Outside-inward animated community

I don’t know anyone who does not appreciate the values captured in Paula Underwood’s story [told in her capacity as keeper of the Native American oral tradition], ‘My Father and the Lima Beans’.  It is a very simple story, taking less than three minutes to read.  Meanwhile, the values implicit in this story are virtually opposite to the values in our modern Western society, suggesting to me that Nietzsche was right, there must be a ‘revaluation of all values’.

The rediscovering of holodynamic living implies such a ‘revaluation of values’.  ‘Holodynamic living is the view that comes to us in a ‘relational understanding’ of the world we live in.

Another Native American [Kiowa] author, Scott Momaday, seems to go just as directly to heart of the matter as this excerpt from the life experience of Abel in ‘House Made of Dawn’ captures;

  “… and you just looked around at all the new and beautiful things. And after a while, the trader put some things out on the counter, sacks of flour and sugar, a slab of salt pork, some canned goods, and a little bag full of the hard red candy. And your grandfather took off one of his rings and gave it to the trader. It was a small green stone, set carelessly in thin silver. It was new and it wasn’t worth very much, not all the trader gave for it, anyway. And the trader opened one of the cans, a big can of whole tomatoes, and your grandfather sprinkled sugar on the tomatoes and the two of you ate them right there and drank bottles of sweet red soda pop. And it was getting late and you rode home in the sunset and the whole land was cold and white. And that night your grandfather hammered the strips of silver and told you stories in the firelight. And you were little and right there in the center of everything, the sacred mountains, the snow-covered mountains and the hills, the gullies and the flats, the sundown and the night, everything — where you were little, where you were and had to be.”

What do these two stories have in common?

[see also the five-minute overview of this essay]

 

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