Akanida, Daughter of the Sun

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My computer is down so instead of typing with two fingers on phone I’m sending you an audio of the Saami story, Akanida, Daughter of the Sun.

All the indigenous cultures I know of are pattern-makers. Clothes are embellished with patterns. Dances and songs follow set rhythms and forms.

These patterns are shared communally and express sacred truths and laws received from nature, reminding the people who wear them, or dance them, who gave them life.

In this way, the people receive their instructions on how to live through nature. Patterns help keep the balance.

Modern humans have all been colonized by industrialization and individualism. We are encouraged to do what we want, to express however our bodies want to move, to dress how the mood takes us.

Some of us know what we are lacking and take the patterns of intact cultures, wearing shirts embroidered with Shipibo designs, chanting to Krishna at kirtan. The list of cultural appropriation infractions is long.

I understand wanting to fill the emptiness of living in a culture without sacred communal patterns, but borrowing from intact cultures is not the answer and must no longer be our response.

What do those of us without a real culture do?

I think the answer resides in devotion to transmuting the individualism we are encouraged to cultivate that I mentioned earlier.

If we follow the impulse of our bodies and truly listen to how they want to move or sing, they will realign us with nature’s patterns.

Notice I used the word devotion two paragraphs above. That’s how the alchemy occurs. We need to show up over and over and move or sing until we are sung ourselves by the wind and the rain and the mountain.

One by one, we’ll repattern ourselves as children of the sun. Eventually, our individual streams will join in rivers and new cultures will be formed who remember where we came from.

This may not happen in my lifetime, but I still show up. That’s what someone who’s devoted does.

How will you remember the patterns that link you to the stars?

Who will dream you into gold?

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