Culture> Review and Comment

Indigenous qualities exist everywhere

By Peter Buffett ( China Daily ) Updated: 2014-06-20 11:02:42

Or worse, people feel completely disenfranchised - unseen and unheard. People considered "mad" or "crazy" are most likely missing their indigenousness the most. Like the canary in the coalmine, they're telling us that something in the culture is getting too toxic, too unnatural.

There are various antidotes that our culture offers to forget these feelings of separateness. But where does the indigenous disruption begin?

When boys and girls are told to not feel their feelings, or that their feelings shouldn't matter, they start to forget what feelings feel like. That creates the opportunity to make false impressions of feelings seem real.

We are separating ourselves from each other and the natural world around us - we've lost many subtle forms of feeling and communicating. We've lost the relationship to our nature.

China's understanding of community and connection to nature can live in the present through its deepest roots - fed by philosophies of harmony and balance, two words that both depend on relationship for meaning.

If these ancient roots are nourished, China holds the possibility of leading the world toward rediscovering a collective purpose. Through embracing a common understanding of the indigenous ways of China, what has recently become a planetary human relationship can begin to become a tribe.

The writer is a musician and author based in New York.