Spirituality – SoulPaths / the journey….

Standing Rock: This is Not a Rehearsal

I knew of the DAPL desecration of ancient graves and brutal attacks on unarmed water protectors; the ramped-up arrests by the Morton County sheriff’s officers; the lies being spread through the local media about the resistance to the pipeline. I knew of the paramilitary equipment that was showing up against the front-line water protectors’ actions. But nothing could have prepared me for the shock of seeing the steady parade of law-enforcement vehicles on Rt. 1806 past the camp, or the surveillance helicopters and planes that circled many times each day. It was clear: this camp was at the border of a conflict zone; a psy-ops campaign was underway to wear the people down.

It is a strange feeling, being a white middle-class woman, a clicktivist, letter-writer, and subtle activist but not a direct-action protestor, walking into such a situation: the adrenaline immediately starts to flow, the nervous system goes on hyper-alert, and the slightest thing can seem to be a danger signal. I was awed at these people, survivors of 500+ years of attempted genocide, who lived day-in, day-out under the strain, strong, watchful, and outwardly cheerful, with a constant thread of ceremony weaving through their life together. walking peacefully to stand in the face of the paramilitary forces that seek to destroy their land, culture, and sacred places.

Still, it didn’t take long to start hearing warnings and rumors. I’d just set up my tent and come down to the central drum circle to hear Dennis Banks, co-founder of the American Indian Movement, welcome a busload of middle-school students from Duluth, MN, when a woman hurried up: “Have you heard? They’re saying the governor’s going to call in the National Guard to evict us all, any day now.” Mark Lesser, the firekeeper who had helped me put up my tent on the first day, pooh-poohed the rumor when I asked him a little later. “That’s been going around the camp for months. This land is off reservation territory,” he told me. “According to treaty, it still belongs to the Standing Rock Nation. However, it’s Army Corps of Engineers land, and yes, any of us could be arrested for camping here. If you want to be safe, you should go and camp at Sacred Stone, that’s private land.”

I chose to stay, but took the lesson: live lightly, set priorities, be ready in case of eviction. Everything except the barest necessities stayed in the car. The phone stayed with me at all times unless it was charging at the solar station at the top of Facebook Hill.

The real wake-up moment came as I was standing at that charging station at the highest point in the camp, hearing the buzz of a DAPL airplane overhead as I talked with NoDAPL activist Deborah Gaudet of New Mexico. Nearby, journalists interviewed Dennis Banks, and security guards rode past on horseback, surveying the camp perimeter. In that charged moment of communication and watchfulness, shortly after I’d learned of the eviction risk, I saw the bright yellow of a front-end loader rolling past the security station and into the camp.

Had it begun already? A black SUV followed the heavy equipment, and I thought of the unmarked black vehicles that had accompanied the police cars on their last pass. What to do? Frantically weighing options, I gave increasingly distracted responses to Deborah, until she made her farewells and moved away. I headed downhill for the security station.

The young guard there – Larry, who had greeted me on my arrival – smiled easily as I approached. No sign of alarm there. Feeling rather foolish, I stammered, “I, er, saw some heavy equipment coming into the camp just now…ummm, is everything OK?”

He glanced down the central avenue, lined with the flags of the nations represented in camp, and nodded. “Oh, that’s just to help with building the yurts for the elders,” he said. “The building materials arrived a while ago and we’re getting ready to level the ground to put them up.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m so glad,” I said. “I’d just heard that the National Guard might be coming to evict us all in the next day or so.”

img_20161016_092100450 — Sweatlodges in camp

He frowned. “You’ll hear stories like that all the time. The police and DAPL are trying to scare us, put us off our balance. Don’t let it disturb you. After all, what’s the worst that could happen? You’d go in spirit to see your relatives. Don’t let them shake your prayers. Stay in prayer, sister.” He smiled reassuringly, held out his arms and gave me a big hug; I smiled at him in gratitude.

It was the first of many times I would be reminded of the source of this camp’s heroic strength.

