Enco, Jake…. I’ve spent thirty minutes deciding how to choose a small window into profundity. I’ve landed on a Māori experience.
Each tribe has its own “marae” which is their sacred community building where they attain a sense of ‘belonging’. It is prohibited for non-tribe members. I was adopted as sister, and embraced into the shared flow of emotional bonds.
The sleeping room for the marae was a very large room (like a church hall) with stages raised along the sides and the back. At the back there were three tall stacks of mattresses, about an inch thick, on the stage.
You remove your shoes to enter the room so as not to bring the outdoor spirits inside. You take a mattress, and put it on a side stage longways, so your feet would be pointed at the centre, head to the side wall. You put your belongings on the floor in front of your bit of the stage with your mattress. There are around fifty to sixty mattresses that end up side to side on the platforms. People come in during the late evening and add to the sleeping humanity. Little children wiggle in between sleepers, to cuddle into the warmth.
Then the snoring begins. Deep steady snoring, from multiple men (and possibly women). The snoring is like a single steady motor sound, with every snorer on different rhythms. It penetrates your bones, and generates an incredible vibration.
Here’s the life-changing aspect:- That deep sound makes you feel safe at a primal level. You belong utterly, you’re sharing your existence, and the sheer masculinity of the sound reaches your primal mind, making you feel the safety and security of the communal protection to a depth that you’ve never felt before. And lastly, you become aware that you’ve always carried a small pocket of fear somewhere in your mind – and for just this while, it’s eliminated – almost how you’d imagine womb-security might feel.
So now I know that in our civilised lives, we carry an element of primal fear deep down. I know what it feels like to carry that fear, and I know what it feels like to have that fear lifted and removed. And that we all carry it, and most of us don’t even know.
