When Carrie and Suresh first moved to their land,
they were told the story of the Madonna set in a half bathtub altar in the adjacent field, a fixed with round stones dragged from the creek and ceremoniously placed into an altar. One day soon after moving here, Suresh stood up on the hill and looked out at the sister mountains across the valley, from the Madonna came a strong voice out of nowhere, Atina, Atina, Atina. The name was repeated three times. The voice came to him strongly, out of nowhere.
Looking into the word, they found that it belongs to the Corn Goddess of many native peoples, and a familiar goddess among the Mohicans, whose land Atina Foods lives on.
It is from the darkness to the light, Atina led the animals and the people.
The story of Corn Goddess Atina goes like this:
At one time, the planet was filled with devilish human beings, people who have no respect for anything other than their own selfish greed. They destroyed habitat, enslaved other humans and animals. This became unbearable to the Mother Earth. She pleaded to Gitche Manitou, the great supreme god of many native tribes on this continent. ‘We live like this anymore. Please do something.’’ Gitche Manitou looked at these devilish people, who had grown to control machines and technology, who had said that they no longer needed gods, as they were the gods. Gitche Manitou, seeing that they were only one of the many tiny creatures he had made and yet they were destroying everything, became angry.
He identified the humans who abided by the great laws of reciprocity and sustainability, and along with the animals, birds, plants, put them all into a great cave with everything necessary for their survival and sealed the entrance with a boulder. He reached into heaven where he planted a single seed, and unleashed his anger in the form of a great flood. The waters washed away the evil people, while those in the cave remained untouched. When the flood subsided, the seed he had planted in heaven had grown big. He told this plant, Atina, to go into the cave. There, inside the darkness, are all of these good beings; get them out and lead them to the west, into the sunset. All of the animals together worked to move out of the cave, through action and change they emerged and travelled towards the west where they began their civilization again.
Where humans settled again, trouble again came about. Gitche Manitou asked again of Mother Atina to enact the great law, along with her sisters Squash and Beans. The great law is the foundation of the native constitution in this area, and rests on premises of peace, justice, and reciprocity.
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For Suresh, the connection of the story of Atina which appeared to him as he stood on this land in Catskill is one of deep importance.
“This story metaphorically represents our human being’s dependence on all other beings, and also the necessity of our responsibility to live in harmony and peace. So this story appeared to us, and this is precisely the culture which I come from, which I, as the great Mohicans did, perform special traditions. The single most important thing in Native American and Mohican traditions is that food is medicine and medicine is the food. So is the basis of Ayurveda, that in every habitat, there is food and medicine and the practitioner. The job of a practitioner like me is to keep the food, nurture it, and share it, wherever I am, it is there. And this is what Atina is.”
As you stand on the hill above Atina Foods, and look out at the Madonna and at the sister mountains across the way, the sun sets towards the west. There is where the beings in the cave would have moved towards, out of darkness and into the light, and it is a reminder every day of the relationship we must foster with the land that we live on and the stories that come with it; of the relationship of healing with the food that grows -- how it nurtures us, and in turn, we have the responsibility to nurture it.
Taken from an interview with Suresh by Libby Green in Catskill New York, July 31 2020.