Findhorn: Learning to Listen at the Power Point

I could go on and on about the adventures of our group at the Findhorn Foundation‘s Experience Week…our free-time hike to Forres, abetting one young man’s quest to try the quintessentially British diabetic-coma-on-a-plate (a.k.a. deep-fried Mars bar) and then ascending a minor mountain to mug for photos at the base of Nelson’s Tower…wading in the frigid Moray Firth…scrubbing sculleries and washing windows during Love in Action…and serving up a potluck of talent, from Wonderwall to Taize, on our last night…and through it all, through the attunements and trust exercises and service and meditation and clowning, bonding to become a close-knit international family.

It was the experience of a lifetime; I haven’t shared so unself-consciously or laughed so hard or felt so utterly free to drop my masks and public persona since I was a teenager.

…and it wasn’t until I’d stepped into my second week – Spiritual Practice Week – that my deep purpose for coming to Findhorn truly began to take shape: connecting consciously with the awarenesses of Nature. Our small group spent far less time bonding, far more time in solitary contemplation, and despite the wild weather (rotating snow/sleet/hail/rain/sun, often in the space of an hour), I gravitated again and again to the Power Point.

I spent the first few trips alternating between admiration of the glorious forest and mountain vista, and impassioned prayers: let me hear! let me see! let me shift to a new, grounded perspective, one that will last and support a deeper work when I go home!

Yup, I was broadcasting on a pretty wide band. And remembering the words of Findhorn co-founder R. Ogilvie Crombie (ROC), quoting the deity Pan in his memoir Meeting Fairies: My Remarkable Encounters with Nature Spirits:

…the genuine people who are legitimately curious about my world… would dearly love to see us. There is nothing wrong with that except that it very rarely works—they try too hard. Perhaps this is fortunate as they do not realise how dangerous it might be if their desire was granted too soon, before their bodies or their minds had been prepared and conditioned for the experience, and the right degree of cosmic consciousness had been reached. The elementals, the ones who are my subjects, belong to a different evolutionary stream than humanity. Close contact between human beings and the elementals can be dangerous if it takes place too soon, especially if the motives for seeking it are wrong.

So you might say I was protected up there…or else I was just making too much noise, asking!

And then there came the day when things shifted…

I was coming down the spiral path, touching the trees and bushes in gratitude, when my eyes were drawn to a stump by the side of the path. It was beautiful, covered with moss and lichen, with delicate plants resembling tiny cyclamens springing from its root. And…..something about it, the energy around it, was different.

I slowed to a halt, squatted down, and considered the beautiful little micro-ecosystem…took out my phone and snapped a photo, and rose to go on my way…

and heard in my mind a rather irritated voice, asking, “Is that all you’re going to do?”

Whoa..what??? I turned on my heel, knelt down and apologized: I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snub you!

You just didn’t expect your requests to be answered? That’s not unusual.

I mentally stammered in confusion, mouth agape.

There was a sense of softening, and an invitation: Just sit down and be with us for a little bit. Let us see you.

I knelt down on the path, the wet leaves soaking through the knees of my jeans, feeling a sense of welcoming. While the stump looked – and felt – like a fairytale scene, while I could imagine the tiny fairies of the storybooks flitting about among the plants and reclining on the mosses, I didn’t see anything…but there was that sense of aliveness.

I thought of Hildegard of Bingen’s word, veriditas. referring to “spiritual and physical health, often as a reflection of the divine word or as an aspect of the divine nature”….remembered the warnings ROC had received: that if the nature spirits withdrew that vital force from nature, humans could no longer survive.

Yes, came the response, and I began to catch a sense of a multidimensional macro-ecosystem, not only populated with interdependent physical beings of all kingdoms and species, but also with related ethereal beings tasked with caring for them and keeping the whole system functioning. I knelt there in awe, feeling myself part of a cosmos much more diverse than I’d ever imagined.

You don’t have to pound on the door, came the words, gently. You need only ask in love and openness. We’re here and we want to help you in serving the land and the people.

With that, I felt I was released; the encounter was complete. I rose and bowed in gassho to the beings of the stump, and went on my way.

______________________________________________

Crombie, R. Ogilvie (2011-06-01). Meeting Fairies: My Remarkable Encounters with Nature Spirits (pp. 92-93). Independent Publishers Group. Kindle Edition.

