A Map to the Next World

Part II: Carrying Fire to the Next Tribal Town

Woman Admires the Grand Tetons from a Field of Wildflowers 
[Photo]. Lissette Ramirez

This is Part Two of a 20-plus-part essay on making and following a map that might get us to the Next World, and on what it means to leave one world and eventually reach another, and on what it’s like for a community or a society to be between worlds, perhaps walking that long road for several generations. Think of this as a draft of an essay I’ll be working on for a while — or eventually a short book. Let me know what resonates with you. To fully understand or contextualize today’s part, you might want to read, reread, or at least scan part one. If so, click here.

My Substack postings will appear more or less at the same time on our Animas Valley Institute weekly “Soulcraft Musings,” which you can access here. I encourage you to join this free Animas list because our Musings include the voices of other Animas guides as well as soul-and-nature-oriented verse from familiar poets and others who may be new to you. Also, joining our list will provide you free access to several previous years of Soulcraft Musings, to upcoming Animas program information, and links to The Animas Commons, our online community with frequent events you can drop in on.

We, of course, will not be the first humans who left one world for another. I’m not alluding to the harrowing enough geographical migrations of the long or recent past — from one bioregion, island, or continent to another (for instance, the pre-historic crossing of the Bering Land Bridge; the Polynesian settlement of remote Oceania; or the transatlantic slave trade, a forced migration of approximately 12 million Africans to the Americas) — but, rather, collective relocations from one consciousness, worldview, mythos, or umwelt to another. Some inter-world migrations have, of course, been both geographical and gnostic, such as the Israelite Exodus (the multi-generational journey of the enslaved Hebrews from Egypt, across the Red Sea, through the desert, and into the land of Canaan, which was also, whatever we might think of it now, an archetypal migration of consciousness from slavery and idolatry to freedom and covenantal religion, a profound psychological shift from being subjects of Pharoah to being “people of God”); the Indo-Aryan Migration, circa 1500 BCE (from the central Asian steppes southward to the Indus and Ganges valleys, which was also a fundamental transformation of culture and worldview, from nomadic pastoralism to an agrarian lifestyle with a new Vedic cosmology); and the Hopi and Diné migrations noted just a couple paragraphs below. Perhaps some of our past hominin evolutionary milestones have been world migrations as well, such as those enabled by learning to control fire, or by new or enhanced capacities for art, language, and complex symbolic expression, or by our diverse and evolving epiphanies of what it is to be human.

Please note that migrating between worlds is not at all the same experience as enduring the end of one world and being blessed by the beginning of another. We’re not waiting passively for the old, moribund world to die while somehow managing to survive while a new world assembles itself. Rather, we’re called to action — endeavors that are both creative and determined. We’re faced with the formidable task of leaving the old world before it completely collapses, liberating ourselves from the kinds of slavery we might not even been aware we’ve been subjected to, and embarking on a long uncertain trail to the next world. Arriving in the next world requires proactive choice, route-finding skills, and the cleverness and fortitude to pass through the narrow gates of the Symplegades.

Many nature-rooted peoples have origin stories of journeying up a ladder from a previous, lower world to the present one. The Hopi and the Diné (Navajo), both of the American Southwest, have “emergence stories” that recount a spiritual passage from an underworld through a variety of other realms until arriving in the current world. The Hopi understand themselves to be living now in the Fourth World, but their prophesies suggest they will, before long, transition to the Fifth. These are sacred stories rich with mythopoetic motifs, stories that embody a people’s primal understanding of what a world is and what it means to leave one and migrate to the next. And why. And what it is to have a map that supports or enables such a migration.

In her poem, “A Map to the Next World,” Native American Joy Harjo (Muscogee)^[1], evokes the ethereal and mystical nature of such maps:

… The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light.

It must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land,

how it was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it. …^[2]

We are indeed in the gift, and of it, as Joy says, but most present-day humans have forgotten, as have most earlier members of Dominator societies (our ancestors) going back thousands of years. The gift is the land itself, this Earth, our home, along with the reality that we fully belong in it and to it, our having been made, individually as well as a species, precisely for and by the Earth. This is our original blessing. Our daily offerings of gratitude for this supreme gift are natural and foundational to our genuine and original humanity — and necessary in order to locate ourselves on a map to the Next World so that we can comprehend where we currently stand and what the next leg of our journey might require of us.

Joy Harjo acknowledges the mystery and difficulty of migrating from one world to the next. She also reminds us why it is time now to leave the current world:

… Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the altars of money.

They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; a fog steals our children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression, the monsters are born there of nuclear anger.…

Too many of us have built our lives around compensatory ambitions — ambitions to shop, acquire, accumulate wealth, to “win” or gain power over others, ambitions for fame or “higher” socioeconomic status or for what might appear to be glamorous memberships. These ambitions, these pseudo-satisfiers, are synthetic Dominator substitutes for the real thing. These ambitions are what we have left when we individually and/or culturally lose touch with our primary and innate human satisfactions such as making and deepening friendships; singing and dancing together; cultivating our knowledge of and relationships with the diverse forms and forces of the other-than-human world; art-making; praising the everyday magic and natural miracles of this world; storytelling and mythtelling; making and experiencing magic; the enraptured observance of the night sky; preparing and sharing meals; healing and being healed; creating and participating in ceremonies to grieve our losses and to celebrate our good fortune; the ritual celebration of the seasons and of human life passages; making love; romance; childbirth; the joy of growing children and in turn being grown by them; the delights of communitas^[3] or collective joy; working side by side with our kith and kin to accomplish meaningful tasks, address crises, and strengthen community; the solace and relief of forgiving and being forgiven; our daily awareness of grace received; the privilege of tending the injured, ill, infirm, and dying; the exploration and revering of the boundless mysteries of both nature and psyche; the raptures and challenges of the journey of soul initiation; and, most fundamentally, the ecstatic arts of not just sustaining but enhancing the life of the more-than-human world^[4] (the world that includes us humans but so much more) — and doing so especially through our unique soul work, the source of both our foremost service to the world and our greatest personal fulfillment. (What would you, dear reader, add to this list of primary and innate human satisfactions?)

The fog that steals our children “while we sleep” is, I believe, our collective forgetting that we are part of nature, forgetting our first and primary membership in the greater Earth community, disregarding our original instructions that show each of us how to uniquely contribute to life, and losing track of the maps that show us how to discover, merge with, and be shapeshifted by that mysterious dimension of the world we might refer to as our individual souls.

This post is Part Two of a long 20-plus-part essay on a journey to the Next World and on a map that might help get us there. We’ll continue with Part Three next week. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this article helpful, please restack it to share it with your followers!

^[1] Joy Harjo was the first and, so far, only U.S. Poet Laureate of Native American descent (2019 - 2022).

^[2] In Joy Harjo, A Map to the Next World: Poems and Tales (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000).

^[3] The word communitas was coined by anthropologist Victor Turner. Communitas is the deep experience of community, of social solidarity and togetherness that emerges during shared and especially liminal/ transitional experiences or rituals, often evoking the shared experience of “anti-structure” in which social hierarchies and norms are temporarily suspended, fostering intense, direct personal connections.

^[4] This phrase, “more-than-human-world,” is from David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous.

Animas Valley Institute offers multi-day in-person experiential immersions in wild landscapes as well as a variety of online programs. The journey of ecological awakening, wholing, and soul initiation might be cognitively understood by listening or reading but it will shift and deepen your life only when directly experienced. We offer programs on six continents and provide generous scholarships for those in need.