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Channel: Caitlin Johnstone
Date: 13/01/2023

It can be hard to feel your roots as a westerner.

Many of us live in countries built on relatively recent colonization by Europeans, so our ancestral connection to the land only goes back a few generations. Our spirituality is generally expressed in religions which originated thousands of years ago in a geographical and historical context that we have no real relationship with, or in the borrowing from other traditions we're even more distant from. And all of us are continually slammed in the face every day with a mainstream culture that is phony and shallow from top to bottom.

This often leads to feelings of disconnection and alienation, and a deep yearning that feels so tender and vulnerable we don't even like talking about it. It's a deep yearning for depth, for groundedness in something ancient and much bigger than ourselves. We feel it when observing the colonialism-ravaged remnants of indigenous cultures, or even made-up indigenous cultures like in the movie Avatar; this longing to belong to a cultural framework for connecting to the land and to other people in a way that's guided by ancient wisdom, and which we don't have to make up as we go along. 

But it is possible to find that deep connection we long for, and we don't even have to go appropriating indigenous spirituality or co-opting eastern religions in order to get there.

Reading by Tim Foley.

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