A Life to Change Lives: Matthew Fox’s Confessions

I first heard of the radical theologian Matthew Fox when I was in college…at the time, he was the visionary founder of the Institute of Culture and Creation Spirtuality in Chicago, shaking up the Catholic theological world with his teachings of joy, embodied-ness, ecology, activism and contemplation in prayer. I remember feeling intrigued, attracted to a Christian theology that honored creation as sacred…I didn’t know then that Dr. Fox’s work would eventually be the key to a new direction in my life.

Mumble-mumble years later, as his student, I read Dr. Fox’s stirring autobiography, Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest. It was published in 1996, three years after he had been removed from the Dominican Order as a heretic after 10 tumultuous years of standing courageously against the virtual freight-train of Vatican censure. So far from being crushed or finished by the ordeal, however, he was embarking at age 56, a free man, on radical new directions in his career.

Confessions describes Fox’s evolution from a Dominican seminarian, inspired by an exchange of letters with Thomas Merton to attend the Institut Catholique de Paris, where he first encountered the teachings of creation spirituality through his mentor, Pere M.D. de Chenu, and was challenged to incorporate activism for social justice in his contemplative spirituality.

He went on to spend 34 years as a successful and visionary educator, speaker, and author of 22 books, founding and directing the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality for a total of 19 years despite increasing criticism and opposition from -Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, then chief Inquisitor and head of the Congregation of Doctrine and Faith (later Pope Benedict XVI).

The cause of Ratzinger’s ire? Fox was a feminist theologian who called God “Mother;” he taught “original blessing” over original sin; he fraternized with Native Americans; he refused to condemn homosexuals, and other charges. When his work was reviewed and passed as theologically irreproachable, Ratzinger acted unilaterally, silencing Fox for one year in 1989 and forcing him to step down as director of the ICCS. Three years later he expelled Fox from the Dominican order, thus terminating the program at Holy Names College.

Confessions wrenchingly details those tumultuous years, closing with Fox’s new beginning in the Episcopalian Church, developing what would become the Cosmic Mass, contemplating the beginnings of a new University of Creation Spirituality, and asking deep questions on the future of the Catholic Church.

Just this week, North Atlantic Books published Fox’s revised and updated version of Confessions, picking up the story from where it left off and carrying it forward to the present day.

Five new chapters tell of Fox’s ongoing radical innovations in the worlds of education, worship, and theology: he founded and later retired from the University of Creation Spirituality; launched a revolutionary wisdom education program in Oakland’s public schools, retooled the Cosmic Mass, partnered in intellectual ventures with luminaries including Andrew Harvey, Bede Griffiths, Brian Swimme, David Korten, and Rupert Sheldrake; and published another 10 books.

Two of those books, A New Reformation and The Pope’s War, blew the whistle on Vatican scandals, presaging the ultimate retirement of his bête noir, Pope Benedict. Cautiously hopeful in seeing the renewal of social justice and liberation theology in Pope Francis’ reign, Fox nevertheless continues holding the Vatican to account.

Like the original Confessions, the revised and updated edition is simply and movingly told. I found rereading its chapter “What Will Belief and Holiness Mean in a Postmodern Era?” most moving: Fox is describing spirituality as an ecstatic, embodied experience that goes beyond the bloodless theory of religion. He writes of finding God by letting go of the predefined images of God, and looking instead “for a God of justice, of beauty, of celebration, of creativity, of truth, of wonder, of mystery, of nature, of humor, of earth and earthiness.”

Fox’s experiential description of the Divine embodied in creation is what called to me so many decades ago; it is in large part what has enabled me to reintegrate my adult spirituality; and as I see the experiential, earth-honoring spirituality of the rising generation, it is what gives me hope for the future.

As the new Confessions closes, Fox writes:

It has been a privilege to serve modestly in the task of bringing alive the creation spirituality movement all these years, trying to mine the treasures from that tradition and to do it not from an armchair but from the front- lines. While I bear certain wounds in my body and soul from the struggles, I anticipate with joy what is still yet to come.

“Joyous Repentance” by David Sparenberg

As we sink deeper into darkness approaching winter solstice, poet-playwright, actor, director & author David Sparenberg offers this breathtaking video “inviting all Sufis, Gypsies, poets, alchemists, mystics and lovers to come and have a look. This is an alternative to violence video, to the cult and culture…”

Taking the Risk of Sharing Our Stories

Four years ago, in the midst of studies towards my Master’s degree, I birthed the precursor of this blog on the free WordPress platform. What a journey has taken place between that time and this!

