Coming Home to the Trees Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Glossary

  COMING HOME TO THE TREES

  Travelling with the Gypsy Spirit of the Past

  Patrick Jasper Lee

  Published by Ravine Press 2014

  www.ravinepress.com

  ISBN 978 1 909882 11 9

  © Patrick Jasper Lee 2014

  www.patrickjasperlee.com

  Patrick Jasper Lee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  To the trees and all they continue to give to us

  Introduction

  I walk into the glade of an ancient wood. I am taking you with me. We’re about to embark on a journey to discover a spirit of the ancient world: the nomadic Gypsy of the past.

  Night falls as we reach the spot where we will light our fire. The air is cooling and the trees are silhouetted around us in the darkening woodland glade. Here as we dik ta shoon (watch and listen), we will be asking some questions.

  Can the nomadic Gypsy spirit of old give us what we don’t have in our modern lives: wellbeing, togetherness, spiritual and emotional security, creativity and understanding? Can we use the past to heal our future?

  We will need to lure this ancient spirit from her hiding place so that we can ask her to help us, because the physical world masks any remnants of how she used to be. We want to uncover her power, her mystery, her dreams and her charms, and step back into that enchanting place she has long occupied.

  As an indigenous Chovihano (medicine man), and a keen researcher on Romani Gypsy folklore and myth, I see that our need to rekindle elements of the ancient world is more important to us than ever. I see that if we do not return to thinking as our ancient cousins did, we may find our personal lives affected in a permanently negative way as our beloved Earth finally buckles under the strain of man’s ignorance. The nomadic Gypsy spirit of old, together with her connection with the otherworld, may hold a valuable key to our inner survival.

  So as I toss a little whisky into the flames of our new fire, I perform a ‘thank you’ ritual to the spirit of Yag (fire), as we nomadic Gypsies would have done long ago. I know how much he assists us. As his flames rise up to dance, he gives us a sign of his protection, and we know then that we are in safe hands.

  We hear the sounds of the modern world around us: cars on the road nearby, planes droning overhead, sounds that are all too familiar but which have no place in the ancient world we’re seeking; be reassured that we will be taken beyond these things. We may hear an owl hoot or a fox bark or glimpse the stars through the boughs of trees. And if it grows so still that we should hear the whispering of the trees themselves, their deep dark voices busy with their ancient songs, we’ll know that we’ve struck an ancient chord, for these voices will finally be connecting us with that enigmatic, haunting world in the woodlands of long ago.

  As we ask everything within the natural world to bless our journey—the fire, the wind, the spirits of the otherworld, and most of all, the trees—I will begin the ancient rhythm on my vastengri, or tambourine; I will shake the bells of my ran as we dive into this old, old world, and remember. We step onto a bridge to the otherworld in a way we’ve never done before.

  So take my hand. Take it and hold on tight. We’re going somewhere we haven’t been before. We hope to take a journey we’re not easily going to forget, as we prepare to go home.

  Chapter One

  THE GYPSY’S WEIRD AND WONDERFULLY OUTLANDISH WORLD

  Coming Home to the Chovihano

  ‘Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.’

  Albert Einstein: The Evolution of Physics

  As we sit in the trees, hoping and praying that the ancient world will open up for us, we are required to put down our usual thoughts. We have to feel something of a free spirit coming on inside us: liberated, passionate, rebellious and somehow outlandish. We have to unlock those shackles of the mundane modern world as we ask: ‘Please Gypsy spirit, help us to find you—if it be your will.’

  ___________________

  I love the above quote of Einstein’s. It says everything about our physical world: that we freely create aspects of it, every single day. Are we its victims? Or have we always had an unconscious hand in creating it in some way?

  This is a question I begin our journey with and urge people to ask, because we’re going to be questioning many aspects of life according to Gypsy lore as we make this journey.

  The Gypsy spirit, having lived alongside numerous religious, shamanic and spiritual ways of thinking over aeons of time, still creates a strong image in our minds, as much today as at any time in the past. Yet, because we forget how new our civilized physical world is—as old as the sixteenth century, according to some experts—we also forget the impact the Gypsy had as she wove her way through the many thousands of years behind us. She is a survivor, and a remarkable one for having endured for so long across many parts of the world.

  We can rarely discover much about the deeper Gypsy past when time—because there has literally been so much of it—becomes so crazily incomprehensible. The social, emotional and domestic elements of centuries past become lost to us when they’ve been whitewashed with gaujo (non-Gypsy) history books and their events and dates, something that sadly strips us of important community information.

  A chief feature within this is the fact that otherworldly life is now largely extinct, having taken a severe battering and therefore becoming, easily, the biggest victim of time. There is no question that humans committed the greatest crime when they chose to hold the physical world above the otherworld, meaning that this once enchanting and distant magical world now lies subdued and silent on the very edges of society, like some sunken ship with its precious cargo now forgotten as it lies decaying on the ocean bed.

