(And I say to myself ...) "What A Wonderful World!"

[Photo Credit: Vitaly Gariev]

Is it just me, or are people becoming more beautiful? I know, that's a terrible thing to say, even to think. Beauty is subjective, in the eye of the beholder, and all that. Comparisons can be degrading. And it's entirely superficial, anyway, as if you can judge a book by its cover! But this is why I put it to you as a question. Because there just may be something worth considering here.

As populations formerly separated by geography now begin to blend (known, scientifically, as the process of genetic admixture), the differences between peoples are now being seen among peoples. The world is shrinking. Humans are becoming one, gloriously diverse, species. As those former distinctions dissolve, so do the cultural hierarchies that have often been associated with them.

In Rwanda, the cattle-tending Tutsi tribe was chosen by the European colonial powers of the 19th Century as a superior race to the agrarian Hutu people. The differences in their physical appearance allowed their European overlords to interpret some Tutsi features as being more "Caucasian" and therefore preferable. The Tutsis were favoured and given power over their Hutu neighbours, the two tribes, in pre-Colonial times, having lived together in relative harmony. The disastrous consequence of this racial profiling blossomed in the Genocide of 1994, when, in a coordinated attack, the Hutus rose up to slay the Tutsis, en masse, slaughtering almost three-quarters of a million Tutsis in a 100-day period.

In modern-day Rwanda, they speak only of Rwandans now. Any lingering enmity between the two tribes is considered corrosive to the new society trying to emerge from the ashes of that holocaust. But, as a Rwandan friend explained to me, the people still know who's who, and the resentments run deep, going both ways. Only the slow blending of the tribes, over time, will ease the tensions, if not erase the memories, of that cruel and senseless conflict.

Worldwide, we might see a similar trend, and a similar need. As the former determinants of "them versus us," fall away, we become, simply, "us." And as we recognize and honour the interrelatedness not just of all peoples, but of all the created world, "us" itself just keeps broadening, becoming inclusive of the animals and the trees and the rocks and, eventually, the entire Cosmos. We are all one.

This is why I find the new generation so beautiful. In the blending of their ethnicities and the relativising of their cultures, they represent a shift away from the old tribal divisions toward whatever the new humanity, the new and inclusive human tribe, is destined to become. Are there cultural losses along the way? Of course. Is there grief associated with such loss? Sure. That's the inevitable cost of human evolution. But something new is being born.

So, I was intrigued to meet Andrea Tsugawa. Born in Peru to a Japanese father and a Mestizo (Spanish / Indigenous) mother, Andrea was raised in a culturally blended environment that included Buddhist, Shintoist, Indigenous, and Christian religious influences. The Christian links were the weakest, partly in reaction to Catholicism's part in the colonizing culture that had had such a devastating effect upon the local peoples. Andrea herself, of mixed blood, and raised with the nature-based wisdom of her Indigenous forebears, was labeled a "witch" at her Japanese school.

But now, Andrea, at thirty years old, finds herself enrolled at the Vancouver School of Theology in the Masters of Divinity program, where she may decide one day to be ordained within the United Church of Canada. What is extraordinary about her story (and there is much that is extraordinary about her story) is that she is not choosing a Christian path over all the others; she intends to bring it all with her--the plant medicines, the ancestral veneration, the Indigenous ceremonies. She's becoming a living sign of human evolution in the modern age.

Beautiful!

To listen to my conversation with Andrea Tsugawa for my podcast, The Mystic Cave, just click on the Play button below.