The sound of Memory
Kuando un avla, serra la boca y avre los oídos.
When someone speaks, close your mouth and open your ears.
The sound of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), Yiddish and Hebrew is the soundtrack to my childhood memories. My mother’s family came from Turkey in 1912, a community of Jews whose ancestors fled from Spain in the 15th century at the time of the Inquisition. My father’s family sailed from Poland and Russia in the early 1900’s, running from the pogroms, the hunting and killing of Jews in Eastern Europe. Learning Hebrew was a given in our family, attending Hebrew school just a part of being a Jewish kid in a family which kept the traditions alive through food, prayer, ritual and the learning of the holy language. Today when I hear any of these languages, powerful memory is evoked. For me, these are the sounds of home.
Pacha mama mucha napin. Yuya rinchis mama tay ta. Wasin chista allun chista. Munas canchis kow sai nin chista.
Mother Earth, on the altar with reverence. We remember you, mother and father.
Our home, our family. We love you, for giving us our lives.
But what if we don’t know why the sounds of a particular language are familiar? The first time I heard the Quechua language (the language of the Q’ero, the wisdom carriers of the Andean medicine tradition), I was seized by a feeling of recognition strong enough to bring me to tears. I knew these sounds!
The person speaking Quechua was Alberto Villoldo who was to become my first shamanic teacher later that year. He taught a weekend introductory course entitled “Healing the Light Body” designed to give people a taste of the wisdom teachings taught at The Four Winds School for Energy Medicine and Shamanic Healing. This took place at the Omega Institute, a well-known retreat center in Rheinbeck, New York, far from the electric buzz of Manhatten. The Institute offers a wide variety of holistic studies on a campus surrounded by 195 acres of peaceful, hilly countryside.
I had seen Alberto’s photo in the Omega catalogue the year before when browsing for something to take me out of my well-worn routines. I had actually been looking for a class in Navajo weaving, attracted by the colors and patterns, but that class was already sold out by the time I called to register. His picture caught my eye and I remember feeling a moment of recognition when I saw his face, certain that I’d seen him somewhere before. At the time, I became distracted by other things in my life and didn’t sign up for his class, but later, after my first Soul Retrieval, I came back to the catalogue, found this class and knew that I needed to meet this guy and discover what he was teaching.
At the end of the first evening, we gathered outside in a circle around the fire pit where the wood waited for the match. In the dark, Alberto wore an enormous, long, black, woolen poncho and began to use his rattle, praying in Quechua. We followed him as he turned and called to the four directions, East, West, North and South. He called on the Sun, Grandmother Moon and the Mother Earth, the Serpent, the Jaguar, the Eagle, the Hummingbird, his spiritual lineage and ancestors to surround and assist us in a Sacred Space for a fire ceremony. Twenty of us, curious about this tradition, watched as he lit the fire, poured the olive oil and taught us how to approach and perform rituals for transformation and cleansing.
My logical mind struggled without success to come up with a single memory related to the emotion arising in my body as I heard the cadences and intonations of the Quechua language. These words, these rituals, the fire, and the sound of Alberto’s rattle called forth an awareness of something almost remembered, on the tip of my mind’s tongue. I felt called to come back to a home that I had forgotten, a place where a deep and reverent relationship with the natural, Divine world is primary. A place where all that lives stands ready to assist us in healing others and ourselves. As I knelt before the fire, bringing the smoke and the energy of the flames towards my body, I knew that I needed to learn more and follow where this might lead. The sound of this familiar language opened a door and I walked in.
