We are all tribal people. This is the one truth that we fail to recognize, remember and reclaim. In this technological marvel of a world, it's the simple truths that escape us. The sheer magnitude of information, opinion and knowledge available to us makes it easy to forget the most basic elements of our human condition – that we are all tribal people.
Once upon a time, in our collective pasts, we gathered together in small bands around a fire in the night. Stories were told, songs were sung, and we felt bonded by the sense of security and community that were sparked by that flame in the night. Everyone has that common link. Everyone, at one point in their ethnic history, has that in common with one another.
It's important to remember. Because it is the embers of those old fires that will allow us to heal our world. to ignite a new flame for all to gather around on a changing and shifting planet.
When we gathered there and the darkness surrounded us, the fear of what lay beyond the safety of firelight left us. Instead, we became secure in the knowledge that we were amidst people who sought only to nurture and protect us as one of their own. We were members of a community and we belonged to each other.
That's the ember we need to carry into the world. Because we all share a common fire in the night and we all carry the earnest desire for community, belonging and safety. All of us.
The answers to the discord and separation and displacement that form much of our world are not political. They are not academic. Neither are they religious, philosophical or esoteric. They are spiritual.
As a native North American (Canadian, Ojibway) I've been taught this all my adult life. There are embers from those common fires that we all seek to see burn in our villages again. The embers of nurturing, acceptance, trust, loyalty, honesty, love, wisdom and courage. Spiritual embers that, again, we all carry within us. We just need to remember and reclaim and work together to change our world.
You don't need to be Indian or a recognizable tribal person to get that. We all do at some level when we think about it. The world suffers from a spiritual malaise and only a spiritual reunification will cure it. We need to remember that we share a common fire, that we all once huddled in the darkness, that we all heard the stories of our people around the flicker of flame and the radiant warmth of community. That's what we share – and if we can remember that and reclaim our emotional response to it, we can communicate with each other because there is no separation in the remembrance of that fact.
Sound too simple? Try it. Try it with the neighbor you don't really talk to because of the perceived cultural or ethnic difference between you. Try it with the store clerk struggling to work in the English language. Try it with the homeless person with a cup stretched out toward you. And more importantly, try it with the ones you claim to love because that's where healing starts.
We can't change the world. But one person at a time we can change our homes, our neighborhoods, our community. If we all remember that we are all, at our core, tribal people, that we all share the memory of a fire in the night, we can reignite the spiritual embers necessary for change to happen.
That is spiritual, that is truth, that is tribal.
