In 1997, I traveled to Zimbabwe to meet a Nganga, that is a medicine person, a healer, who had been called to a very different life than he had ever imagined. He, like many young men, engaged in actions against apartheid and then when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, he became head of education for the police force which was the domestic army. Augustine Kandemwa had no interest in being a Nganga but the spirits had other ideas and eventually Mandaza took back his original name, which had been anglicized, left the army and that life, and became a formidable healer. His story was like my own story. We had each been walking one path, which was conventional, and then we were walking another. And both of us found ourselves guiding others to recognize their soul calling and find the paths they were called to walk.
Mandaza called his healing community Daré, which means “Council” in Shona.
Mandaza gave me one of his Daré rooms while I was there. It wasn’t the Daré Council room where we met for Lodge or to drum, or where he, and then we, met those who came for healing. It was a small rondavel with branches as walls holding up a thatched room. There were herbs hanging from the ceiling and glass jars with medicines, and ritual objects that he used for healing. It was where he meditated and I believe, sat in council with the spirits. You cannot be a healer unless you are in on-going and intimate relationships with the universe’s wisdom carriers. They taught him, they guided him, and worked through him on behalf of the community. Different people have different relationships with the spirits, and his was evident when he was called to heal, while his wife, Simakuhle, a dreamer, advised Mandaza which plants or herbs he would need next. We can say they are a team but it is so much more than that. Actually, healing is the center of their lives and the life of everyone who comes to be with them, which consisted then of about 12 children, other relatives, neighbors, people seeking healing and elders and healers. That was the first thing that I noticed when I was there. The secular, economic, commercial and media preoccupations of American life whether at work or at home were submerged in the interests of healing and alignment with spiritual concerns. I returned from Zimbabwe wondering what it would mean for me and the community to live, in this country, as healing presences? How could professional concerns and spiritual concerns meld so that every word and action is ethical and heartfelt? I had long had the hope of being a village healer, which had meant gathering a village, and here I was in a home that was, in fact, a village.
In 1999, after another visit which had, as many of you know, also included the first of many heart meetings and exchanges with the Elephant we call the Ambassador and his herd, we were inspired to create a Daré, which has met since on the first Sunday after the New Moon. One of the circles I was teaching had formed in response to my question: What will it mean to be a healer in the 21st century? The participants in that circle wanted to see if it was possible for Daré to exist in the U.S. (and later in Canada).
Daré is a free gathering of the community on behalf of healing, peacebuilding and reconnection to the natural world. Since April 1999, Daré had been meeting on the land at the edge of Topanga State Park on the first Sunday after the new moon. Since April 2020, it is meeting on Zoom.
In 1958, I had visited a physician friend who was working among the Diné on the Four Corners Reservation. He told me with no little irony and humor that while the people seemed to come to him when suffering some serious illness, they didn’t believe Western medicine would heal them. What they needed after his treatments or stays in the hospital was to be seen by a medicine person or to have the appropriate Sing Ceremony, which would include the gathering of the entire community. There was nothing he would ever do that would gain the respect and authority of the Indigenous healing. As a physician, he was trying to fathom the understanding that was central to the Sing ceremonies that simultaneously restore health, harmony and balance to the individual and the cosmos. The healing of the individual and the world are inextricably linked.
Accordingly, when we considered creating Daré, we put a question at the center: What is healing? We knew it would take years to gain some understanding and that the teaching would come from learning what we could from Indigenous traditions, from the spirits, and from watching the animals and so would emerge from the natural world, from our own experiences and what happened among us as we pursued these questions. We knew from our own experiences, previously not quite acknowledged, and from what was revealed in Zimbabwe as well as from other Indigenous traditions that dreams, stories, drumming, and music are central. And so, we had to create circles with these explorations at the core. When wind and drought permitted, and when we met on the land, we sat around a fire. Ceremonies occurred spontaneously to meet the questions and concerns. We offered music Daré, focusing musical tones, singing into the areas of suffering, jamming with each other, the afflicted one, the illness and the spirits. We actively carried these questions: What is healing? How and why does community heal? Can a village exist among people who may live far from each other and only meet once a month?
