Essay English - The Song Of The Sky Loom

Essay

Song of the sky loom

A poem by the Tewa Tribe

Climate changing. Global warming. Environmental pollution. Melting polar caps. Rain forest dying - The headings of news papers from all over the world, from Tokyo to Las Vegas, from Sydney to Rome.

The journals inform us about the earth’s situation, directing our attention to the world problems caused by people. And unconsciously, they divide the world into two parts:

The bigger part consists of the ones that don’t pay attention to any of these headlines and instead blame everyone else but theirselves, along the lines of: It wasn’t me.

The smaller crowd of people are the helping and caring ones. Some are members of environmental organizations taking active part in saving endangered species, for instance. Others have their own helping stragedies, sorting their waste or using a bike instead of a car, which is a good start to contribute.

But did it really have to come to that?

As a matter of fact, people didn’t always act as unconcerned as they do now.

Hundreds of years ago, before the Puritans came to North America longing for religious freedom, a tribe from the Southwest of what is now called the U.S. lived in peace with nature and environment: The Tewa people.

To express their feelings, the tribe created poems and songs, mostly about what was going through the members’ minds and what seemed important enough to them to think about.

Their written poem “Song of the sky loom” deals with their relationship to planet Earth.

In the following section I am going to explain why we can learn a lesson from the “Song of the sky loom.”

The poem begins and also ends with the line “O our Mother the earth, O our Father the sky,” showing which close relationship the Tewa people have to the nature. The tribe is connected to it like children are connected to their parents.
The earth holds them like a mother holds her children and lets them grow on her with a motherly protective instinct.

The sky is watching them from above, holding doom off his “children.”

With using this line as the first and also as the last verse, the poem builds a completed circle, representing the circle of life we are living in.

In the next verse, they write about bringing with tired backs the gifts they (Mother earth and Father sky) love. It does not go in detail what is meant with “gifts they love”, so we can only imagine what they intented. Due to the fact that in this time, having enough to eat was the most important element for surviving in a tribe’s continued existence, they probably hint at a rich harvest. When people had a good yield on their fields in the summer, it meant that they could have a happy and fulfilled year, so having a good harvest was the biggest gift you could have made for them. By offering this (the greatest present they have) to their gods, they show how serious they are with worshipping them and how important it seems to them that their gods are happy too.

In the text development the poem uses the term “garment of brightness” as a synonym for a good, happy and fulfilled life. Its respective clothing parts symbolize the nature: “May the warp be the white light of morning, may the weft be the red light of evening, may the fringes be the falling rain, may the border be the standing rainbow.”

These weaving terms are found in the entire poem as the central theme. It might emblematize the cosmogony because looms create garments, and in this poem, the garment stands for the human’s life.

                       

The “Song of the sky loom” shows us that the Tewa people put the nature on a par with gods. Instead of worshipping animals or figures like many other Native American tribes did, they prayed to the environment.

We can learn very much from this poem although it doesn’t mean that we should deify our world. But we can learn from it that having an intact nature is essential for having a good life and only if we live in harmony with our surroundings we are able to live in joy.

What we cannot do is expecting our world to be perfect without doing something in return. As the Tewa people bring with tired backs the gifts they love, we have to take care of what is given to us. Like the old Native American tribe, we have to think about what our planet wants to have from us, and again like them: We have to do something for a good environment. The Tewa people brought with tired backs their gifts, which means that they put a lot of effort in their work. If we transfer that in our today’s life it means that it does take some time and endeavor to sort our waste, and yes, it is more exhausting to ride a bike instead of a comforting and fast car. But it is definitely worth it. Because only with commitment we are able to receive the good life our Earth is offering to us.

So maybe, after eventually everyone realized that, why shouldn’t the future newspapers’ headings go as following:

Thanks for letting us have this beautiful world.