  As people busy themselves with their modern lives and the trappings of technology, as they draw their curtains against the stars at night, and ward off the seasons with their commercialized celebrations during the day, they turn their faces away from that magnificent dimension that used to be fundamental to life.

  Where has the otherworld gone? Why do neighbours no longer gossip over the garden fence about the magical beings that once caused havoc in their kitchens? Why do we no longer become suspicious of the man who walks the street in a strange fashion due to having been attacked by beings in the otherworld? We would have talked like this just two to three hundred years ago.

  Do we no longer think and talk like this because we’ve overcome the ignorance we had further back in history? Are we too intelligent now for any of this? We no longer perform little rituals, like counting, turning around a designated number of times and uttering incantations when we think we might be inviting bad luck. Is this because we think we don’t need to exhibit such ‘silly’ behaviour in these sophisticated times? Why do I, as a Chovihano, no longer receive people’s requests to help reverse spells, curses, bad luck, or spirit influences, as happened in woodlands not so long ago? Things have changed, in a most drastic way, and we are obliged to take this change s
eriously.

  If we take a closer look we might realize that we were not indulging in such modes of thinking for nothing in earlier times, and we might also discover that this way of thinking wasn’t only consigned to certain or special people. These were the experiences of the ordinary folk, those who might talk about spirits of the otherworld as easily as one might talk about the washing left out on the line when it’s raining, and the otherworld they were speaking of was often heavily guarded by the nomadic Gypsies in their woodland homes. In fact, without the Gypsies, it is my belief that the relationship between the ordinary folk and their spirits would not have lasted as long as it did.

  Now, at dawn and twilight, when spirits have been at their thickest, gathering like wispy patches of mist in the air, there are no longer the recognizable stirrings within the trees as heavily laden mortals of the modern world tread wearily around their insular worlds. And so mortality has come to symbolize a refusal to engage with the most endearing, dreadful and challenging of influences, that which has been with us since the dawn of time: the spirits.

  From the smallest, craftiest woodland creatures to the tallest, idlest giants, we considered them all to be natural elements of mortal life. Now they are consigned to obsolescence and lie abandoned, like outdated mannequins in the corner of a disused warehouse or relics in the cellar of a dusty old museum. And we are at a loss if ever trying to recreate them, with little or nothing to go on regarding how they used to be.

  Consequently, there are no celebrations of the otherworld, no laughing at it, no crying over it, no loving it, no fearing it; there are no songs and dances around bright campfires about what our fortune might hold, or weeping at what our misfortune might threaten to bring us. We no longer engage with the highs and lows of otherworldly emotional life; we fear the bad while urgently courting the good, hardly knowing what good and bad mean anymore, as we work to remain pure at all costs. More importantly, we no longer fear the valuable lessons the otherworld might bring us, and we do not know what might happen should we choose to ignore it on a permanent basis. And that thought alone separates us from our ancient cousins: the common people, and the Gypsy people, those who would have lived in fear of what the otherworld might do to them should they exclude it in any way from their daily lives.

  So as our televisions blast their noise into the air, and as our computers whizz around the world when we are online, as we eat our breakfasts or dinners according to where we are on the globe, and as we throw our parties and busy ourselves with our hobbies and physical lives, the trees wait, and wait, and continue to wait, waiting for us to return home—for that is all they can do.

  The trees are obliged to hold their secrets, no longer able to share what they know with us—and who knows if they want to share what they know with us? They may never be able to reveal their age-old secrets to mortals who do not wish to play their part in the story called ‘life’. Sometimes it seems that humans are denied access to those ancient secrets because they’ve turned their backs on the trees for a little too long.

  Have humans now manoeuvred themselves into a position where they will have to earn the right to rediscover such natural wealth? Is the painfully slow death of the planet we call ‘Earth’, which we all once knew, at all reversible?

  In my first book We Borrow the Earth: An Intimate Portrait of the Gypsy Folk Tradition and Culture (Thorsons 2000/Ravine Press 2013), I talk about the cultural history of the Romani Gypsies as they wove their way across Asia and into the new Western world that was fast developing around them, and how this journey affected their language, traditions, myth and culture. I talk a good deal about the plight of the natural world. I believe the natural world holds a more significant key to our understanding of life today.

  I see that if we do not turn back to the natural world for our answers, with the aim of learning how to relate to her as we once did, we risk sacrificing something fundamental to our existence within the human mind/body/spirit make-up. This also means that we may find ourselves with an unalterable fate: that as humans we may deprive ourselves of nature, entirely, and we may never know her as she used to be. This may sound far-fetched, but is it?

