Where Digital Meets the Inidgenous

Indigenous societies hold wisdom borne from a time where the split between body and spirit, nature and culture or any of the many dualities who we moderns hold in the fabric of our psyche. As such, there is a rapidly becoming almost mainstream desire (and with that a “market”) to re-apprehend and integrate these earth-based technologies, ranging from the most primitive to highly esoteric. The Grandmothers’ ways are essential in restoring the sacred balance at this time on the earth.
Yet nostalgia is not an answer. We are in the paradigm shift that is wrought in part by the digital realm. But navigating that realm! How many middle aged women do I know who engage in a time honored exchange; help from young men with setting up their high speed Internet for dinner and some job advice. For many women my age (early fifties) especially those of us who are more intuitive than linear thinkers, the computers’ language, encoding syntax and expansive uncharted architecture can leave one feeling like they have stepped into a parallel universe, foreign exotic, unnerving. I have spent many a moment in front of the computer feeling vaguely caught and seen by cybergod’s blinking screen face, sure it can see my neurotic failures. Hence its power and possibility . But we know the Internet is a whole new arena where commerce and community meet so that, like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the act of engaging its viral capacity changes the essential nature of the market network. Harnessing the Internet’s utility as integral to the planning of a project will generate both its structure and the market co-terminously...

This, too, even for those for whom the Internet has become a necessary tool and resource but less a destination, the technologies meet, the spark of dynamic tension synthesizing science and spirit into “techne”, an applied practice, internally balanced with indigenous tools for accessing and discerning the parallel realms of the spirit while expanding the true commerce vehicle for its manifestation.