(Essay 3) Red Poppies Among the Ruins by Mary Saracino

[Author’s Note: Originally published in TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, Issue 6, September 2007, www.triviavoices.net.]

The Kurgan legacy survives to this day. Too often humankind worships the warrior culture, the power and might of dominium. From sports icons to corporate raiders and political strategists we laud and celebrate the principle of conquest. Our history books teach war, not peace. We learn of military campaigns, famous battles, esteemed generals with their prowess of might and destruction. The progress of civilization is measured in lives lost, blood shed, peoples oppressed. The more ancient legacy of peaceful coexistence is silenced. How did it come to be that 7,000 years of violence could wipe away 50,000 years of accord, erase it from our collective memory? Where are the history book chapters about peaceful resolution to conflict? About cultures co-existing in harmony? Where are the tales of societies like that of early Tharros? Or of the Nurgahi of Sardegna, people whose day-to-day living made no room for slavery, social stratification, or inequality between men and women?  History chronicles the exploits of the conquerors even as it silences the subaltern ways of the conquered.

In June 2004, in Rome, en route from Sardegna to my life in America, I walked the city streets, mere days after then President George W. Bush had visited the city. Everywhere, hanging from windows on buildings large and small, from wrought-iron apartment balconies, the facades of public office buildings, the stone arches of church entryways, I saw rainbow-colored banners waving in the smoggy breeze. In white letters, against a prism field of hope (bright rows of violet, blue, green, yellow, orange and red) blazed the word: Pace. Peace.  A clarion call for sanity in an insane, out of control world. A prayer for harmony, for humanity, for grace.

The Pace flags mirrored the hopes of people seeking to create a different resolution, establish a new pathway, disinherit humanity’s 7,000-year-old Kurgan legacy.  On city walls throughout Rome, red and black graffiti screamed its paint-stained resounding truth: war harms the warriors as well as the warred against. Unambiguous, stark images leapt from stone walls and the sooty sides of buildings; war, and warmongers, were not welcome.

Stop Global War; Bushladen; Bush Go Home; Bush Terrorista, No War for Oil; No Justice No Peace; No Bush, No War. 

I stood on street corners, reading these spray-painted messages, my heart pounding with urgency.  The memory lives, I heard myself say.

In Sardegna, I had waded through a field of knee-high grasses to reach ancient tombs and gaze upon graffiti of another kind: ochre-red carvings, symbols etched into rock tombs 1000s of years before.  The spears of thistles pierced my socks, lingered like acupuncture needles, touching the essential points of Qi, conjuring vitality, coaxing life back to essential balance.  Eco-activists tell us the Earth is out of balance and I agree. But the human spirit is awry as well. We cannot begin to save Mother Earth, and all her rich bio-diversity, until we save our own souls.

Can humanity turn away from the cycle of victim and oppressor? Can we re-invite the ethos of justice with compassion, non-hierarchical social structure, and equality among all peoples to take root once more?  In remembering and honoring our ancient past, can we begin to sow the Dark Mother’s aspiration of peace and well-being for all Her children?

Among the ruins at Tharros and the cave-tombs of Montessu, I began to remember: the dream within the dream is as real and as tangible as breath.

There was an age, before this violent one, in which the peoples of the Earth fashioned metal into useful tools and jewelry, not weaponry. There was a time before this one when men and women resolved conflicts without bloodshed, where humans lived in harmony with animals and plants. On that granite and basalt island in the Mediterranean, I beheld a four- thousand- year-old olive tree whose limbs embraced the sky, whose thick roots burrowed  into the deep belly of the Mother and I remembered that there was a time, before dogma reigned, when Spirit was not separate from Body, when eyes shone with certainty and ears rang with sustaining lore. Rippling streams coursed through the parched land, giving sustenance. The waters of the turquoise sea lapped the shoreline, caressing beaches under the push and pull of the moon tide. Stones spoke to the wind, the sea, and to every willing listener.

In Sardegna, beneath layers of sediment, eons of submission, the stony lips of ruins loosened, howling their stories among the tasseled grasses. Slowly, steadily, memories erupted with insistent defiance. Once, long, long ago, we humans could read the stars and portent the future. Once, long, long ago,  we could witness the seasons, accept our place within the larger, all-encompassing circle, and reflect the Divine back to our receptive faces.

Something deeper resides beneath the silence and the half-truths we contemporary humans tell ourselves, seeking to comfort our overwhelming sense of powerlessness, our disconnection from self and others. That’s the way it’s always been, we lie.  People are violent by nature, we fool ourselves, hoping to feel less burdened by the responsibility to change our lives. Knowing better, our hearts shudder: how can this be true? Conflict is part of life, of course, for human harmony does not preclude disagreement or the need for mediation. But war and its twin, the violent subjugation of other peoples, is the anomaly—not peace. Violence is the mutant strain, the dismembered spirit. Peace is our birthright, our better choice. Peace begets transformation and transformation is the desire of each and every soul.

Under the Sardegna sun, on a cloudless day, I sat among the ruins and listened to the songs of stones, the stories of poppies, those blood red tongues of memory.  I know in my bones that there is hope for the human race. The ruins ask us to embrace the mystery, seek a different way, remember a time when peace was possible; the poppies mark our path home.

(End of the Essay)

Meet Mago Contributor, Mary Saracino