Greetings AoCers
As Heartland is an agora for delicious words and igniting story let me share my walkabout with Martin Prechtel,, a wordsmsithing, storylelling, visual and song artist whose work are fountains of deliciousness and inspiration for your the words that float on your precious breath...
Robert Bly refers to Prechtel's work as "a treasure house of language in service to life." Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, declares "the Mayan gods, who hold eloquence above all else, must surely be pleased with his soul, who, in this lifetime, is named Martin Prechtel."
Below are a few excepts from an interview that took place, obviously for the likes of you, members of Heartland...
..."A master of innovative language, Prechtel works to promote the vitality hidden in language...
Prechtel described the power of poetic language as the greatest weapon against death.
"Death wrestles you, but not with machine guns or bombs or sarcasm," he said, "and you then fight back with poetry; you beguile death; but you can't kill it. Death loves words so much it will make a deal with you. It says 'I'll give you back your soul if on a regular basis if you send messages to the holy.'"
**********************************************************************
"The spoken story becomes the way people know how to live inside a certain landscape," he began. "It takes the landscape to contain story - that mythology that has all the details of the dismemberment and rememberment - the words utilized are of such force that it causes the young people to grasp at the things they do not comprehend."
It's an initiatory process that takes years for people to "get closer to beauty."
"They go through a personal transformation that takes them out of the sibling nonsense and into community accountability," he continued. "So words can be utilized to link them up to something enormous, a ritual feeding of what is Holy in nature."
If done correctly, the "Holy in Nature" can be fed by the way we walk, speak, or even gesture, he added.
"As long as we're working for the benefit of the human, we're working with a narrow vision," he noted. "We need to keep the Holy before and after the human. Only then can humans become a very large beautiful thing speaking human to human. The real initiations are those that cause us to become something that feeds life beyond ourselves. It's not self involvement or self enlightenment. It's something beyond yourself for the universe."
*************************************************************************
And....
What does a shaman have to say about coping with modern violence and this time of war?
"You love what you love more than you love your hate," he advised. "If what you love is the divine, story, culture, children, then instead of blowing a whistle, you'll strive to keep the seeds alive."
I hope that was tasty,
William Sebrans



Recent Comments