Measure of Worthiness
“Whales watched people from their own country, or nunat. ‘Those who feed the poor and the old, we’ll go to,’ the whales would say. ‘We’ll give them our meat.’ They made this choice based on the moral worth and ceremonial care of the people who ate them”
In the old ways, before living beings were commodified and reduced merely to their dollar value, worth and worthiness were inseparable. In the lands of the far north, before a whale could be killed, among Yupik and other Indigenous hunters, certain protocols were observed: Each whaling family made its offerings of codfish, roseroots, and walrus fat in ceremonial feasts where they ate whale from the last season... Women entered into solitary rituals to speak with the spirits of the whales and beseech them to give themselves, so that the humans might survive. Offerings of meat were made to the sea, accompanied by songs of gratitude.
When at last a whale delivered herself to the community, the distribution of the whale's body occurred according to a strict generosity: Those with no share, the old and the unlucky and the widowed, were the responsibility of successful families, who gave of their whale as the whale had given itself - an act both practical and reverent, as it made a hunter and his wife worthy of leadership among people and worthy of future whale deaths.
When did the idea - the requirement - of worthiness fade from the criteria for leadership? When did leadership lose its strict accountability to both the human and other-than-human communities? When did the accumulation rather than the distribution of wealth become the measure of worthiness to lead? More importantly, how do we wrestle ourselves back to that prior standard? As in the potlatch traditions of Indigenous people in what is now the U.S., the people with the most to give were the ones that gave the most. The first priority of leaders was to care for the vulnerable and to protect the natural world.
In the far north, in the 1800's, whale oil replaced beef and pork tallow to illuminate homes and run factories in Europe, Canada and the United States. Baleen corsets became essential fashion accessories for women desiring tiny waistlines. As with colonial incursions elsewhere, native populations fell to infectious diseases (syphilis, measles, scarlet fever, smallpox) then to alcohol and violence. Profit and violence are paired. That should tell us something about how to untangle the spirals of addiction and crime that money has not - and cannot, cure.
The ceremonial honoring of the animate natural world that we modern westerners deride as superstition once served to protect an intactness that translated into a flourishing bounty willing to share itself with humans. In our current predicament, which worldview is most ludicrous: offering fresh water to the skull of a recently killed bowhead whale before sliding the massive bone back into the sea so that it can transform into a whale again, or slaughtering whales to the brink of extinction, discarding thousands of tons of usable flesh, skin, organs and bones, and destroying the people who revered and depended on them?
This past summer, I planted a forest of sunflowers in a newly created garden. The sunflowers' long roots opened and nourished the compacted soil and fed the bees. And now, as I harvest the sunflower seeds, I am astonished by the way each plant ensures its own survival - and ours, by giving thousands upon thousands more seeds than the one that gave it life. This is generosity. This is beauty. This is miracle.
In traditional Liberia, as in other Indigenous cultures, leaders were identified as those that the people could turn to in times of need (real need, not the need for influence or favors). I think about this often, especially as I read the relentless headlines of the petty madness that has overtaken us. What might happen if the wealthiest individuals and companies pivoted their profit margins to return the majority of that wealth to the Earth, and to those in need? What if the national conversation that dominated the headlines were of how best to accomplish this? Of individuals and businesses vying to give more, rather than less? What if, as the I Ching advises, we were to 'give with both hands', to each other, and Earth?
In Liberia, we once joined village communities in making offerings to the elephants, who are considered harbingers of peace. When, inexplicably, a short time later, actual elephants came to those villages, the elders immediately went into the forest and read aloud certain passages from the Koran, so that the elephants and the trees might hear holy words of gratitude. I have learned over the years to find ways of doing likewise: I stand on the cliff above the ocean and sing to the whales. I thank the plants in my garden for their nourishment and bounty. More and more of us do likewise, though still far too few.
It is unnerving that today, in late October, it is over eighty degrees here on the north coast, when it should be twenty or thirty degrees cooler, and raining. The question that haunts me is the always the same: What to do? Something more immediate, even, than installing solar panels and planting trees. I imagine multitudes of us stopping to give thanks. To apologize. To promise to do better, as we send forth words of devotion on wings of poetry, song and prayer. To offer nourishment back to the Earth in order to feed Her complex abundance. I see photos rippling across the internet of shores and fields and forests lined with grateful humans, caressing, thanking, singing to the overheated still-bountiful Earth. Would that be so ridiculous? Or might it actually add a small stitch to the embroidery of repair?
