How the Bushmen Dance with the Divine.

The Bushman doctors I know… know that understanding the mysteries of God’s creation is less important than participating in it. What they say to others is inspired by a desire to motivate them into the heart of God’s love. They want us to dance more and talk less. They want to feel and see us open our hearts rather than fill our minds. The Bushman way is more polyphonic, improvisational, performative, playful, and biological  than the textually ruled world that anthropologists inhabit. They prefer shape-shifting in and out of a polychromal and polyphonic universe over word-shifting onto monochromal academic paper. Their truths mirror the truths of the sky, earth, plants, and animals that surround them. When they dance forth the dots, lines, and shapes, they marry them to a  heart bathed in the tears of longed-for relationships with the ancestors they love, the remembered mother who scratched their head, and the missed father who brought home meat. Deep emotions of the heart  guide the steps of the Bushmen, and their dance celebrates how they are inseparable not only from the living creatures of the present, but from the living presences of the past.

… imagine standing up, moving, and awakening to the biological verities that are within and around all of us.

— Bradford Keeney, Ropes to God: Experiencing the Bushman Spiritual Universe

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