ORETETI PRESS
Text and photographs © 2013 Tanya Pergola
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher:
Tanya Pergola, www.tanyapergola.com
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Cover photograph by Andreas Sigrist, www.andreassigrist.com
ISBN: 978-0-9911-9102-4
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Lekoko Ole Sululu’s father at his home in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania
This book is dedicated to my father,
Charles Pergola, who inspired me to love life,
to understand how healing makes our hearts
happy, and, to treasure all the lessons in life
that make us grow and blossom.
And to the Maasai, who entrusted me
to find a way to share their rapidly
disappearing indigenous knowledge
so their enduring wisdom can
help heal a troubled world.
I humbly hope that I have met
your expectations.
1.
Setting the Stage
THE BIRTHPLACE
I have a heart for indigenous people. When I meet someone who has a deep connection to her ancestral past and a direct line into the earth, something sparks between us. We connect on an elemental level. The voice of Mother Nature speaks through us, even while we are dressed in human costumes.
On a bright Sunday more than a decade ago, I found myself in a primordial forest at the bottom of Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania, accompanied by elephants, eagles, and Maasai warriors who have been at home in that remarkable region for many millennia. As I looked at the high canopy of trees surrounding me, their leaves began to shimmer, to sparkle, and an overwhelming sensation came over me. Everything was profoundly alive. And I sensed that I had come to a place on planet earth that could teach me wondrous things.
As a social anthropologist, I was aware, of course, that I was only steps away from Oldapai Gorge—ancient terrain where our human ancestors took their very first steps. Yet something else about that place drew me in as well, pulling at my intellect as well as my soul. My brain twitched. My heart danced. I was filled with delicious anticipation, and I sensed that whatever I was about to learn would be so unique, so important, that I would be compelled to share it with members of my own tribe.
On the crater floor, Ngorongoro, Tanzania
On that singular Sunday, I simply and very powerfully knew that what I would learn there would be a kind of antidote to the stresses, challenges, and many enigmas of our complex contemporary lives. I was about to take an extraordinary journey back to my roots—to the roots of us all. In equatorial Africa, I would re-learn what it means to be human, and would discover a wonderful medicine for healing ourselves and our communities using the eternal forces of nature.
What a journey! And what remarkable lessons I learned beginning that day! I’m eager to share them with you.
MY GLOBAL ROOTS
I was born in Connecticut, not far from New York City. My father’s family had emigrated from Sicily in the 1920s. My mother was born in what is now Azerbaijan and was raised in northern Italy. So, I was born a global girl, and my bloodlines and the cultural influences inside my childhood home were deliciously mixed, often making for excellent culinary experiences—from the homemade ravioli we would have on special Sundays to the exotic piroschki I would take in my lunchbox to school.
Yet when it came to gaining clarity about some of life’s biggest questions—Who am I? What do I want?—I was often met with a flood of perplexing answers. The prevailing belief in Fairfield County, Connecticut in the 1980s was that, in order to be successful, a young woman should go to university, do well, and continue paving the way for other women that first was cleared by the women’s movement of the 1960s. Having been born with a pioneering spirit, this plan seemed reasonable.
But my father, who as a good Sicilian had originally hoped I would be born a boy, spoke to me as if I were his son, and he plainly enjoyed criticizing the feminists he knew and, by extension therefore, me. Deep down, however, I knew that by biological and sociological default I was necessarily a “feminist,” and the cultural buffet of sometimes conflicting ideas from my earliest days certainly did provide many interesting meals on my life’s plate.
A born peacemaker, when disparate ideas come my way I instinctively start building bridges. On a practical level, I think nothing of serving Italian wine with a Russian meal; and on more spiritual and philosophical levels, I have often found myself seeking the common ground between my Muslim, Christian, and Jewish friends. A born optimist, I try to seek out the good in everyone and everything, and create combinations of the best of two or more worlds.
Perhaps inevitably, at university I abandoned the majors my father had chosen for me—marketing and advertising—for anthropology and sociology. In those departments I truly fell in love with reading and learning for the very first time in my life. As I read about the bushmen of the Kalahari, I delighted to imagine what it would be like to live life in a manner so different from my own. In my social psychology classes I freed my mind to explore the vast realms in which society and culture co-create self and identity. I discovered that we are who we are because of our relationships with those around us. And as each of us acts and reacts to the world we encounter, we make changes—individually and collectively.
I was hooked, and I dove in deeply enough that I eventually earned a Ph.D. in sociology at one of the most exciting places I could have been at the time, the University of Washington in Seattle. 1990s Seattle was the talk of the nation, if not the world. With its contribution to music—the grunge rock of Nirvana and other great bands—the technology revolution spurred by local behemoth Microsoft and dozens of lesser companies that spun in its orbit, and the coffee craze that was initiated
