The Primal Paradigm

I gift to you the primal paradigm once common to all our ancient ancestors: the art of animistic perception. Perceiving the landscape and the life above, upon, and in it, including sky, soil, rocks, and bedrock as fundamentally sacred sentient entities is the basic experiential viewpoint of Animism, the oldest religion by far. Achieving this viewpoint is no easy task, and, in days of yore, was traditionally offered to every sentient shortly after puberty: the vision quest. The practice has variations as many as are tribes, with the commonality of an awesome reverence for the ‘stone people’ or ‘grandfathers’. The detailed methodology of the vision quest as practiced by the now extinct Latgawa Takelma of Southern Oregon was assembled by the last apprentice of their last medicine people: James L. Petersen, aka Rockman. In 1988 “How to SEE: a photographic vision quest” received limited private publication, but is now free online at latgawamedicinetaxi. Brace yourself for a truly strange journey to a forgotten paradigm. Who am I? Just a gringo who became the apprentice’s renegade apprentice. This being a tipping point moment for humanity, where the world is on pause, and we seem to have made mother earth mad at us, it is time to get the world back in balance. Lomakatsi, life in balance, as the hopi might say.