emphasis on corporate welfare and the coddling of the uber-wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class I have found myself feeling quite disenchanted with American society.

Next Monday I will begin an advanced German language course at the Germanic American Institute in St. Paul.  I tried out an intermediate course this week but quickly found myself feeling bored and unchallenged.  In life I generally would prefer to be challenged rather than bored.

As I prepare to immerse myself in the German language yet again I find myself naturally turning to the topic of our love of the places our ancestors come from.  Below is a piece taken from my journal dated June 6, 2009:

I was a student of the Indigenous Science concentration of study in the Master of Arts program in Creation Spirituality at Naropa University in Oakland, California during the period of 2003 to 2006.  This graduate school program proved to be one of the most transformative experiences of my entire life.  I expected that I would grow significantly during my time as a student.  But never did I expect I would emerge from those three years as profoundly changed as I ultimately was.

The most amazing experience of my life came to pass during my visit to the Netherlands in the autumn of 2004.  I traveled to the village of Ootmarsum where my great grandfather and his father had originally lived in the 1870’s.  Lying in the far east of the country, Ootmarsum was the primary location of my family’s history several generations ago.  During my first night sleeping in the village of Ootmarsum I had the most amazing dream I have ever had.  The following is an excerpt from the journal entry (I am italicizing it for emphasis) I made the following day, October 7, 2004:

So the dream (or dreams?) I had last night was incredible.  Not unlike previous dream states I have had, this one had two seemingly very unrelated pieces.  In one dream I had the image of a woman before me.  She had long black hair that was tucked into a heavy shawl that covered her shoulders.  The shawl had a rough appearing texture and extended down to her knees.  She had large, piercing black eyes and had one arm extended out to her side, as if she was directing my attention to look at something.  This was her left arm.  At her right side appeared dozens of black birds.  They were descending from the sky.  They seemed to be crows.  I thought of her as the crow woman.

In another dream piece I was in my bedroom in San Rafael.  It seemed there was a party going on there.  All my furniture was gone, so it seemed there was plenty of space to lounge in.  There were many guests, but the three I recall were all women.  One was a beautiful young woman, probably in her late twenties, who sat very discreetly, but very obviously, alone.  It seemed her beauty intimidated others.  But even though she held a smile throughout the time, I felt she felt upset no one would approach her.  There was a youngish girl, maybe twelve, who sat with probing eyes looking at me from the corner.  She had beautiful straw blonde hair.  Her gaze seemed filled with wisdom beyond her years.  And then there was an older woman sprawled upon the floor with wrinkled breasts.  I was engaged in guiding her through a breathwork session.  She vaguely reminded me of Soleil from my breathwork training.

The following month, upon returning to the States, I entered Crystal Way Bookstore on Market Street in San Francisco.  I began leafing through a book on Celtic spirituality.  And there in the center of the book appeared an illustration virtually identical to the woman who appeared in my dream.  I discovered she is none other than the Morrigan.

Over two years earlier I made a trip to visit my family in Germany.  During my travels in Europe I visited Berlin for the first time.  I visited historical sites and was much impressed with the beauty and scale of the new vibrant life of the city of Berlin.  While there I also had a profound experience.  Once again I felt the very land I was visiting shared its wisdom with me.  During the single weekend I was in Berlin I sketched an image.  I drew an image of a man with a spear, hair the texture of a spruce tree’s foliage and a stern countenance.  The word for the German people comes from spear.  The Germans were once called spear men.   I then wrote something I felt was actually revealed to me by the land itself.  I do not recognize what flowed from my pen onto the page as originating in my own mind.  I was quite awestruck to later learn that the image I drew had some remarkable similarities to the ancient Teutonic tribe.

I will share one other experience to illustrate my basic thesis.  In the spring of 1997 I lived upon the Rosebud Reservation of the Lakota Sioux Native American people in South Dakota.  This nearly four month long sojourn set me on the course to later enrolling in the Indigenous Mind program at Naropa University.  Never before and never since did I live so thoroughly surrounded by a people of very different origins and traditions.  I was a very young man at the time and lived in a Jesuit mission community.  The immense scale of the plains and small size of the communities made it very easy to find solitude for contemplation. 

One day, upon returning from a trip to Rapid City, I was overcome more than once by a grief whose depth blindsided me.  I felt I was feeling a grief beyond anything that could be my own personal grief.  I felt I was feeling the grief of an entire people.  I look back on that time now and feel I was actually feeling the grief of the departed Lakota people who considered the land I was driving through sacred and alive.  Perhaps I was feeling the collective grief of these people caused by the oppression and colonization of their tribe.

I share these three anecdotes to illustrate a belief I have come to hold.  Perhaps it is not the easiest belief to scientifically prove has a basis in objectively verifiable fact.  Yet validation by widely accepted methods of scientific inquiry does not make something true or false.  It only gives legitimacy for collective acceptance.  I believe the multitude of unique landscapes that constitute our planet retain the memories and experiences of the people who are native (and not native!) to the region.  Each bioregion is a product of a combination of a unique set of conditions that can be found nowhere else on earth.  It follows that people native to each region will be a unique expression of that place.

I believe human sexuality is in itself also highly influenced by the places we live in as we come to maturity. 

In a related way, I believe pathological development in the human being, sexual or otherwise, can in part result from a traumatic breach or separation from that unique environment that nurtures our development.  I feel a trauma of this nature may have happened to me, and the impact of it is perhaps still affecting me today.

Dr. Pamela Colorado, founder of the Indigenous Science course of study, set forth a series of tenets to define the nature of Indigenous Science.  The one most relevant to my statement here is the following: ‘All of nature is intelligent and alive and can be partnered with in a research process.’  Stated another way, there is a wisdom and a lifeforce present in the entire living world.  Everything has a story to tell.  There is a purpose in the existence of all the flora and fauna of this planet.

I have spent years in individualized psychotherapy looking to discover a healing and wholeness within myself that will endure.  Yet of all the work I have undertaken to reach this state of health, I continue to remain firmly convinced that the most healing act I ever took was to visit the land of my father’s ancestry in 2004.  Now I wish to do so again, but this time I seek to explore my mother’s ancestral heritage.  I wish to travel to Germany for the purpose of learning more about who I am.

……

I ultimately enjoyed an opportunity to travel to Germany in 2013.  And visiting my mother’s family for the first time in approximately a decade set me on a new path.  At first (the summer of 2013) there seemed to be an immense and all consuming darkness that pressed in on me from every direction.  But then, as time passed, the darkness ultimately began to recede.  Now, over a year after going into therapy once again I feel myself embarking upon a whole new phase of my life.  I still have many moments when my grief feels deeply oppressive. And yet as each day passes I feel myself continuing to grow stronger, clearer, sharper…and yet still more alive.