  If we’re no longer relating to the trees as we used to, should we expect the trees to adapt to us as we are now, considering the changes we have been responsible for instigating, changes which attempt to transform the fabric of life, and which have happened only in the last few hundred years? Now we do not, cannot, for the life of us, relate to nature in the way we used to do.

  ‘That is a lovely tree,’ I may remark to someone.

  ‘What tree?’ they might reply.

  ‘The one that is just across the road from where you live.’

  ‘Oh, that one. I don’t usually take any notice of it.’

  People either disregard trees, generally, or else they cut them down due to believing they look ‘a bit messy’—as one neighbour of ours declared recently.

  Such actions and comments are commonplace today where nature is concerned, and such hurts many of us who remain sensitive to the plight of nature. Trees have ultimately become ‘things’, toys to be played with or ornaments to arrange as we please. And the saddest part is that we do not think that our attitude matters. Perhaps we feel that we know what nature is, really, beneath our mundane conversations and our shallow thinking, and don’t need to remind ourselves to pay homage to the natural world. But do we know what nature is?

  We are inclined to walk in woods and forests as a leisurely pastime. We ‘go out’ for a walk, inferring that we leave our place of safety in our homes and step out into some kind of unreliable external world, because we feel that anything could happen out there. We have come to fear woods and trees in a way we never did before, and associate remote patches of woodland with danger, of the human kind rather than the tree kind. And when bodies are discovered hidden in woodlands, we can perhaps understand why.

  I see that we walk in the trees, but do we, really? I see that we think we know trees, but do we, really? Are we relating to and engaging with these ancient beings as they used to be? In a world where we now relate to a tree as if we are spectators, we find ourselves relating to elements of our environment which we are obliged to manage. And we are thus left with a story about trees and woodlands that contains many gaping holes.

  Gypsies consider trees to be the oldest relations we humans have. It is a relationship built on humility and trust, a relationship that is considered to be crucial to survival. Like many tribal people, the Gypsies of old would never dare interfere with or undermine that relationship for fear of what might occur: negative circumstances, from which escape might prove difficult. Gypsies of old feel they will not be kept safe and sound under natural law if they betray that trust.

  This was an extremely healthy fear for communities in general to have, not least because it kept us from stripping the world of trees and contributing to the slow and painful death of the earth that we’re experiencing now. Earth, that place we should call home, is sadly not a home that is treasured anymore.

  Humans cannot help playing with fire. Removing ourselves from the dream landscape known as the otherworld, which was always so richly steeped in folklore and myth, and which went hand in hand with our relationship with the trees, is seemingly an unconscious act, and a dangerous one. Those of us who know how dangerous it is to take ourselves to the edge of extinction—like we’re all playing some kind of computer game—feel powerless, because we know that we cannot turn our backs on those elements of life which we need, and which the Gypsy always cherished.

  Stripping forests of trees is probably the best example of that ‘edge’. As one of the few indigenous Chovihanos remaining in the Western world, I know, as any other indigenous medicine man knows, that I am not looking at a situation that involves choice anymore. Basically, there is no choice. We cannot choose to pick up and put down the natural world and the otherworld as we please. It just doesn’t work like that.

  We’re obliged to come
clean and admit that we got it wrong, and then do our very best to put matters right as much as we can. We’re long overdue for an otherworldly makeover. We have a dire need to be saved from Einstein’s ‘external world’.

  Is there hope? We need to know that even in the face of it all falling down there will still be a place for those of us who understand all of this, a ‘place’ in a spiritual, emotional and ancient context, a kind of safe house where we’ll feel we can belong.

  Here, in that safe house, when faced with finding ways of holding on to the last remnants of what we once had—our otherworldly common sense and our otherworldly mind, perhaps even our otherworldly sanity—we might find that we can reconnect with that old workable dreamscape, or the otherworld, which some label ‘fantasy’. But this fantasy might well bring us an unexpected balanced mental health and a little peace of mind in our troubled world, should we only choose to go on an adventure to rediscover it in a structured way.

  You need to take the hand of the Chovihano, and you need to trust, simply because there is no choice and this is what we now need to do. Take my hand and hold on tight as we reconnect with the spirits of old who will provide us with some answers. We’ll need to learn how to relate to these spirits in an original way if we are to make this work.

  In modern times, understanding how experience and influence constitute those elements we used to call ‘spirits’, meaning we cannot always perceive spirits in their original sense these days, is essential. Our modern ideas tend to get in the way, but we can work out how we might stretch our imaginations a little to experience spirits in a realistic way, in accordance with Gypsy lore of old.

  We’ll be required to undergo a transformation. This will help us to change the way we think. We will be charged with the task of changing from the rigid modern individual to the graceful, dreamy and outlandish individual—which can actually be quite exciting to do. It means that we are also charged with the task of developing some new but old habits: seeing the world with eyes and ears we may not have used in a very long time.