We continue to ask the questions, even now, 23 years later. Even now, when we, since the Covid-19 pandemic, no longer meet on the land but on Zoom. And so the questions are modified: What is healing when we can’t be together in community? What is community when we can’t be together but on Zoom? Can a village exist on Zoom? Can we live inter-dependent lives? Can we walk the different paths, the pathless paths, we are each called to walk in this country at this time? What is the relationship between the afflictions we feel as individuals and the suffering of the Earth and the non-human beings? Can our healing provide Earth healing? Will we heal if the Earth heals?
When we started meeting online during Covid, Daré changed dramatically because it could now include people from everywhere on the planet but could not so easily include the beings of the natural world and the elementals, and the questions were modified: What is the nature of a village when it is international? How do we care for each other and interconnect over time and space?
Daré is a circle, a Council, in which everyone is respected. Actually, we say, each person who comes through the Turquoise gate, literally or virtually, especially those we haven’t met before, might be an angel.
When LX came to Daré for the first time, it was mentioned that whoever came through the gate might be an angel. We didn’t know that he had just come out of federal prison. We didn’t know that he had spent his time in prison contemplating his life and how he would like to live it. We just knew that he, like everyone, every being, who had walked in, might really be an angel and it was our task to discover this essence as it would bless all our lives to know this. A miracle happened; LX was prompted to recognize the angel in himself and so his life changed in unimaginable ways to meet what being an angel was for him. Or, better said, he changed how he was living according to his new vision. He began to notice signs. In the first months, he was surprised by Ravens gathering around him though he lived where wildlife is not prominent. It became obvious to anyone in the area that he was companioned by them. They seemed to have sought him out, to be communicating with him. He learned to read the meanings in their gathering. The younger boys in the neighborhood were curious. The conversations on the street corner changed.
Daré offers each of us the opportunity to change our lives in ways that matter to us individually, but as importantly, matter to the world. We are working to try to understand what ‘we’ means and its global implications. What makes Daré so unique and, I believe, important, is that it provides a circle in which people who may be strangers to each other and come from very different traditions can honestly address the most essential and difficult questions of our time.
SR wore a kafya to express his alliance with the Palestinian cause. When BZ, the daughter of holocaust survivors saw it, she began shaking. We had to create circumstances that assured each one that they were both welcome and respected, and they had to meet each other in the same way. Ultimately, we created several small councils with people SR and BZ both trusted. They met several times listening from the heart. We asked each to tell the other the essentials needed to know about the other’s life. There could be no interruptions, no crosstalk, no disagreements, no attacks, while the other spoke. The task was to open toward appreciating each other and their histories. At the end of the sessions, SR took off his kafya and gave it to BZ. She returned to the next Daré with a a photo of the kafya as an altar cloth.
Daré provides the opportunity for souls to meet in intimate and trustworthy exchanges. It is a place where everyone must feel safe. Anyone who comes in through the Turquoise gate and wants to be a member of Daré is a member of Daré—no applications, no dues, no fees, no requirements except being present and respectful of everyone attending. Everyone is welcome to come to Daré, to participate in Council, to bring their dreams. There is only one restriction—one cannot bring weapons into the circle.
MZ carried radical hope that our society would change drastically and the U.S. would give up its imperial actions. He had devoted his life to social and political change. He had to trust us, to feel safe, before he could abandon his pistol. I insisted it had to be locked in the car; he objected. We had an eye to eye or a heart to heart. He needed to be safe and so we needed to protect him and be trustworthy; in order for him to give up his gun, we needed to convince him that he was safe. I agreed to be scrutinized in all ways so he could trust the community. His feeling of safety became essential to us. Ultimately, I could take his word that he had locked the gun away. Finally, we had worked it out with words and without words.
