Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Grandmothers know we are rooted and ringed with memory by Danica Anderson



Blood & Honey - Herstory Grandmothers’ Poetic Colleges and the kolo, the circle and to dance, trace the origins and the roots of our being. Grandmothers know we are rooted and ringed with memory just like the sister kinship of the trees.

The kolo danced or activated within the circle has the memories of the past with ancient grandmother’s memories.

If former Yugoslavs and Slavs felt their m...atrilineal heritage and felt the essence of the archetypal energies of the kolo, the circle or to dance it would bring them face to face with ‘matter’ –earth our the Goddess. With the excavation of the kolo we are peering at a reflection in the mirror through the kolo of our first mother.

In recent study revelations about how grandmothers hold a systems of wisdom is coming to light in the scientific field.

Already warped by the androcentric world, grandmothers have been regulated to the sidelines and to menial duties at best. With their stooped postures and sitting positions, these grandmothers observe the world at sub-atomic particle levels.

South Slavic stari Babas-Grandmothers- knew the outcomes of a ‘rat study’ where it was documented how rats can “grasp the relationship between seeing and doing," and how these influence events differently.” Despite many of the South Slavic Grandmothers lack of any formal education, their wisdom in using the kolo- the dance or the circle- is a form of seeing and doing. ‘Seeing and doing’ is the ancient wisdom of how to model native knowing through observation of small acts.

Seeing & doing once honored is translated with embodying acts such as the kolo or being in a circle. The same acts of observing and doing in the kolo transcends time into the moment manifesting eternal communities and peaceful families.

The research of Anna Ilieva and Anna Shturbanova, Senior Research Fellow/Scientific Researcher, institute of Folklore, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria, experiences the virginal female wisdom and truth. “Our research is based on material that, until the mid-twentieth century, was still in existence as a festive and ritual system and that is still alive in the memory of our informants. We can trace the stability of Old European Symbolism even in such a ‘living,’ immaterial cultural forms the folk dance, which developed in Old Europe and has continued to exist in patriarchal agrarian society.”

With observation comes the recording of memories both ancient and modern. Grandmothers are experts at mental time travel with their memories. Endel Tulving researched how humans can recreate the brain pattern activity when an event first occurred and discovered that most of us do this time traveling before the memory is activated to the parts of the brain where we can discuss it.

If you can share your present moment, it is an image of the future according to the Bosnian grandmothers. I often ask my elder wise women what is the future in their present moment.

I ask you to share what is the future told in your present moment, now in your life?


By Danica Anderson, shared with permission

Be sure to check out Danica's Blood & Honey Icons: Biosemiotics & Bioculinary page on Facebook and The Kolo website.

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