CULTURE AS RADICAL IMAGINATION
A couple of days I wondered about why stepping outside of your culture into another can be so alive and why stepping back in can seem constricting and flat. When your own culture becomes fundamental, the only proper one, you don’t notice that it is only one culture among many possibilities. When you step out you can actually see your own culture as the amazing, odd, idiosyncratic, unique, precious, temporary creation that it is. It isn’t fundamental or universal, it is a magical set of meaningful conventions created by people who lived before you and passed along to you, a culture that has split off from other cultures and resulted in the amazing, unique culture that you live within, one culture among thousands.
I suddenly think of the sacred Pipal tree on the bank of the Ganges at Assi Ghat in Varanasi across from the Sahi River Guest House where I have stayed with Susie, Todd and Kathe.
On certain holy days women come and circle the tree in a clockwise direction praying for fertility, praying to be able to concieve a child. They leave offerings of leaves and flowers, water or milk in front of the images of the gods, particularly the Shiva lingams which represent in a stylized way both the male and female sexual organs.
From the perspective of a Swannanoan this all seems as odd and fantastic as could be, even nuts, and yet the images of the various female and male gods are charged with the power of the sacred and their presence gives intensity and meaning to the lives of these Hindu women. You can see it in their reverence and concentration. How could these Hindu women have arrived at such a different way of worshipping? How could Swannanoans have arrived at worshipping Jesus and his virgin birth and death on the cross and other Biblical stories, which must seem equally odd to these women? How could both ways of worshipping be equally charged with life creating intensity? What miraculous human drive is functioning in both places, what wild discoveries of the imagination? Who are we as humans that we can veer off in such different directions, all charged with meaning? Look closely at these images and wonder.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 