AVATAR – A MYTH FOR OUR FUTURE

AVATAR!

Hollywood has brought us yet another opportunity to tune into a possible future…

I loved it deeply, have seen it twice so far (3D was great!) and will see it again, I know.

Reading so many descriptions, reviews, got to give my own…

For me it was at least an offering to the vision of a beautiful future for our own planet – a vision of  community, shared food, simple life in nature.  Ok – that is merely the surface – I am trying to speak of DEEP ECOLOGY, the right relationships that can come with reverence for other Beings – be they trees or animals.  All of this was implied in the world of the Tribal Forest People.

I want to speak right now of our relationship to the meat we eat.  As a cook & nutritionist I have been through many phases of vegetarianism since 1970 when I discovered brown rice & macrobiotics.  I now eat a small amount of local or organic poultry & wild fish, as well as using broth from bones.  Although I do not kill my own meat, I have done so.  years ago I was a communal caretaker of goats, chickens, rabbits, ducks.  We fished and certainly i gutted, descaled & cleaned lots of fish as a child with my grandfather. I believe that we each should be able & willing to do that – to clean the organs, cleave meat from bone, access the animal’s raw biology & flesh.  If we cannot bear to think about that – how can we justify being carnivores – eating such an offering from the life blood & sacrifice of this Being?   And, so – I ask us all to question our inner truth, what do we eat, how do we offer it into our very metabolism, as it becomes part of our own flesh, do we give thanks, do we revere the life that has been lost to save our own?  It is the true spirituality of food, and an opportunity to again – say Grace, give thanks and make the food into love & a blessing to our bodies.  (And I am talking about plants here too, by the way)

So, let’s think about the hunting scenes…using bow & arrow, knife, a more equal challenge between the prey & the hunter…

In the words of Lauren Raine – www.threadsofspiderwoman.blogspot.com

…They even had enough anthropological understanding to include the hunter who prays over the body of the fallen prey, offering thanks for the gift of its meat – this is, indeed, what native peoples universally did in both myth and in practice, recognizing and honoring that the animal has sacrificed its life to sustain the life of the tribe. Most Americans do not equate the hamburger they buy with an animal that has lost its life, let alone do they comprehend a spiritual system that respects the exchange of life force and energy that has taken place. What a wonderful concept to introduce to the young people who watched the movie…

To finish – I invite each of you readers to see this movie as a deeper symbol of more than the politics between conqueror & conquered (European Invaders vs Indians, etc) and other wonderful analogies that can be made about resource extraction, but rather – as a mythology for the spirituality of nature & our place in it, the very Gaian Philosophy of Lovelock & Deep Ecologists such as Joanna Macy!  I will even take it one step further – in the scenes at the Tree of Life - we witnessed a ritual of healing involving the synthesis of an entire community acting & tuning as one – the possibilities of which break open our own limited beliefs in “Self & Other”.  Tune to each other, become true community, unite in compassion & shared life, healing.  Enjoy, live in joy, fly!  I think I got it.