To truly know a thing...

There was a time when we really knew a thing for what it truly was

a tree a mountain a fox our own being.

We would sit for days or weeks or months and just behold it take it in listen to it notice it be with it build relation with it.

In a time in the world when mastery and craftsmanship and curiosity and care and great love led the human experience

an essential part of the ripening into adulthood and mature Humanity was developing an intimacy with the spirit and form and mystery of the wild world we were born into.

Traditional Culture was one of the greatest gifts we ever gave ourselves.

It supported each new generation to incarnate here into their bodies into their families into their clan onto this earth and into the mystery.

Traditional Culture in its purest form is an extraordinary technology.

It develops an embodied being in a way that the personal development industries

and the new age world

will never be able to replicate.

The Western world was fractured from its traditional culture not so long ago in the grand scheme of the great story.

In the process of this fracturing we forgot how to truly know a thing we lost our intimacy with this world and...

we lost the very traditions and rites of passage that were there to lead us through the journey of a human life into our place in the world into embodied humanity

and into the sacredness of inhabiting the human form.

I believe the time of truly knowing a thing is coming again.

I believe culture is stirring again

in the tender underbelly of the western world.

I believe that when I'm finally in the soil

my grandchildren will know the tree

that grows out of my grave

for what it truly is.

I'm planting that seed in my heart right now

and I'll water it everyday for the rest of my life.

Awen.

~ Matthew Liam Gardner