At the beginning, I had no idea of where the journey would take me. I only knew that I was waking up to the reality – not just the single, catechism-shattering experience that I’d had in childhood, but the everyday, sublime-and-mundane Reality — that we exist in a conscious cosmos.

And along with that awakening came the calling to, somehow, integrate and share both that experience and that Reality.

Thanks be for the circles, and friends, and teachers, who shook me free of the Catholic-schoolgirl impression that such an experience was bizarre and unique, and the Reality…well, theologically incorrect at best! It’s taken a long time for me to realize that that experience is both archetypal and universal, and that it genuinely reflects REALITY, the mystical core of both shamanism and religion, and the guiding ethos of this inter-aware, interdependent creation.

It’s a challenge to stay in that awareness, and to share the journey from a place of personal authenticity, seeking, and ongoing discovery, when the risks of vulnerability and spiritual self-revelation are terrifying. And a very humbling task indeed, in the knowledge that the personal discoveries that are cracking open one cage after another in my mind are the mystical equivalents of 1+1 and a-b-c. It’s a wild ride between “wow – this must be shared!” on one hand and “who do I think I am?”on the other.

I’m deeply grateful for – and challenged by – the teachers who have encouraged me, affirming that each person’s shared story validates the experience of others, and gives others the courage to share their own experience in turn.

Looking at the mess we’re in as a species – and the devastation we have wrought on this planet – the human journey is about waking up to recognize and choose to walk in Sacred relatedness with the nonhuman awarenesses and wisdom that surround us. This awakening and re-connection to our brother and sister beings, I believe, is the key that can ultimately save life on Earth.

So to affirm, and live, and share, the truth of Sacred inter-being, at whatever bare-beginning level one understands and experiences it, is no longer an option but a necessity.

This blog traces some of my own path, and the events and people whose work speaks most deeply to me. It is one step in the evolution of a project further exploring the experience of conscious connection to the Divine embodied in creation.

I invite your sharing of your journey in response!

A Christ for the Spiritual but Not Religious?

This may come as a shock to those of you who know me – an Earth-based spiritual edgewalker who’s clenched her teeth, swearing silently “I will not bolt, I will not bolt” when she hears a minister edging too close to standard-issue Christian doctrine, and who shies away from enmeshing dogmatic constructs like poison ivy.

And who, for years, has been seeking to bridge the psychological chasms between a “heretical” childhood vision of the Divine conscious oneness of creation, versus evangelical-charismatic teen and college years, versus a near-vocation to the convent, versus an adult life drawn to Earth-based and indigenous spirituality, along the way witnessing too many spiritual manipulations and abuses across too many denominations, and grieving helplessly over the injustices done to the First Peoples of the world as Western Civilization proceeds on its rapacious way, mowing down primeval cultures and ecosystems like blades of grass.

That search finally found its fulfillment in the ancient/post-modern Creation Spirituality teachings of theologian/author/activist Matthew Fox…and never more so when he said that the Earth, women, GLBT people, people of color, and indigenous nations are being crucified on the cross of modern Christians’ shadow-Christ. This priest, I knew in that moment, saw what others could or would not. Two years later, I was managing his website and helping to promote his work.

Even so, it was a stretch for me to attend the first in the newest series of trainings that he and author Andrew Harvey are co-directing, the Christ Path Seminar: was this just Christianity in a sneaky new wrapping, a new form of pious deception, I wondered? No – knowing the integrity that both of them demonstrate, that was impossible.

It was a worthwhile and healing stretch, as it turned out, as I listened to the two authors deconstruct the pop-Christ for a deeper, truer, more integral cosmic Awareness, and reframe Jesus from a schmaltzy best friend/copilot to a potent advocate for justice and compassion for all, and especially for the most vulnerable. I found myself reconnecting to my earlier, forgotten experiences of Jesus-connection, forgiving and integrating the see-sawing spiritual path of my past. Yes, I was (and am) still a solitary, Earth-based, spiritual edgewalker, but a door that had been shut in my soul was now ajar.

So why am I sharing this?