Daré is also the place where we can contemplate our own complicity in climate dissolution, extinction and the plagues of violence and social and political chaos. We can and do inquire where we are each responsible. How can these global conditions be reversed? What paths are we called to walk to bring healing to this broken world?
I am speaking of all this because Daré went through another transformation which concludes this essay. The Kerulos Center for Nonviolence, created by Dr. Gay Bradshaw, sponsors Living One, a free webinar series where presenters from around the world share their vision of a future in which all of Earth’s beings live as one community in peace, dignity and freedom. Living One asks the question: We know what’s wrong, but what does “right” look like? Gay’s remarkable work focuses on animal trauma recovery and wildlife self-determination. Identifying Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in non-human animals beginning with free living Elephants, led her to founding the field of trans-species psychology. She is the author of, among others, Elephants on the Edge, Carnivore Minds and Talking with Bears: Conversations with Charlie Russell.
I had the great honor of appearing on Living One for the second time this year to discuss, in Kerulos’ words, “healing paths for Earth’s renewal.” Entirely engaged with questions of restoration, concerned with the myriad lives and cultures we hope to protect, restore, inspire, we were examining the territory where non-humans and humans can meet in true dialogue and interconnection. Among the listeners were many members of the Daré community. Well, then, it was inevitable that they would participate. That they would tell dreams and stories. What has become a familiar Zoom form—a formal exploration of a subject followed by questions from the audience—became a Council, a Daré conversation, a moment when the listeners stepped through the virtual Turquoise gate and offered their understanding, deep questioning and vision.
This coming together of two aligned but distinct communities will meet beginning 2023, four times a year.
Driving home from a doctor’s appointment, yesterday I listened to a study on NPR describing the loneliness of men since Covid-19 for friendship with each other. One man spoke of isolating for years by watching trivial televisions shows but added he is now joining affinity groups. At first, he said, the conversations are shallow, but that sharing common interests might lead to bonding.
At home, I find a note from my associate, Annie Licata, who writes, “You know, I have been sitting with a few questions after we talked about the implications of Elon Musk buying Twitter. Now, where can like-minded people go to gather online without becoming commodified? Where is it safe to go online and not have your information sold? Where can we exist online? Can online communities be real communities?”
We had just participated in the unlikely event of a Webinar spontaneously creating bonding between communities. I remember Gay Bradshaw’s words Sunday morning, speaking of trans-species psychology, saying we had to understand that the Elephant is us and we are Elephant. We are both deeply aware of the great loneliness of the contemporary human species for the beings of the natural world from whom we have separated. Daré, Living One, offer ways toward true connection. Johanna Mytkos’ dream of becoming a Wolf (told during the Webinar) resounds in my mind as I consider the fate of P-22, the lonely and aging Mountain Lion who crossed two freeways to make his home in Griffith Park, now ailing, whose fate, sanctuary or euthanasia, at the hands of humans is uncertain.
If we were able to have Daré on the land again at this edge of Topanga State Park, you might come upon Mountain Lion scat or an occasional sighting of our Cougar neighbors, or very shy Bobcats, or hear the community song of Coyotes or the nightly conversation of Owls. And, you might encounter the same at the Kerulos Hare and Tortoise Sanctuary and Wildlife Center. Saving our lives, means saving all life, saving life itself.
ReVisioning, inter-connection, re-uniting with the natural world offer ways toward restoration. As we learn, together, how to live our lives in ways that foster reconnection instead of extinction, might we also be easing the great pain of human life in these times?
Please join us for Daré. If you’re not on our mailing list, leave a comment below and we will add you so you can receive the monthly invitation. Or visit Deenametzger.net to retrieve the Zoom link.
And to receive announcements of the Living One / Daré Webinars, visit Kerulos.org.
Walk through the Turquoise gate!
A story that I told at the Living One Webinar linked to at the end of this essay was not quite accurate. The exact version was far more interesting than my rendition. I am saving this space for Marc Weigensberg to post the true story.
Please do add me to your mailing list for Daré.
Thank you for all this.
Sonia