Awakening from the Great Forgetting
The average person today:
Spends 95% of their time sitting indoors.
Stares at a screen for 10+ hours a day.
Can identify 1000’s of corporate logos, yet only a handful of plants and animals.
Most will go months without their bare feet touching the Earth.
Is educated with a hyper-materialist worldview emphasizing objectification, competition, and separation.
In a time before memory, when the world was still young, people lived in harmony with the land. The Old Ones, our first ancestors, followed the slow turning of the seasons. They knew the smell of rain on the wind before it fell, the way the rivers spoke when the salmon returned, the silent language of deer in the shadows. They didn't say in words, but in the language of the Earth itself.
The animals were not "other." They were relatives, family, companions, teachers, and guides. Raven brought warnings. Wolf taught the way of the family. Bear showed the path inward. There were no sharp lines between species. Shapes could shift. A human might take the wings of an eagle, or the sharp senses of a fox, just as easily as drawing breath. This was the old agreement: to live in harmony, in reciprocity with all of creation.
But change crept in. The wanderers set down roots. Villages rose where once there had been only campfires. They fenced the Earth into neat rectangles, planting seeds in straight lines. The hunt gave way to the field, and the people's path no longer followed the elk or the geese. This began the Great Forgetting.
The Earth, which was once revered as Mother, became a resource to be exploited and depleted. The songs of the animals faded into silence, and the voices of wind and water grew dim beneath the scrape of the plows. The stories and ceremonies that bound people to Earth and Sky fell away, replaced by the endless clamber of building and storing, planting and plowing. Our dynamic, living, breathing world was flattened into something ordinary, merely "useful", to be bought and sold.
Yet, beneath the noise and the hurry, a longing remained. The people felt an emptiness they could not put into words. They chased material possessions, knowledge, and power, hoping to fill the emptiness. All of it was only a shadow of the deep connection their ancestors had lived.
When the Great Forgetting crossed the water to Turtle Island, it came not as a slow shift but as a storm. Native peoples, who had walked in balance for untold generations, faced a force determined to sever them from their ways. Yet they carried a medicine strong enough to endure, four sacred gifts of connection: the Canupa, the drum, the sweat lodge, and the wilderness fast.
These gifts were not artifacts of a lost age. They were living bridges back to the center. The wilderness fast, especially, held the power to strip away distraction, to send a seeker into the raw quiet of the land, alone. There, without food, without shelter beyond what the Creator gave, a person might once again hear the speech of stones and the counsel of the wind.
The Great Forgetting is not the end of the story. The Earth remembers. The animals remember. The ancestors are waiting for us to remember that the land is not ours to own, but ours to love; that we are part of its body, just as the rivers, trees, and clouds are.
When we take up the Four Sacred Gifts and return to the center, we begin to heal the broken parts of ourselves. We awaken the wisdom sleeping beneath our skin. We step back into the old agreement, into the sacred dance where every footfall is a prayer and every breath is an offering.
In The Old Way is here for that return—to guide those who are ready to walk back into the conversation with the Earth, to stand once more in the circle of all beings, and to remember what was never truly lost.