For the past six months, I’ve been promoting the Christ Path Seminar. True to Drs. Fox and Harvey’s teaching techniques, these weekends engage participants, on-site and online, in learning and practices for the mind, body and spirit, exploring questions such as:

Who is the historical person at the center of the world’s dominant religion – and how can his teachings be reclaimed from modern misrepresentations to reflect the cosmic awareness of which he is a facet?

How can we join the passion of our youth with the wisdom of our elders in a diverse and unified intergenerational voice for change?

How can we integrate science and spirituality to create a vibrant and viable cosmology for our time?

And true to Drs. Fox and Harvey’s commitment to the Gift Economy, making this transformational content available to all, registration for the trainings – both on-site and online – is only $50 plus whatever donation you choose to add, based on the value of your experience.

If you want to get a sense of the passion and eloquence of these two master-teachers’ offerings – enough to make this Earth-based “spiritual anarchist” come back for more! – check out the DVDs of their first Christ Path weekend – just $50 for the full 12-DVD set, 20 hours of recorded content.

But more important, do sign up for the upcoming weekend, “Cosmic Christ and Youth – the Occupy Generation,” featuring guest speaker Adam Bucko of the Reciprocity Foundation – a transformational educational refuge for homeless youth in NYC. Adam Bucko recently collaborated with Matthew Fox in the soon-to-be-published book, Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision for a New Generation (Sacred Activism)

I guarantee – there will be no altar calls, but lots of challenges to your preconceptions and invitations to step beyond them into a new, broader and deeper experience of the Divine. Truly a worthwhile and inclusive experience to be savored again and again, whatever your faith tradition.

If the Cosmos is Conscious – Then What?

As I’m working ferociously on the final report of an Independent Study toward my Master’s, on bridging from a mechanistic to a mystical cosmology, a friend sent me this snippet of a lecture by Rupert Sheldrake on the consciousness of matter.

After viewing it, I invite you to share your thoughts in the Comments –

If Sheldrake’s view is correct, and the cosmos is analogous to a vast, living and conscious being, in which galaxies, planets, ecosytems, and organisms from whales to bacteria – all self-organizing systems – are conscious components (the viewpoint held through shamanic, ancient and medieval times up to the rationalist revolution of Descartes) – what is your role within this system?

A View of Christ Beyond Patriarchy

The following article by Andrew Harvey is reprinted with permission from the Christ Path Seminar site.
And why am I, a confirmed “spiritual but not religious,” Earth-based eclectic interspiritual edgewalker/mystic, (apparently) promoting an (apparently) Christian seminar, even one dedicated to “pressing the restart button on Christianity?” That’s a good question, one that I’ll answer in my next post. For now – read the following repost from the event site, and you’ll see part of the reason why I feel this is an important workshop, and why I plan to attend the 3-year series…

An Authentic Christianity Beyond the Dying Churches (via Christ Path Seminar)
…For two thousand years, Christianity has endlessly crucified Jesus by presenting a one dimensional image of His true being. The great challenge of our time is to resurrect the authentic Christ, not the smarmy, ascetic version to which we have been exposed by dying churches. Until we discover Jesus as the supreme living, revolutionary presence of love, who is as much the son of The Mother as he is of The Father, a sacred being who fuses the deepest knowledge of the transcendent with the passionate involvement of the earthly activist, we will continue to allow the churches to disfigure and rob Him of His true identity.

Our Responsibility, Our Power

I shut down another conversation the other day on Facebook. Didn’t intend to do it…but my comment was one of those that are met with embarrassed averted eyes and even more embarrassed silences.

No, I wasn’t sharing the intimate details of my health, sex life, or bathroom habits. I wasn’t evangelizing or objecting to the exclusive holiday greeting “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Easter” or what have you (though I do object to such exclusivity, early and often).

So what taboo did I break in this supposedly taboo-free society? I responded to a friend’s posting of Elaine Boosler’s comment: “When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping. Men invade another country. It’s a whole different way of thinking.”

I pointed out that even if women hold ourselves aloof from macho male militarism, as long as we are purchasing goods that are kept artificially cheap by American companies’ outsourcing to regions with lower standards of living, extracting fossil fuels, minerals, tropical woods and other resources from impoverished nations that are happy to sell off their virgin ecosystems for desperately needed cash, and employing workers in sweatshops at below-living wages, that we, the nonviolent women, are morally responsible for the militarism that protects the companies that provide these goods.

It’s the truth that nobody wants to acknowledge. It’s so much easier to blame somebody else – Extremists in Congress, the Military, the unchecked Corporations otherwise known as The Bigs – Big Oil, Big Coal, Big Agro, Big Pharma, Big Insurance, Big X – Big Y – Big Z – when the truth is that none of these powerful perceived villains would ever have gotten their power or grown to their cancerous size without our buy-in…our votes (or non-votes)…our taxes…our energy and dietary and health care choices…our “therapeutic” shopping…feeding them.

But what other choice do we have in our society, we ask? Surely we need oil to run our cars, warm our houses, make the uncountable numbers of plastic and resin and synthetic-fabric products that fill our homes and offices and hospitals and …well, you get the idea…our society is based on petroleum products! Surely we need coal to keep our lights on and our appliances and computers running – how can a few (hundred) mountaintops and valley ecosystems and species compare to the importance of keeping the power on? Surely we need industrial agriculture to feed our families – not to mention the hungry of the world, isn’t Monsanto solving the problem of world hunger with their genetic tinkering? And pharmaceuticals keep our symptoms at bay, and insurance pays for the rising costs of modern healthcare…well, some of them, anyway…

It all comes down to the core belief that we don’t really have any other options. We’re not in a position to argue – we just have to make the best of the godawful, toxic situation we’ve got, with the Bigs getting bigger every day, the planet getting more compromised every day, more ecosystems and species failing every day, while our balances of money – and hope – grow smaller every day.

And the popular solutions? Work! Shop! Eat! Watch television! Go to the movies or the casino! Pump up that flabby sixpack at the gym or on WII Fit! Invade another country on World of Warcraft! Ingest narcotic substances! Reality is a nightmare, so let’s go virtual, or numb out completely! And maybe before it all goes down, science will have found a way to get us off this planet to embrace mankind’s Destiny: despoiling other planets, having trashed our Mother Earth.

What a grim scenario…no wonder nobody wants to talk about it! With our eyes myopically fixed on the situation-as-it-is, our energy and our brainpower enmeshed in our jobs, we’re frantically scrabbling to save what we have, make small changes (sure, we say, I’m eco-conscious! I’ve swapped all my lightbulbs and I’m a real nut about recycling!). But God forbid we challenge any core certitudes (least of all our own) or consider making deep changes in our lives….

….because we can’t.…

But what if we do have other options? Maybe, as theologian Matthew Fox proposes in Original Blessing, this apparent hopelessness, this paralyzing “I can’t-ism” itself stems from a self-negating certitude* that needs challenging: the certitude that we, ourselves, are somehow insufficient, powerless, not capable of self-motivation, self-management, direct connection with the Divine. The certitude that we need others, more powerful, richer, more authoritative, more degreed, more ecclesiastically accredited, to employ us, direct us and control things for us. The certitude that we are isolated individuals who cannot change our own lives… much less our society…much less our world. The certitude that we, alone, personally need to control and drive any change we initiate, and that this is a crushing, impossible responsibility.

As Betty Friedan wrote – “Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.” Or rather, make that humans’ denigration of ourselves….

But what if we can come up with other solutions…or notice the solutions that already exist, right under our noses…solutions that might start with lightbulbs and recycling, sure, but go much, much deeper….? What if we start to believe that our imaginations, our intent, our love – not just our anger and frustration – can move mountains?

What if, when we (metaphorically) pray for rain, we start carrying umbrellas?

Awhile back I attended an afternoon symposium called Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream, and just recently trained as a facilitator. It’s a multimedia, interactive program developed by the Pachamama Alliance, bringing together the best of millenia-old indigenous wisdom with the most visionary concepts of the modern scientific worldview to create an environmentally sustainable, socially just, spiritually fulfilling culture on the Earth.

In one portion of the symposium, we gather together with others in our community to discuss and discover what we are already doing – and can do. We link up our ideas, campaigns, organizations. Most important, we discover that we are not alone…that there is a groundswell of likeminded people stirring at the grassroots level, group after group arising to save one aspect of the planet, or to care for one group of the People…and another…and another…

We watch Paul Hawken’s “Blessed Unrest” speech and realize that millions of such organizations are working today around the earth…as the Achuar people who initiated the Pachamama Alliance say, it is the spirit of the conscious planet taking action to protect herself, and her life forms…inspiring people to do the work that is needed, guiding them along the way to find the right connections and resources…

We. Are. Not. Alone.

I could quote Goethe at this point, about the Universe acting to support us once we commit ourselves…but instead, I’ll close this post with a story.

Last week I went on a two-day retreat with a very wise and unassuming holy woman. I was struggling with my own forms of confusion and “I can’t-ism” – moving from work with one Teacher to seek a stronger connection to the Light within. In our conversations, she urged me to ask for inner guidance, and listen not only with my mind but also with my heart and body…to sit in “eyeball to eyeball” conversation with Spirit, however I experienced Spirit, and seek the inner voice, not in desperation or begging or presumptive problem-solving, but in silence.

After our conversation, she sent me to seek and follow inner guidance for the day – whether to sit indoors and read, meditate, and journal, or go outside to walk the grounds and connect with the Earth for grounding and direction.

So I went outside, asking for direction, noting the springs that arose from the ground and cut across the fields toward a wetland at the bottom of the property. Drawn to follow them, I stood at the bank of a small stream, barely a foot wide, and felt led to step over it, onto a small island completely surrounded by small separate streams. Ahead of me, two trees called to my attention. I approached, and between the trees found a pile of rusted metal junk, and felt the inner calling to remove it.

“How?” I asked, and the inner leading directed me back to the house…where my hostess was talking with her neighbor, a farmer who had been working for years on cleaning up and restoring the wetland. He was delighted to provide a wheelbarrow and practical advice for the job. My hostess provided work gloves and boots, and thus supplied, I had the pile cleared within a couple of hours, receiving further guidance in every quandary.

The message was clear: ask for guidance and it would come, step by step…if I consciously remained focused and aware. Whether I chose to say it came from God, Goddess, the Earth, the Universe, the Unified Field, what have you, the guidance came. I was not alone – guided by the Divine, the Earth, and helped by the People, and I could create a change. Yes, a small change…but a change, a beginning.

I believe that this is the key to real and lasting change, not on behalf of the planet, but in partnership with Spirit, the People, and the sentient Earth….and that each of us is capable of that partnership.

And I would like to invite your stories of similar experiences, if you are willing. If you feel called to share, please add them in the Comments below, or email them to me at phila @ soulpathsthejourney.org. Together we can create an empowering affirmation of partnership that goes beyond our individual abilities.

Thank you!

______________

* Matthew Fox, Original Blessing (Santa Fe, NM. Bear & Company, 1983) p. 120

Joining to Help Mend the Hoop

Ultimately this is more than a Canadian struggle. It is a global struggle to protect the Earth against the cannibalizing “extraction” of oil, gas and minerals by mega-corporations. The Elder peoples, the Indigenous nations of the world who hold the sacredness of the Earth at the heart of their culture, are leading the way, but ultimately the survival of life on this planet depends on all peoples of all nations and races following their lead.
I would like to offer an open invitation here: Do you feel called to participate in an energy circle supporting the work of Idle No More – the protection of the land, the water, the People and all beings, the honoring of treaties and the preservation of sacred sites – not only in Canada but also around the world?

I was reading Starhawk’s Truth or Dare this morning, feeling vast blocks of “Aha” falling into place, when I came upon this paragraph, and stopped short…

The ethics of immanence are based on the recognition that all is interconnected. When the earth lives in us, as we in her, our sense of self expands until we can no longer believe in our isolation. When we practice magic – the art of seeing the connections that run deeper than the visible surface – we know that no act is out of context. If we participate in a native American sweat lodge, we are obligated to aid their struggles for land and treaty rights and their battles against forced relocation. We have sunk a spirit root into the living soil of their community. They have fed us. But to be fed without feeding, to take without contributing, is not a road to power-from-within. We cannot grow in strength through being parasites. If we adopt ritual trappings without concern for the daily realities of those we learn from, we become spiritual fungi. But power-from-within derives from integrity, from our recognition of the context of every act, from a consistency between what we say, believe, and do.

It was not a new idea – my husband had been a Pipe-carrier and Sundancer, and supporting his Lakota spiritual family had been an accepted part of our life. But since his death, as I have been seeking my own path as a non-Native woman living in modern-day suburbia, incorporating the teachings that he and I had practiced, the implications have rippled outward…

At the last Sundance we attended, there was a strong presence of the American Indian Movement, reclaiming the ritual for the Lakota people and winnowing out the non-Native Dancers….as they reached the completion of their four-year commitment, it was understood that they would participate in other, mixed Dances. As a clearly non-Native supporter, I was in a minority. I remember one AIM Dancer asking me, not as a challenge but very seriously, “Who are your grandmothers and grandfathers? Where are your sacred sites?”

I could only respond hesitantly – while my known genealogy was Italian and Lithuanian Catholic, digging back into our cultural history revealed Baltic paganism and the ritual healing Graeco-Roman trance-dance tradition of tarantelle. While both traditions had gone underground, pressured first by Catholicism and then (in Lithuania) by Communism, I knew that my ancestors most certainly knew how to relate to the Earth as a sentient being, knew how to connect with the conscious energy in each living being. I could still feel that knowledge in my bones…but how could I honor that knowledge and both sides of my cultural heritage?

This bone-level instinct was what drew me to the Native traditions of this land…the cellular awareness of a time when all the peoples of the world danced in relationship with the living Earth. And today I continue to teeter at the lip of the divide between Then and Now as a family dissident, an outlier seeking a place of balance between the Earth-centered practices of my husband’s spiritual family, my ancestors and the current-day Teachers who inspire me, and the modern, materialist, commercialized, mainstream practices of this culture.

As I watch friends on similar paths, I am realizing that this chasm is one that each of us face at some point if we embark on any sort of journey toward consciousness…there is the attraction to cosmic oneness, to a sacred physical world, to “magic” perhaps, or to altered consciousness and mystical or shamanic practices.

But in this culture of smorgasbord spirituality, there’s no moral imperative to connect with the actual present-day cultures at the source of those mind-altering practices….at least, not until one connects with a teacher of integrity.

Then the awareness comes – that the knowledge in which we’ve been dabbling arose through centuries of arduous tradition…and that the people who still practice those traditions have been decimated by massacre, poverty and disease, bereft of their land and natural wealth, and very nearly bereft of their culture and spiritual traditions. And that to honor those traditions requires that, in some way, we give back.

The divide between the cultures in which all was (is) sacred, and those in which nothing is sacred, has never been described so heart-wrenchingly as in the words of Oglala Lakota holy man Black Elk following the massacre at Wounded Knee, 122 years ago yesterday:

My people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream… the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

In a global sense, not only the hoop of the Lakota nation has been scattered, but the sacred hoop joining all nations in conscious Earth connection. The human and cultural genocide we have seen in North and South America, Africa, Asia and Australia through recent centuries is a modern replay of the genocide that wiped out European indigenous traditions.

And the oppression continues……and with it the resistance.

Most immediate, of course, is the struggle of Idle No More, led by Chief Theresa Spence and supported by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people around the world as she hunger-strikes for a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper to honor Canadian treaties with its Indigenous nations against the expropriation of the land and waterways for resource extraction. Now in the 20th day of her fast, she has received no response from Harper.

All of us, waking up out of our separation from creation and cosmos and rejoining the family of consciously connected beings.

All of us, helping to mend the Hoop of all Nations.

I have been posting news of Idle No More on this blog and on Facebook…and I would like to offer an open invitation here:

Do you feel called to participate in an energy circle supporting the work of Idle No More – the protection of the land, the water, the People and all beings, and the preservation of sacred sites – not only in Canada but also around the world?

If this speaks to you, whatever your spiritual tradition, and you would like to join your intention with others through prayer, meditation, energy work, drumming, or ceremony at a set time every week, please add your voice in the Comments below:

your name
the day of the week that would work best for you
the way in which you would like to participate, and if you’re willing to connect with others locally to do so
your general location (if you’re willing to connect with others locally)

There are many prophecies that address this time in human history…but the one that speaks to me most just now is this, from the Anishnabe tradition: