WHY ENVIRONMENTALISM FAILS
RESTORING ACTIVIST SPIRITS
THE SEVENTH PROPHESY SACREDFIREMAGAZINE.COM
AN ANTIDOTE TO HUMAN AMNESIA
Grandfather HEALING, Fire GRIEF & LOVE Francis Weller
THE SPIRIT RISING FROM THE LAND
Teztan Biny What Is Our Future Here?
AN INTERVIEW WITH A MAYAN SHAMAN
$7.95 U.S. / $9.75 CANADA
I S S U E 10
WILL FISH LAKE DIE FROM GOLD FEVER? WISDOM KEEPERS ADDRESS THE WORLD
SACRED FIRE FOUNDATION
Speaking The Whole World is
For many, many thousands of years,
humankind experienced every facet of the world as being alive with spirit. The earliest peoples regularly communicated with the plants, with the animals, and with the natural forces of the world. This was not a religious practice, not a belief system. It was an everyday fact of life. These relationships were essential to our health and well being.
Why should we care how early people lived? Yes, we’re modern now. We think we’ve conquered the earth, that we’ve harnessed the elemental forces of nature. And some people live lives of great power, comfort and excitement. Meanwhile...the whole world suffers. Call it climate change. Call it social injustice. Or ground water pollution, drug addiction, eroded topsoil, ethnic cleansing, ocean dead zones, family dysfunction, extinct species, autism, or profound feelings of helplessness, alienation and depression. Call it what you will. When we treat the world and everything in it like inanimate resources, rather than the dynamic, sentient beings that they are, we create tremendous imbalance in the world. Sacred Fire Foundation is here to promote listening. The kind of deep listening that comes from hearing, not with our minds, but with our hearts. To bring balance back into the world, we need to listen to the people who have come before us, the ancestors. We need to listen to the people alive today whose traditions remind us of the stories and lessons that served humankind for thousands of years. And we need to listen to the living spirits of nature that are there to help us awaken to all of life.
Listen deeply. Be in conversation with the world. Sacred Fire Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, supports initiatives that honor indigenous spiritual technology, traditional knowledge and the ancestral ways that foster global balance and healing. MIKENORTON/ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
sacredfirefoundation.org
Contents
ON THE COVER: Photographer,
Phillip Colla, made this image near
Wawona, California.
COLUMNS 11 | Logs for the Fire
13 | Reconnecting with
the Earth The Wonder of Living in the Heart By Rina Burleson
14 | FireStarters
7 DEPARTMENTS 4 | Flares from our Readers Dear Sacred Fire + How Messy Is Community?
5 | Our Contributors 6 | Editor’s Note
Listening to the Song of the Earth
7 | Unintended
Consequences If Only This Were a Fish Tale 8 | Reviving Right Relationship Vallecitos: A Sanctuary for Activists
10 | Burning Books
I’m a Medicine Woman Too by Jesse Wolf Hardin Reviewed by Adrienne Kant
50 | Marketplace 2 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
13 POETRY 17 | Capricious By rm mist
A Confluence of Rivers By Cynthia Frisch
40 | Ocean
56 | Final Flicker
49 | Little Bug Kneels
The Seventh Prophecy By Edward Benton-Banai
By Hydeh Aubon Down By Marianna S. Tupper
8
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: JOHNSTUBLAR//ISTOCKPHOTO.COM; KADIMAGES//ISTOCKPHOTO.COM; COURTESY VALLECITOS MOUNTAIN REFUGE
Mud and Mercy By Dianna Vagianos Miller
Features
28
18 | Redwood Speech, Watershed
Prayers: The Poetics of Place When we give time to a place and open our senses to its speaking, our bond with the world becomes sacramental. By Francis Weller
CARLA FUNK
23 | Lessons for the People of the
Corn: An Interview with OmeAkaEhekatl Erick Gonzalez Can we prepare ourselves so that the transformation of 2012 is a time of celebration instead of lamentation? By Sharon Brown
36 | Healing the Torn World: Lessons 28 | To Save the Sacred Waters:
The Teztan Biny Story. An open pit mine is a tool of genocide when it destroys a lake which is the heart of a land and of its people. By Emilio Laurier Williams Portal with video images and interviews by Susan Smitten and David Springblatt
34 | Greed
We are born with no sense of private ownership, yet greed is the basis for all oppression and injustice. By Manitonquat (Medicine Story)
from Tatewarí, the God of Fire In this time of disconnection and desperation, Grandfather Fire arrives to bring guidance to all people.
41 | If All the World Could Hear
Nine Wisdom Keepers from indigenous traditions answer the question, “What would you say?”
45 | The Realms of Coincidence
What is usually dismissed as “coincidence” is actually evidence of the intricacy of the web of being. By Robert Moss Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 3
Sacred Fire An Antidote to Human Amnesia Issue Number Nine
sacredfiremagazine.com
PUBLISHER SHARON BROWN EDITOR-IN-CHIEF JONATHAN MERRITT CREATIVE DIRECTOR MACE FLEEGER ASSISTANT ART DIRECTOR ROSETTE ROYALE CONTRIBUTING EDITORS CHRIS SCHLAKE, STEPHEN MICHAEL SCOTT COPY EDITOR KATHY DANCING HEART SUBSCRIPTION SALES KATHY AFTAB SUBSCRIPTION MANAGER ANDYE MURPHY ADVERTISING SALES LYN FELLING PUBLICITY KATHY DANCING HEART I.T. & WEB MASTER DAN CERNESE ADVISORY BOARD KAREN ABERLE, JEFF BAKER, TUCKER FARLEY & LISA GOREN
THANK YOU! DIANE MCWILLIAMS, JOSH COWAN, CARLA FUNK, PHILLIP COLLA AND THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE CONTRIBUTED YOUR TREASURE, TIME AND TALENT, AND OF COURSE GRANDFATHER FIRE
Letters We encourage readers to share their reactions to Sacred Fire by sending emails to editor@sacredfiremagazine.com or letters to 10720 NW Lost Park Dr., Portland, OR 97229. We reserve the right to edit submissions for length and clarity. Submissions We accept queries and unsolicited submissions of writing and illustration. See sacredfiremagazine.com for guidelines. Email editorial inquiries to submissions@sacredfiremagazine.com and illustration inquiries to artsubmissions@sacredfiremagazine.com Advertising Inquiries For an ad sales media kit, visit sacredfiremagazine.com/the magazine/advertising sales or email advertising@sacredfiremagazine.com. Change of Address or Other Subscription Inquiries Email subscriptions@sacredfiremagazine.com and include both your old and new address. Please allow 6 weeks for address change to take effect. Subscriptions In the United States: Four issues: $28, in Canada, $38, all other countries, $48 (all amounts in USD). Subscribe online at sacredfiremagazine.com Single Copy Sales Bookstore sales in the United States: $7.95, Canada $9.95. Order single copies and back issues online at sacredfiremagazine.com, $10 includes shipping within the U.S. Distribution Services Sacred Fire is available to bookstores and retailers in the U.S. and Canada through Ubiquity, Armadillo, Kent News, New Leaf, One Source, Ingram, Source Interlink and Disticor Direct Postmaster Please send address changes to: P.O. Box 7284, Santa Cruz, CA 95061-7284. Reproduction No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the written consent of the publisher. Any requests to reprint material appearing in Sacred Fire magazine must be made in writing and sent to publisher@sacredfiremagazine.com.
PUBLISHED BY SACRED FIRE FOUNDATION Sacred Fire Foundation fosters personal, cultural and environmental healing through the preservation and propagation of traditional indigenous lifeways. A 501 (c) 3 charitable organization, the foundation seeks to revive “right relationship” between humanity and the natural world. The foundation seeks to support sources of ancestral wisdom through partnership and grants, and supports bringing ancestral wisdom to the world through publishing and events.
SACRED FIRE FOUNDATION sacredfirefoundation.org 71 N Main Street P.O. Box 270 Liberty, NY 12754
Board of Trustees CHAIRMAN DAVID WILEY BOARD MEMBERS ALAN KERNER, ARTEMIA FABRE TREASURER AND DIR. ADMINISTRATION NANCY EOS EXEC. DIR. DEVELOPMENT SHERRY MORGAN EXEC. DIR. PARTNERS AND GRANTS SOFIA ARROYO EXEC. DIR. COMMUNICATION AND EDUCATION SHARON BROWN SECRETARY VICTORIA REEVES BOOKEEPING DANA MARTIN The opinions expressed by Sacred Fire contributors are not necessarily those of Sacred Fire magazine, the Sacred Fire Foundation, the Sacred Fire Community, and/or their respective staffs.
4 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
Flares from Our Readers DEAR SACRED FIRE, I DON’T KNOW IF ANYONE else has ever had a magazine call to them, as this one did to me. I am a half-blood Ojibwe, Metis, French Acadian, Irish man from Ottawa, Canada and now also a fan of this magazine. I only own issue 9 so far, but will be on the look out for the next issue when it hits the stands. If I enjoy that one as much as this one, I will definitely want a subscription. Thank you so much for the story on the Ojibwe Medicine Wheel. After reading and rereading the story I went to the web site, and listened in awe at the teachings of my people. Keep up the great work. Blessings to you and your staff DAVID JOSEPH O’BRIEN Ottawa,Ontario
HOW MESSY IS COMMUNITY? I WAS DISAPPOINTED BY Chris Schlake’s article “Community is Messy.” The title and tag line promised a juicy exploration of the challenges of life in community. But instead, Mr. Schlake spent the majority of the piece tracing his path to living in community and extolling the virtues of community living. Only in the last two paragraphs did he even allude to the challenges. As the structure of our dysfunctional society begins to crumble, hearing the experiences of those who are walking the path of community living is vital. Expose the mess! We need to hear about the real challenges—what happens when agree-
ment among the group cannot be reached on a key financial, philosophical or logistical issue? What happens when a community member unconsciously sabotages the process by holding the group hostage with his/her unresolved personal issues? What happens when the group begins to polarize into camps with opposing views? How do you deal with the myriad personality irritations? There must be 1001 ways that community can be messy. I want to hear about it all, and especially, how you’ve come to resolution. Mr. Schlake states, “...intentional community goes beyond polite society and becomes a robust and supportive container for everything from our most raw and unruly emotions to our quirky (and maybe annoying) little pet philosophies.” Each community group must form its own container through dedicated, committed work and play, and the willingness to walk through the fire when conflicts arise. A strong community container is forged in the fire of strife. We need the support of the experience of those who are already in the community process. I invite Mr. Schlake to roll up his sleeves, stir the turds, and take a second shot at writing about the messiness of community. We all need to hear it. KATERI MCCUE
Groton, Massachusetts Does Sacred Fire warm your heart or singe your sensibilities? Do our articles, stories and poems light up any memories? Can you add a log to a flame we’ve kindled? Burn with us. Send letters to the editor to editor@sacredfiremagazine.com.
Sacred OUR Fire CONTRIBUTORS
FROM LEFT: JAMES WILLIAMS; COURTESY OF CIRCLEWAY; COURTESY OF NEW WORLD LIBRARY.
Cynthia Frisch cultivates connections between Earth and people in businesses, organizations and communities through her company, Gaia Global Consulting. Her seminar “Ancient Wisdom for Environmental Corporate Leadership” interjects traditional worldviews and values into the modern dialogue about sustainable environmental practices. A facilitator of Pachamama Alliance’s Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream Symposium and her own workshop The Power of Earth, she also serves as an Ambassador for Change with the Green Energy Council, where she integrates traditional earth wisdom into their Green Jobs Corp training.
Francis Weller draws from an extensive background in depth psychology, mythology, group work and indigenous traditions in his
work as a community builder, writer, teacher and psychotherapist in Sonoma County, CA. He is the founder/director of WisdomBridge, an educational organization that seeks to synthesize the wisdom from traditional cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from western spiritual, poetic and psychological perspectives. His book, A Trail on the Ground: Tracking the Ways of Our Indigenous Soul, will be completed this fall. wisdombridge.net
advisor to The Nature School in Greenville, NH, and with his wife, Ellika, leads tribal living summer camps in five European countries. circeway.org
Robert Moss, the
Manitonquat (Medicine Story) is a storyteller, an elder and a keeper of the lore of the Assonet Band of the Wampanoag Nation of Massachusetts. Author of eight books and a former columnist and poetry editor with Akwesasne Notes, he has also edited Heritage, a journal of Native American liberation. He directs a program for Native prisoners, is
pioneer of Active Dreaming, works with individuals and groups to open personal paths to creativity and healing. He has been a bestselling novelist, a foreign correspondent and a professor of ancient history. His other books include, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead, and The Secret History of Dreaming (New World Library). Visit his website mossdreams.com
Edward BentonBanai, Grand Chief of the Three Fires Midewiwin Lodge, is a full blood Ojibwe-Anishinabe. One of the founders of the American Indian Movement and its former spiri-
tual leader, he is a master speaker/teacher of the sacred Midewiwin language and a strong advocate for culture-based education. He founded the Red School House, an Indian-controlled K-12 school located in St. Paul, Minnesota and currently serves as the Academic/Spiritual Advisor for Shingwauk Kinoomaage Gamig/ Shingwauk University. In addition to The Mishomis Book and the recently released Anishinabe Almanac, Anishinabe Living Thru the Seasons, he has published Mide teachings and philosophy, as well as native spirituality-based short stories and poetry.
Catherine Haller, born and raised in Xeni Gwet’in traditional territory, is a spiritual healer (deyen) of the Tsilhqot’in people. Catherine still lives in the valley where she grew up and still practices the traditional ways of drying fish and meat for winter—not only for herself but also for her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She often donates her traditional food to community meals. Catherine has also worked as a drug and alcohol counselor in native health for 19 years.
Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 5
Sacred EDITOR’S Fire NOTE
Listening to the Song of the Earth IT IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE TO
ignore the catastrophe that confronts us as the ice melts, as the oceans warm and storms wreak havoc in Asia, as endless droughts grips Australia, India and Africa. And, despite the efforts of millions of good-hearted men and women, we have to admit that the environmental movement has failed. This is difficult to comprehend here in the Pacific Northwest where, after a morning rain, sunlight glints off beads of water on the cedar boughs and magnolia leaves—still green in late October—as the last tomatoes cling to the vines and the pumpkins and spaghetti squash lie ripe on the ground. It’s hard to imagine that this land, so rich and moist, may soon be unable to support our lives. Even as millions gather around the world to advocate for the reduction of carbon emissions to 350 parts per million, the halls of government echo with intractable arguments over ineffectual measures like carbon trading or slowly raising the gas mileage of cars. Serious efforts to invest in alternative energy can’t make it to the floor of Congress. And even that is not going to be enough. Soon, the questions may be about finding adequate food and water rather than keeping cars on the road and our computers running. 6 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
In a sense the 350ppm Action is symptomatic of the problem. For the environmental movement has always relied on science and advocated technological solutions for the problems caused by pollution. And a few opposing scientists—often in the employ of the extraction industries and given undue airtime by the mainstream media, which is, after all, dedicated to maintaining our consumerist lifestyles— dispute the overwhelming evidence that implicates human involvement in climate change. And even the best technological solutions carry with them unknown consequences. And so, at a time when serious changes need to take place if we are to survive, we find ourselves at a standstill. Clearly, another approach must be taken. What’s been missing in the environmental movement is any real sense of the livingness of the land, of the song that rises from the oceans and sweeps across the continents carrying with it the voices of every living thing, all the people, plants and animals, the mountains, lakes, rivers, forests, valleys, plains and deserts. We are under the thrall of Scientific Humanism—the concept that humans are the pinnacle of evolution. We believe that we can understand the nature of being and solve the problems of survival
through the activities of the mind and the applications of technology. We have separated ourselves from the living world and taken on the premise that anything that increases human wealth is good, without regard to the damage it may cause to other beings. While Scientific Humanism has increased our capacity to produce food and shelter and brought us numerous conveniences, it has perpetrated a population explosion and conditioned us to a lifestyle that is patently unsustainable. And, for the most part, we have lost the knowledge of how to live in sustainable relationship with the land—wisdom that was nurtured for tens of thousands of years by our ancestors. We have lost our capacity to hear the song of the Earth. This wisdom is still alive in cultures that maintain their ancestral rituals and live in close connection to their lands. Emissaries from these cultures arrive every day, calling to us to wake up, to look at the precipice we’re perched upon, to listen. And even people in our culture are being called to ancestral traditions, to recall the ancient wisdom of our lands and to awaken the consciousness of our people. I am one of these. Yet, in a sense, we are like whales swimming up the rivers or beaching themselves to call attention to the problems of the seas. Our voices seem unintelligible and are easily ignored. And for those of us who have been called from this culture to nurture our connections to the living world, it is so difficult to let go of our cultural conditioning. How do we, really, begin to hear the singing of the world? Not long ago, as I was sitting beside the fire in a tuki, a ceremo-
nial house, in a Huichol village in the Sierra Madre of Mexico, I asked this question. And it came to me that the way to begin is to stop looking at the artifacts—the things made by humans that cover the land—and to start paying real attention to the land itself, with its vitality of plants and animals and people, the movement of the rivers, of the wind and clouds, of the sunlight pouring down, nurturing every living thing. And to not ignore the places where the land has been marred, for that, too, is vibrantly alive. A couple days later, as I flew in a small plane from that remote place, it was so difficult to keep my eye from falling on the ranchos and roads. But I was able to see the livingness of the land and its endless diversity. And when I landed in Puerto Vallarta, beneath the roar of traffic, I could hear the song of the ocean and the wind moving among the trees, of the grass pushing up between the cobblestones. Now, as I sit on this land which holds my home and has nurtured my family so generously, I hear this song singing through the cedars and pines, alive in the grasses and ferns, in the squirrels and birds. It is calling for all of us to slow down, to look at the living world. For the Earth has endured for billions of years without us and can, in a few thousand years, easily repair the damage we have caused. Yet, we too are children of the Earth and she is calling to us, through every living thing, to wake up, to listen, to hear the song she sings and to recognize our part in that song. Through this listening, we will begin to learn again how to live in proper relationship with the land. —Jonathan Merritt
Sacred HOT FLASHES Fire
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES If Only This Were a Fish Tale
ILEXX // ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
SHARK. Even the word is scary.
Sharks have always gotten a bad rap, thanks to Jaws and the occasional surfer maiming. Actually there are only 5 shark deaths a year, which is less than those caused by soft drink machines. Nobody thinks of a shark as warm and fuzzy, but it turns out sharks are shy, curious, intuitive animals without whom we can’t exist. That’s right. People can’t exist without sharks. According to filmmaker Rob Stewart, scientists estimate that the global shark population has declined by 90% over the past 50
years. The decline is partly due to bad fishing practices (like the use of long-lines) but mostly it’s due to the lucrative shark-fin trade. In order to supply raw material for the expensive Asian delicacy, shark fin soup, the process goes like this: catch the shark, take the fin, and dump the finless shark back in the ocean. Without its fin, the shark is unable to swim. It sinks to the bottom where it is eaten alive by other fish. An unbelievable 100 million sharks are killed for their fins every year. After thriving for
450 million years, and starring as the world’s top predator, the shark has become a victim of the elite status humans ascribe to its body part. It’s another sad, pathetic story about humankind’s apparently
never-ending hunger for the rare, the unique and the statusconferring. But can it be deadly to our existence? Yes. In yet another example of just how connected humans really are with “all our relations,”
Collective Wisdom Initiative There is a field of collective
consciousness—often seen and expressed through metaphor— that is real and influential, yet invisible. When we come into alignment with this living field, with the Other, there is a deeper understanding of our connection with all things. The Collective Wisdom Initiative invites all people to actively join in the study and practice of collective wisdom. collectivewisdominitiative.org
Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 7
Slow Food USA Convinced that pleasure and quality in every-
day life can be achieved by slowing down, respecting the convivial traditions of the table, and celebrating the diversity of the earth’s bounty, Slow Food USA reconnects Americans with the people, traditions, plants, animals, fertile soils and waters that produce their food. Through their programs, which include Taste Education, Defending Biodiversity and Building Food Communities, Slow Food USA supports and celebrates the food traditions of North America. slowfoodusa.org
8 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
REVIVING RIGHT RELATIONSHIP Vallecitos: Restoring the Activist Spirit THE LATE ECO-THEOLOGIAN
Rev. Thomas Berry was known for diagnosing the root illness of the modern world as a kind of spiritual autism. “The universe,” he said, “is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” And yet most contemporary people, he says, speak only with themselves. “We are not talking to the rivers; we are not listening to the wind and stars. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking that conversation
we have shattered the universe.” It’s that shattered universe that moves many onto a lifelong path of public action, into a deep commitment to social healing of a wounded body politic. Unfortunately, as legions of activists will attest, the entrenched suffering and dysfunction of the world can prove more contagious than many at first anticipate. Epic quests for justice, freedom and peace often reveal questers’ succumbing to
the same shattering they’re trying to repair. Burgeoning rates of burnout among activists of all stripes have spurred some social change organizations, publicly and privately, towards a new kind of soul-searching—one that takes much more seriously the personal health and well-being of their members. The Vallecitos Mountain Refuge in northern New Mexico appeared in response to just such an inner climate of exhaus-
Project Happiness Communities from around the globe are
joining the conversation about looking inward rather than outward for happiness. Project Happiness promotes experiential tools and multi-media opportunities for exploring the relationship between our choices and happiness. Using a youth-oriented Happiness Handbook, an interactive website and a documentary film featuring the Dalai Lama, the Project supports people in discovering a new sense of awareness and compassion for themselves and others— from the inside out. projecthappiness.com
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the scenario being played out goes like this: the ocean is the source of between 50 and 70% of the world’s oxygen. The oxygen is created by phytoplankton, the one-celled plant creatures that convert sunlight, carbon dioxide and nutrients into cell material and our favorite breathable gas. These plankton are eaten by fish. Here’s the key: sharks keep the fish population from exploding, which leads to overeating of the plankton, and thus dramatic decreases in the amount of oxygen available for us air-breathers. These kinds of scenarios have been played out before. When top predators disappear, their prey populations increase dramatically and decimate lower levels of the food chain, sparking chain reactions of starvation. But never have we seen this played out on such a dramatic scale. Filmmaker Rob Stewart wants to educate people about the shark “so people can love them just like they love pandas, tigers, elephants and bears—because people protect those animals.” As he sees it, currently nobody is fighting for sharks. There’s no Greenpeace for sharks out there. His documentary, Sharkwater, hopes to change that. At some point, people need to realize that the shark’s survival is essential to their own. P.S. It turns out sharks are picky eaters and don’t even like humans. What they love is fish. For more information rent the film, Sharkwater, or go to Sharkwater.com or Savingsharks.com.
THE VALLECITOS MOUNTAIN REFUGE HISTORIC MAIN LODGE
Sacred Land Film Project Creators of the acclaimed
documentary, In the Light of Reverence, the Sacred Land Film Project produces a variety of media and educational materials to deepen public understanding of sacred places, indigenous cultures and environmental justice. Its mission is to use journalism and activism to rekindle reverence for land, increase respect for cultural diversity and spiritual practices, stimulate dialogue about connections between nature and culture, and protect sacred lands. sacredland.org.
tion, illness, and despair often present—if not always acknowledged—in activist circles. Enlisting contemplative spirituality as a new ally in the struggle for social change, it serves as a retreat and refuge for activists from the nonprofit sector who need to recharge from the rigors of work in the trenches. For many it reawakens core passions and a sense of purpose driven underground by their overworked, ON RETREAT AT VALECITOS
overstressed lifestyles. Environmental lawyer Grove Burnett and community organizer Linda Velarde brought their respective experience with Buddhism and Vipassana meditation to bear on the needs of contemporary activists when they purchased the 135-acre wilderness ranch in the 90’s. To them, the magical interplay of majestic old growth forest, lush alpine meadows and abundant
wildlife, plus lakes, a swimming pond and the Vallecitos river, spoke of a “mountain sanctuary.” Perched at over 8,000 feet in the San Juan Mountains near Taos, Vallecitos welcomes activists of all spiritual orientations to connect with the land, each other and themselves through a range of contemplative practices. Though participants often highlight the quality of care and nurturing they receive, it’s not
because they’re steeped in resortstyle luxuries. In fact, attending a retreat means dispensing with phones, computers and, except for some solar-powered lighting, even electricity. Connections at Vallecitos are direct and uncompromised. It’s back to basics as retreat-goers rediscover the songs and silence of the natural world and their own inner spirits. While activists have often been privately inspired in their work by their spirituality, today they’re growing much more inclined to seek common ground with allies outside of their own traditions in a shared quest to affirm the essential place of the sacred in the movements for social change. Increasingly inspired to listen to “difference”—in their communities, in the natural world and in themselves—activists are helping generate a whole new foundation for social change work. At places like Vallecitos, the political is no longer personal. It’s transpersonal. Vallecitos is open to everyone. Meditation groups, nonprofits and other groups may rent Vallecitos for meetings, retreats and gatherings. vallecitos.org —CYNTHIA FRISCH AND CHRIS SCHLAKE
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Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World At its
165-acre Earth Sanctuary, the Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World envisions a new relationship between the inner life of the child and the beauty and wonder of the universe. With programs designed to nurture the faculties of imagination and intuition, the Center enables participants to form a bond of intimacy and a sense of veneration for the sacred natural world. beholdnature.org
Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 9
Sacred HOT FLASHES Fire
I’m a Medicine Woman, Too! A Tale of Herbal Wisom & Personal Empowerment for Budding Healers and Daydream Believers BY JESSE WOLF HARDIN Hops Press 2009
A MOVING NEW BOOK of
multi-cultural wisdom and deep nature connection, personal empowerment and plant medicine, I’m a Medicine Woman, Too!, is now available from author and illustrator, Jesse Wolf Hardin, cofounder of the Animá Shaman Path and Medicine Woman Teachings. While Hardin’s previous seven books on nature spirituality and self growth are clearly for mature seekers, his latest was 10 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
conceived as his first children’s book. Unexpectedly, a number of grownups have been buying it for themselves. Enchanting color illustrations and enticing text introduce a global tradition of herbal medicine and wise women healers while tracing a young girl’s evolution from self-doubt to self-assurance. In the process, over 50 species
Threshold Choirs The all-women Threshold Choirs
honor the ancient tradition of singing at the bedsides of people who are struggling: some with living, some with dying. The voice, as the original human instrument, is a true and gracious vehicle for compassion and comfort. The choirs provide opportunities for women to share the sacred gifts of their voices at life’s thresholds and in community with each other. thresholdchoir.org
traditional mano and metate grinding stones. “You can feel their hands in yours,” Hardin writes. “They whisper sweet hints in the wind in the trees, in the yard or the shadowy far ends of a neighborhood park…. These generations of Medicine Women want to teach you what you need. But even more importantly, they want to remind you of the strength and knowledge that you’ve already got.” One of the things that motivated Hardin was the large number of women and men he’s counseled and taught, who discovered that their adult insecurity was rooted in growing up without fully loving and believing in themselves. His message of empowerment and possibility is as important for boys as for girls, and for men and women as well. “The job of the Medicine Woman isn’t just to heal sickness,” the author concludes, “but to help make everything healthier and more beautiful. Each person works in her personal ways to both create and improve the world. Each follows her heart, knows her purpose, and answers her own special calling. And each must be brave enough to live her wildest dreams, no matter how hard that ever seems.” medicinewomantoo.com —ADRIENNE KANT
PHOTO BY TEPIC//ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
BURNING BOOKS
of commonly used medicinal plants are accurately portrayed, with many of them featured in a fun “Name the Herb” game. Hardin’s work has been praised by leading-edge thinkers including Gary Snyder, Joanna Macy, Ralph Metzner, Starhawk and Terry Tempest Williams. I’m a Medicine Woman, Too! has also won the support of herbalists like Rosemary Gladstar, Leslie Tierra and Margi Flint. Hardin’s eight-year-old daughter, Rhiannon, served as his inspiration, as she first resisted believing she could ever be a medicine woman like the healers she had met. “Whether you know it or not,” the author advises her, “you’re part of a long chain of women and girls throughout history, reaching out hand to hand from mothers to daughters and teachers to students, from the most ancient human tribes right up until our modern day times.” Readers are reminded that connection to true self, spirit and the powers of the earth are a legacy of nearly every continent, race, and land based culture. Among the 35 frame-worthy color illustrations are eleven portraits of medicine women, including a Hispanic curandera in her Botanica shop, an Anglo herb chef, a bear-medicine shaman, an Ozark gardener and a White Mt. Apache with her
Sacred LOGS FOR Fire THE FIRE
Mud & Mercy Held by the Earth, Healed by the Heat BY DIANNA VAGIANOS MILLER
BILLYFOTO//ISTOCKPHOTO.COM
THE FIRST TIME THAT I KNELT AND CRAWLED
into the mud hut I knew that I was crawling into the earth womb, the one that would take me back into herself. My cousin invited me to a sacred lodge ceremony after September 11th. Sitting in the low structure with a central pit, mud floor and a dome of tree limbs and coverings, I was scared. In the round darkness, only my green towel separated my body from the cold hardening earth. Would the earth mother
accept me the way that I was: broken? When I asked for a cleansing, would the mud world heal me? Could I be honest with myself and pull out the muck that had rooted itself deeply into my body and heart? Once everyone had crawled through the low entrance and seated themselves in a circle, the fire keeper brought in stone people that had been heating up beneath burning firewood for a few hours. “Welcome grand-
father,” the people whispered after each stone was laid into the central pit. “Welcome grandmother.” Women sprinkled ground sage and sweetgrass onto the stones, and the herbs burned orange, singing in the darkness, releasing their healing scent to our lungs. After the bucket of water was passed to Bruce, who would be pouring water on the hot stones, the flap that served as a door was closed and we all sat in darkness. Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 11
It was time to feel this unexplained force, this Wankan Tanka, Great Spirit, and let him undo all the twisting pain and tangled emotions that I allowed into my body after my self-image had been chipped away with what I loved most: words. I was 29 years old and had begun to reject my Greek family’s dynamics and woeful choruses. There was a struggle going on as I pulled away to a place of privacy, a place of my own identity, and I felt torn between the love of family and the adult dance of seeking my own sacred space. Already I knew people who abandoned their families in the name of personal sanity, but I couldn’t walk away from their love, as my love kept me tied to them. The sacred lodge ceremony consists of four rounds. The first round, that night was individual prayer. Each person prayed out loud in the darkness. I was nervous. I hated hearing my voice as I spoke in front of strangers. I heard
again. This was a round of praises and songs. People sang individually. Someone played her drum. At one point everyone made animal sounds so loudly, the dog on the farm came and howled at the lodge. I howled in a tiny voice. A hawk screeched. Eagle cried. Tears. The intimacy of the lodge felt holy. Sitting in the dark on my towel sweating with a community of mostly strangers allowed me to remember others in my own prayers and thoughts. These brothers and sisters, their pain and depression, represented the people of other nations and continents, humans and animals, and somehow in the moist muddiness of the experience I understood the phrase Aho Mi’takuye’Oyasin, to all my relations. I was one soul in a universe of beings and somehow I was connected by my breath, thoughts and actions to those sitting with me, to those sharing the earth. The third round was the scariest because no
IN THE MUD WOMB, EVERYONE SITS, SWEATY AND MUDDY WITH INTENTION AND PRAYER. Bruce pour water on the stones after he made his intentions. It sounded like the stones joined us with their own prayers as heat rose to meet my body. People shared their intentions and prayers. One voice flowed into the next until it was my turn. I felt like an outsider even in the lodge, inadequate in my words and responses to others. I don’t remember what words my shaky voice made that first night, but I closed with “aho” as Bruce did and it seemed to mean “amen.” Water danced on the stone people. At the end of the round Bruce said that we should forgive the terrorists so that we can heal. I was dirty in the dark. My towel was soaked with sweat that was pouring from my skin soaking my t-shirt and skirt. My hair was as wet as it was when I swam in the ocean. I felt mud in between my fingers, on my bare feet. It made me want to live in the mud, in the earth. I needed this ceremony to balance the disparate aspects of my life because I couldn’t make sense of everything alone. I longed for mud and mercy. After the first round the flap was opened, and the fire keeper went outside to bring in more stones. Once again the stones were given an offering of herbs and the bucket of water was passed over the stone pit. The flap was closed 12 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
one talked. Each person sat in silence and processed their individual intents as Bruce poured water on the stone people. The stones mounted higher in the pit as the intensity of heat paralleled the intensity of the ceremony. There was crying and coughing and deep breathing. I sat with my arms hugging my knees and cried. I listened to the voice inside of me and heard many things. I knew that I would have to do a lot of this work to cleanse myself before I could go out into the community as a poetry therapist and support others in their own healing journeys. In this round I knew that I had to hear my heart to heal it, to show people compassion but do not let them disturb my psychic space. I became a howling wolf. I thought about my body pain. My once flat feet were curving into arches. My arthritic hip was letting go of her childhood anger. My spine was stretching straight up towards the grandfather sky as knots released, cracking and bursting into the lodge atmosphere. I didn’t know if I could stand this much longer. My face was flushed and dripping with sweat. I wanted water and food. I wanted cold air not the hot air that rose from the stones. I wanted to be healed and illuminated. But I was still me. In the mud womb, everyone sits, sweaty
and muddy with intention and prayer. “Our illnesses are gone,” Bruce said. We all heard voices inside our hearts that would become our guidance, our healing. I heard words inside me telling me how to better deal with the family. My body felt different. I wanted to step out into the night and stretch and live in this new body with fewer kinks and burdens just as much as I wanted to sit still in the center of the earth and pray. And pray. In the fourth round, each person spoke a prayer of thanksgiving. We all wanted to take this with us. This round was where I first saw light beings swirling in the black night of the lodge. I saw blue and green swirls, purple lights spiraling up toward the curved ceiling of the rounded dome. I thought I was hallucinating from not eating and being in the presence of these other not-so-worldly-minded people. Later that night Bruce said, “Did you see them? They are the spirit helpers.” Going through this experience, I felt that I was so different from everyone else. As we emerged from what felt like the heart of the earth mother after the fourth and final round we all seemed startled. I wasn’t so different from everyone else after all. Stepping out of the mud hut into the moonlit sky, I was surprised that hours had passed. It felt like I had been cradled by the earth mother for a few moments. The cooler air filled my lungs as I walked outside with people who had crawled on the earth in prayer, who released illnesses and sang their animal spirits’ songs. I knew that this ceremony was powerful in its simplicity and truth. When I went home I felt calm and deeply healed. As I grew my hair out and begin to shed my lifestyle of worry and shame, guilt and fear, I walked tall with my feet grounded on my mother, my spirit reaching up towards the evening sky and the illumination that is the moon. But after a few weeks my body craved the mud world again. My cells, crevices and curves longed to sit on the warming spring earth curled like a fetus in a mother’s womb. I missed the feeling of my flushed face releasing toxins back into the earth mother. The next time that I knelt in the mud in front of the sacred lodge, I knew I would make myself an offering to the Great Spirit who has shown me Dianna Vagianos Miller is a certified
poetry therapist and teacher who lives in Shelton, Connecticut. She is currently writing a novel that takes place in Greece.
Sacred RECONNECTING Fire WITH THE EARTH
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The Wonder of Living in the Heart Life doesn’t have to be a struggle. BY RINA BURLESON THERE IS WONDER IN THE WORLD, in everything around us, just below the surface of so-
called “ordinary” every-day reality. You can notice it most in quiet outdoor places—in deep, hushed woods or open fields of flowing grass. You can feel it in quiet, lapping waters and gentle breezes—but you have to listen for it, and you have to listen from a place deep inside, in the center of your being.
That place inside is where your heart beats its gentle rhythm, that place you point to when you point to yourself, that place where your deepest, truest self lives. Babies are born living from this place. Small children still know how to live from there. But we, in Western culture, teach them to live in their minds rather than in their bodies and their hearts. We may be the only culture that does this. Aboriginal peoples grow up still living in their hearts, still connected to nature and wonder. We do not. We grow up living in our heads, disconnected from our deepest experiences, from our connection to the Earth and to all of life. I am convinced that this is part of why we are destroying the Earth and aboriginal peoples are not—because we (unlike them) are out of touch with our bodies and hearts, where our sense of kinship with the rest of life lives. By learning to live in our hearts again we can reconnect with that sense of kinship and with our deepest experiences of life. We can reconnect with the wonder and immense power of nature. When you live from your heart, your sense of wonder—that sense we all had as children—will awaken. Walking through woods and fields you will notice that everything around you now has a spiritual quality to it, as though there is another dimension, numinous, just below the surface of things. There is something very familiar and comfortable, something very right about this feeling, as though you are right where you belong. You may find yourself talking to trees, as well as to wind, water, grass, and the earth itself, and you may find that they respond. You may discover that you are surrounded by a kind of love and support that you had no knowledge of before, because you lived in your mind and wore the blinders of the scientific world view. You feel as though you are coming home after a long absence, and in a very real sense you are doing just that. You are coming home to the way life was meant to be lived. You are coming home to your truest, deepest self. You are coming home to… well, life. There are many other reasons to live from the heart. It is in the heart center that we feel our inherent worth as human beings, and that we feel the inherent worth of all other beings. The heart center is a place of love for yourself Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 13
and for all of Creation. It is the place where you experience your larger self—where you know, as one of my teachers kept telling me, that “you are so much more than this.” It is in your heart center that you sense the truth about people and their feelings. If you listen from the heart you can tell whether a person really means what he says. When someone tells you they love you, listen—not from your feeling heart but from your heart center. I admit there is some confusion about this, because sometimes when we say that someone is following her heart we mean that she is following her feelings. This is not what I am talking about. The heart center is the heart chakra, inside your chest in the place you point to when you point to yourself. It is an energy center, a meeting place of body and soul, and a window into the Divine. As you learn to trust your heart center, life stops being a struggle. Somehow you simply know what to do to take care of yourself and to get what you need. Your heart center is where your intuition lives, your sixth sense. It can smell opportunity as a bear smells out honey. It will urge you to the right place at the right time so that opportunity simply falls into your lap. It may lead you to something as simple as an encounter with a friend, or to something as profound as the beginning of a new career. But it is always wise to follow the urgings of your heart, because it is the place of inner wisdom.
If you listen to your heart center it will lead you, unsuspecting and unknowing, along the path leading to your true calling. That calling is something that you are talented at and that you love doing, and when you are following your heart center and your calling you will find that the money will follow. This is what Joseph Campbell is talking about when he says “follow your bliss.” The heart center is a place of deep wisdom. It gives advice (if you speak to it) far wiser than anything the mind can come up with. There are many reasons to learn to live from the heart. There are many reasons to encourage our children to keep living from their hearts. But the impetus for learning to live this way can’t come from the logical mind—it must come from the heart itself. That is the only kind of motivation that really works. To me the most passion-inspiring reason to live in our hearts is the experience of life that results. The wonder, power, and beauty of nature become palpable—you feel them flowing through and around you, linking you to everything that is, and you are part of that flow, of that field of numinous power. Life is wondrous and you find you are so much more than you knew. Regina Burleson lives and writes in the Green Mountains of Vermont.
To help you learn to live in you heart, Rina Burleson suggests one of the following books. Living from the Heart: Heart Rhythm Meditation for Energy, Clarity, Peace, Joy, and Inner Power by Puran Khan Bair, Three Rivers Press, 1998. This book is full of meditations to harmonize your breath with the rhythm of your heart, thereby centering your awareness and consciousness in the heart. The Secret Teachings of Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner, Bear & Co., 2004. This book is about the depth of meaning that can be found by relating to nature from the heart. Although the first half of the book is somewhat scientific in approach, the second half is passionate and poetic, and the appendix has exercises to help you relate to nature, people, and yourself from the heart.
A Confluence of Rivers Discovering a Spiritual Context for the Environmental Movement BY CYNTHIA FRISCH AS A CHILD, WHENEVER NEAR A RIVER, I
always wanted to find its beginning and end, an adventure that usually ended with rather wet and muddy results. Rivers followed me into adulthood in both concrete and metaphoric ways. In 1982, when my meditation friends were given elegant spiritual names of gods and goddesses, I was given the rather unpoetic name “Tunga,” which sounded to me like an Amazonian queen. It was actually a sacred river in India, and years later on my first work trip to the Amazon River, the significance of that name became clear.
Sacred FIRESTARTERS Fire
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THUNDERHEADS BUILD OVER THE AMAZON RIVER AND RAINFOREST TREES
Phases of my life which at first appeared unrelated now feel like a confluence of rivers, merging to reveal insights into our world and what it might take to sustain it. In 1996, after almost ten years living in a meditation center as a staff member for an international foundation, I experienced a series of incredibly synchronistic events that put me at the heart of the environmental movement. The scenery of my life suddenly changed from chanting and yoga to press conferences and public hearings. I threw myself into an intense rhythm with full force, for the rapids of the environmental movement rush furiously for
those who understand that the deadline is just around the bend. After three years of coalition building, grassroots advocacy, and legal and legislative action, something emerged from deep within me. The landscape of my spiritual background had given me a unique perspective, and I began to sense that something crucial was missing in the environmental movement. One day during meditation, an image appeared: I was leading a workshop and all the participants were crying--some with just a single tear, others truly sobbing. I knew these people had fully embraced their
disconnection with the earth, and the pain from this awareness was overwhelming. From this image, I realized that what was missing was a context for the environmental movement—one that had a spiritual foundation. I understood that, while critical, the activism and sustainable technological advances couldn’t fully accomplish the vision of protecting this amazing planet until humanity at large began to inwardly reconnect with the earth. I sensed the key to creating this context could be found in traditional cultures, where the ancient and intimate connection with nature was still alive. Humanity’s very own exis-
AFTER HIS TALK, HE LOOKED DIRECTLY AT ME—AND TEARS INSTANTLY CAME TO MY EYES. tence depended upon these cultures’ spiritual knowledge of nature, their practices of honoring the earth, and their connection to the earth’s mystical secrets. My spiritual path and environmental work began to converge with yet another tributary: training as an anthropologist. Calling my field of study “The Shamanic Paradigm of the Earth,” I established three goals: first, to study the fundamental principles of indigenous peoples and their relationship to the earth; second, to focus on how the medicine men and women of these cultures connect and communicate with the forces of nature; and third, to develop a means by which to bring this wisdom into mainstream culture. Those three goals have guided the flow of my life since that time. At a 2001 conference, I met Dr. Mark Plotkin, president of the Amazon Conservation Team, a non-profit organization that preserves Amazonian rainforest and the regions’ sha16 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
manic traditions. Mark brought a Colombian shaman to join him on a panel. When Don Luciano Mutumbajoy spoke, he gave voice to my inner-most thoughts, describing the pressing need for those of us in the dominant culture to embrace the spiritual technology of preserving the earth that comes from indigenous wisdom, not just pursue modern technological efforts. After his talk, he looked directly at me—and tears instantly came to my eyes. A week later, I met Mark at his office near D.C., thus beginning my relationship as consultant and friend of the Amazon Conservation Team. With them and in other settings, I visited Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru and participated in various indigenous ceremonies. While each was important and very powerful, I was still looking to awaken my own personal connection and direct communication with the elements of nature. That opportunity finally came when I met Dr. J.E. Williams, a naturopathic and shamanic healer and author of
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MORNING BREAKS ON THE AMAZON
The Andean Codex. His Q’ero guide and elder, Sebastian, had received a message to initiate a small group of people outside of his community into his family’s traditional path of earth shamanism. I worked with Williams to organize that small group, and in the fall of 2007 we traveled to Peru. During that extraordinary trip, a door that had always been within me suddenly opened. What we experienced was likened to a wedding with the Apus, the mountain spirits, and I was able to connect with them in the most tangible way. I recognized the elements, and the earth Herself, as indeed living beings, and I experienced firsthand the synergistic relationship between humans and the forces of nature. I had a life-changing awakening: humanity and the spirits of nature are in a reciprocal relationship of offering and receiving. We keep each other alive. During our time together, Sebastian shared his great concern that the Apus could die if not ritually cared for and remembered. From his teachings, and my own experience, I clearly understood the necessity of spiritual exchange and the importance of bringing a massive shift in consciousness to the dominant cultures of the world. While encouraged to see the decades of hard work by activists paying off with the popularity of the Green Movement, I am concerned that action is focused on the symptom of our environmental problems, not on the essential root cause, our spiritual disconnection from the earth. When people and businesses are joining in the momentum of “going green,” they do not necessarily understand the deeper context of being green—the state of consciousness from which authentic action springs. In his book, Where Rivers and Mountain Sing, musicologist Theodore Levin describes fishing in central Asia with Tolya, a traditional Tuvan throat singer. Tolya sings to the water with extraordinary vocals that seem to amplify the river’s own sounds. He says he does this as an offering, because every natural place has a spirit-master who likes to hear the song of the place or thing it protects. When Levin asks, “So when you were just throat-singing, you were imitating the sound of the river’s own singing?” Tolya looks surprised. “Of course,” he replies. “The river is alive. Rivers sing.” My work and my hope is that, like Tolya, we and future generations come to know once again the songs of the Earth and of those places in nature we hold dear. No doubt, you will find me by the banks of a river.
Sacred POETRY Fire
Capricious by rm mist
Last August as barometers fell and skies spun their pewter webs, we dreamed of rain. Watching thirsty sourwoods blush before the light shifted, we pressed that buxom summer to fill our shelves with bottles stacked high in bread and butter pickles, spicy salsa and home brew. Those dog days courted the fat winds out of Alabama, teased us to seventh heaven and hid downpours in fox grapes and persimmons. That year we looked skyward, seeking safe haven in farmers almanacs. Days sailed toward summer’s end within the graceful orbit of Earth, and we prayed like refugees for any clever idea to reunite land and sky. Patient love sweltered in us between line dried sheets. We believed sundogs were the omens; that we could pull them apart like wishbones to find water. Instead our oracles hid in flowers,
still buds under the dry soil in the warts of a mother bulb. This April, they swelled open, right on time – each lusciously wet and brilliantly blue. Yellow anthers shivered Jove offerings onto the winged heels of bees. This August we wake to cool mornings pregnant with thunderheads that burst like ripe plums most afternoons. Our gardens yield a casual bounty and bullfrogs practice swallowing the pond. We wish Eden weren’t so capricious, but our wild hearts know better. We are the fickle ones and paradise meets us here.
rm mist lives on the South Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee; she has written poetry forever; published her first collection, Inviting Calamity, in 2007; and is compiling the next one. Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 17
REDWOODS IN MARIPOSA GROVE, YOSIMITE NATIONAL PARK, CALIFORNIA
REDWOOD SPE EC H, WATE RSHED PRAY ERS The Poetics of Place
By Francis Weller
Photographs by Phillip Colla / Oceanlight.com
“Getting intimate with nature and knowing our own wild natures is a matter of going face to face many times.” Gary Snyder Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 19
PLACE,
to indigenous culture and the indigenous soul, is a living presence. The particularity of place, i.e., known rivers, mountains, trees, rocks, caves, added another dimension to life that is quite foreign to modern consciousness. To place oneself within a living geography is to know our self situated specifically. What this means is that there is always an orientation to life, a direction that can aid in the experience of meaning. The frequent lament by individuals within our culture is one of feeling lost and disoriented. Place is sensual, particular, felt as an otherness with which to relate. Stories saturated places in traditional cultures, filling the ground with mythological rumblings, the most noted storylines being the Dreamtime myths of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. To the people, the ancestors, these pathways marked the ways of survival. They led to water and food sources, but more, they also provided a palpable way of encountering the sacred geography. To know this is to know in your body that you are walking upon holy ground. The Aboriginal peoples knew this quality as djang. James Cowen in his book, Letters (p. 8), relates: For them djang embodies a special power that can be felt only by those susceptible to its presence. In this way my nomad friends are able to journey from one place to another without ever feeling that they are leaving their homeland. What they feel in the earth, what they hear in the trees are the primordial whispers emanating from an ancient source. And it is this source, linked as it is to the Dreaming, that they acknowledge each time they feel the presence of the djang in the earth under their feet. Two days after my fortieth birthday I made my way to Armstrong Woods in Guerneville, a small town located about 10 miles from the Pacific Ocean in Northern California. The town is situated on the Russian River, a beautiful waterway that begins some ninety miles to the north. From every perspective you see the tall ones, the redwoods that tower above the valley floor and during the winter these trees draw an amazing amount of water out of our storms. The town was named after George Guerne, a man who made his mark in the timber industry late in the 1800’s. At that time great stands of redwoods covered most of this area. Now, this woods, set aside by Colonel James Armstrong in the 1880’s, is one of the last remaining old-growth redwood groves in Sonoma County. It had been raining hard for the previous few days and on this day the rains persisted. I had been planning this pilgrimage for a while and when I woke that morning the heavy rains disappointed me. I lay in bed for a while until I decided I had to go. I gathered my gear and got in my truck for the drive to Armstrong. It poured for the fortyminute drive till I reached my destination. I pulled into the parking lot of the woods and it was deserted. The heavy weather had made a visit unappealing to others and so I had the old ones to myself. These trees, sequoia sempervirens, are among the oldest living beings on the planet. They can grow over 300 feet high and live for over 2000 years. I came to a stop and turned off the truck. The moment I did, the rain stopped and the sun appeared. I got out of the truck and made my way through puddles and mud to the trailhead. Being late January, the air was cold, and the mist was high in the treetops, adding to the sudden brilliance and beauty of the day. The ground was saturated and I made my way slowly down the path. The fragrance in the woods was musty, earthy, rich with the smell of decay and growth at the same time. Each tree carried a 20 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
profusion of jeweled droplets suspended from their branches. I came to one old giant known as “Parsons Tree,” and gazed upwards to its peak. Some 300 feet up, out of my sight, it broke into the open. But down here at base, I was the recipient of the most exquisite shower of gems. Each drop that fell carried the sun’s light, came to the body of the earth pushed by the force of gravity and offered to the earth as a blessing. I was mesmerized for a long time drinking in the beauty of this combination of water and light. Already I felt gratitude and reached to touch the skin of this elder. Still I knew I had to continue on, not knowing what it was I was searching for. Deeper into the woods I went, enjoying the profound silence that the woods offered to me on that day. Even the bird life was subdued. The occasional blue jay announced its presence with a loud bark, but other than the sound of water running in the creek beds, I was walking in silence. At one point in my sauntering I came to a redwood with one of the familiar openings that are often featured in pictures of these trees; openings deep enough to step into and stand in. I felt moved to do so, dropped the foot or so to the base and stood there surrounded on three sides by the living membrane of this enormous presence. In this stillness, where only my breathing was audible, another voice was heard. Clearly and distinctly the voice said, “I am the Buddha.” I waited quietly and heard the words repeated. “I am the Buddha. This is the dharma and this is your sangha.” I recognized the words and their meanings. I myself had not spent much time studying Buddhist’s teachings but was aware of these specific terms. The Buddha was the teacher, the dharma was the teaching and the sangha was the community that protected the student and provided the student with support and spiritual encouragement. I could only surmise that these words were coming from this ancient redwood. This old one was the Buddha, was the teacher, the forest and its complex interplay of kingdoms and phyla, species and families was the teaching and the community of sorrel and ferns, bay laurels, Douglas firs and redwoods, creeks and stones, mushrooms and lichen, live oaks and blue jays were indeed my spiritual community. I stood motionless to see if it continued. I finally responded and said I understood the message. Despite the speech of this redwood being brief, it was profound. I had never heard the others speak so directly. I had moments of intuition or images that conveyed a meaningful exchange but nothing this tangible. And so I stood a long time in this being’s body, feeling as though I was wrapped within its essence. I remained there in the darkness of the tree and finally stepped out. For the next few days I thought about this encounter. This redwood’s speech was so intelligent. Somehow, in some way, it knew to use those exact words. I say that because I am so quick to question the legitimacy of something, particularly things that are outside the familiar. To choose those words, Buddha, dharma and sangha, forced me to recognize that the origin of this thought was outside my own consciousness because I would never have used them to speak to myself. That thought sent me into a period of wondering about the link between the outer world and myself, a link that I previously had thought was less definitive than this experience revealed to me. Perhaps the passage between outer and inner was more porous than I had known, than I was led to believe. Perhaps I am known by the outer world in ways that I had not permitted myself to imagine before. What was equally as important however, was the event itself and
the teaching it carried for me. We have been far too long detached from nature, from the particulars of the world and her ways of instructing us in how to be a part of the mosaic of life. This knowing is what made us human in the best sense of the word. “Human” shares the same root origins as “humus” meaning “of the earth.” Despite all our fantasies of transcendence, resurrection and ascension, despite all our technologies that separate us and insulate us from the sensual world, we are creatures of this earth and our substance is informed by the speech of the world. I go back to this redwood tree, this particular tree that I now visit, with a feeling of friendship and a growing familiarity, and realize that I am hungry for a language that conveys the truth of our bond with the world. Traditional cultures rarely had words that specified generalities like “tree,” but had ways of identifying an individual presence in the woods. This language of particularity generates a much more sensuous relationship due to the simple fact that naming requires knowing. And I think of how little time we spend in the woods, along riverbanks, in the hills and mountains. These have become vacation destinations but seldom relationships that we evolve with and nurture, relationships that endure through time. How can we come to know the individualities that exist in the world without time and patience, without attention and relationship? It may be that much of what the soul suffers from is directly related to this breach in its connective tissue with the animate world. Place itself becomes for us a refuge, a communion that offers us a more thorough expression of our innate complexity. Our entire biological structure is designed for engagement with the world. Every sense organ is a gateway for encounter and through this exchange the greater definition of who we are is achieved. The senses are the ways in which our bond with the world is consummated and made sacramental. The radical genius William Blake said, “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” It is through the blood and sensuality of this flesh that we become incarnate. Till then, till we know that our place is in the world and our bodies emerged from this earth, we cannot know who we are. Language too, is rooted to place, to the land. Our imagination is shaped by landscape and topography. Our language reflects the abundance, the richness of our belonging to a complex and vital community of life, or it reflects a poverty borne of exile. I am enthralled with the language of indigenous people. Not only does it carry a beauty in its sound, but also the words themselves reflect an unbroken arc between the speaker and the surround. In many of their languages there is no dichotomy, no separation that strands the human in a point of separation as cold observer. When speech emerges from a Diné or an Inuit man or woman, the cosmos is imminent, not abstracted or referenced. There is seldom the separation between subject and object as we find in our English language. In most traditional speech, there is a continuity of relations that is evident within the structure of the language.
My grief is immense when I feel into the depth of our departure from the earth. Sitting here now, I see a tree with a golden ladder rising from its base. A fungus has emerged from this dying elder, an enormous Monterey Pine and this stairway arises in its decay, orchestrating a new beauty. The sun is illuminating the new growth and it offers itself to us with a radiance that makes me think of Jacob and his celestial stairway. I have been trying to place myself back into the world, as if I could leave it! Yet, spiritually that is what I have been conditioned to do. I
THIS KNOWING IS WHAT MADE US HUMAN IN THE BEST SENSE OF THE WORD. “HUMAN” SHARES THE SAME ROOT ORIGINS AS “HUMUS” MEANING “OF THE EARTH.”
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carry a deep conditioning shaped by two thousand years of images, stories and ideals that renders life here on earth as some form of sentence to be commuted through death. We console ourselves with the deaths of those we love by saying they are now in a better place. The earth is to be transcended: heaven is the better world that will somehow make up for the pain and sorrow of time spent here, our final reward, as it were. I find this offensive and could never believe that the Jesus I know would have ever felt such contempt for the earth. This was the man who constantly referred to the earth, to her creatures and the growing things as examples in his teachings. This was the man who retreated to the wilderness on a number of occasions to gather himself back to himself. Nature, the wild, the world contained and held him. The wild undoubtedly shaped our original words: imitations of animal sounds, wind, thunder, ocean and river. The lustrous blend of sounds quickened the imagination and a cursory glance at tribal 22 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
language reveals a richly textured, complex syntax of metaphor and imagery deeply imbued with the surrounding world. Our modern lexicon however, reveals an erosion in our flowered language. My feeling is that as our senses are deprived of the multiple cadences from a living world, so too does our language atrophy. We are left with rhetoric instead of speech that can bring us to tears or into symmetry with the others with whom we share the world. In a very real way language and place are synonymous. They reflect what we inhabit, where we dwell. Thomas Berry said that our imagination is only as rich as the diversity of the life around us. If we inhabit a terrain of microchips, cell phones and video monitors, we speak two-dimensionally, asensually, abstractly because there is nothing sensual about these realities. If, on the other hand, our daily round includes sunlight, fragrances from the green earth, songbirds, tastes of berries picked from the bush, then our sensual minds stir and the words become as richly textured as the terrain. Our language has an ecology and it is as varied as what it is given. Jay Griffiths speaks to this in her book, Wild: An Elemental Journey (p. 25), “All languages have long aspired to echo the wild world that gave them growth and many indigenous peoples say that their words for creatures are imitations of their calls. According to phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, language ‘is the very voice of the trees, the waves, the forest.’” Oral traditions are richly imagistic, metaphorical and creative. Stories were held in memory, that is, by heart, and the wisdom was continuous from generation to generation. We have a hard time memorizing our social security number let alone a phenologic account of a living system. What migrates when? What is ripe now? When do we relocate to the winter grounds? How do we prepare the acorns? How do we resolve conflict? How does one become a man or a woman? Stories were the carriers of this wisdom and the words used to transport the stories were alive with meaning and significance. I want to see our words jump off the ground, erupt from a sensual earth, musty, humid, gritty. I want to taste words like honey, sweet and dripping with eternity. I want to hear words coming from my mouth and your mouth that are so beautiful we wince with joy at their departure and arrival. I want to touch words that carry weight and substance, words that have shape and body, curve and tissue. I want to feel what we say as though the words were holy utterances surfacing from a pool where the gods drink. What if our words could once again echo the larger reality of the sacred and not solely the world of economics? But that would take an act of remembrance, a slowing downward into a state of presence, awareness and being. And this means being in the world. Enough of this talk that makes us strangers! I want to know I belong here and if my words can say to you that I am a man of this earth, this particular piece of earth, then I will feel like I arrived. My language must be redwood speech, watershed prayers, oak savannah, coupled in an erotic way with fog, heat, wind, rain and hills, sweetgrass and jackrabbits, wild iris and ocean current. My land is my language and only then can my longing for eloquence by granted. Until then I will fumble and fume and ache for a style of speaking that tells you who I am.
S N O S S E L OR E L F PEOP E H T THE F O CORN .” y d a e I am r
y, d a e r e r a u o “If y erview with katl e an int AkaEh z Omek Gonzale Eric aron Brown By Sh
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Erick Gonzalez was born in Guatemala in 1959. At two, paralyzed by polio, he was taken to traditional Mayan healers by his grandmother. He recovered and, as he grew, he spent many hours with the elders as they shared their medicine. He remembers how, at four or five in the morning, there would be lines of people bearing gifts in exchange. Erick came to California in the 70’s during the indigenous genocide of the Guatemalan civil war. His life changed when he met the Mexika elder, Tlakaelel, who was bringing the teachings of the four arrows north into America. He “fell in love” with his teachings of traditional ways, and traveled with him throughout Mexico and the American Southwest, learning the ceremonies, sacred dances and way of the council fire. He was called back to Guatemala to work with elders in village cooperatives, but the 80’s were a dangerous time. During the war, indigenous ceremonies had to be kept hidden, as those who participated were regularly targeted by death squads. The situation improved somewhat with the Peace Accord of 1996, which recognized and protected 68,000 ancestral sacred sites. But even today, Mayans who practice their ancient ways are heavily and often violently persecuted by Evangelical Christians, who call them brujos—witches. Erick, whose Mexika name, OmeAkaEhekatl, means “GetThis,” spent more than 25 years learning the healing ways of ceremony and council with Native spiritual elders from Mexico, North America, Colombia, Peru, and Guatemala. In 2005, he was adopted into the Ts’aalth Clan, the five-finned killer whale people of the Eagle Clan of the Haida, and given the name Gaada, meaning “Supernatural Light.” When we meet, Erick lights a candle. “It’s important to do this first,” he says. His voice is soft and his Guatemalan accent flavors his English with melodic flow. He has an enveloping presence, and when he prays in Maya, I can feel the prayer without understanding a single word.
Sacred Fire: What is the nature of your work?
Erick Gonzalez: First, we do a lot of personal healing, if there is any conflict in the body and in the mind. The other is to kind of energetically, spiritually, open the doors of the individual to have an experience with Divine. We do our ceremony through the fire, through the sweat lodge, through working with the mesa (altar), drums, different journeys through the night, or spiritual walks through the woods and mountains. It’s to get people to reconnect to the spiritual. Through the ceremonies we’re in the profound place where we can recollect and we can connect with spirit and find again our personal vision, instead of being into fear. What is the message you’re trying to bring to people? Is it just about individuals and their healing, or is it broader?
I think that one of the exciting things to see is when people have a divine experience. Their spirituality opens. Their spirits just come flying and they see that a lot of healing can come through at that moment. A lot of feelings of betrayal, anger, shame, guilt—all these things the body connects. Then they start realizing, “Oh my god, this is my commitment to the land, to the earth! What are we doing to the earth, to the water?” People have emotions come up when they realize what we’ve been doing to destroy the world around us. What happens next? 24 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
That’s when we come in to hold the space. All we can do is hold the space to create a spiritual experience that people can witness for themselves. And then, of course, each person has to make their own decision about what’s next. We have to go through the experience of the individual recollecting what is sacred. And this is where our humanity comes for them—what is sacred? What is worth loving? What is worth caring for and preserving, you know? When we forget that, then we do what we’re doing today. We kill by the millions. We destroy the trees. We have annihilated almost every species on the planet—plants, animal and mineral. We’re doing that because people think, “This is just for us to do what we want.” And that’s not true. We are just part of the web of life. In the time before, people could really create great civilizations, but they didn’t destroy the earth. They worked with Her. They didn’t genetically alter everything to kill for them. They didn’t create weapons to mass kill people with viruses. We had wars and stuff, but it wasn’t that way. We didn’t need to destroy, to really exterminate things.
How important is it to find a teacher to work with? What would you recommend to someone who feels stirrings, but does not know what to do next?
The ceremonies were kept secret, really hidden for generations. There were instructions a long time ago that the grandmother would teach the daughter, the daughter would teach the granddaughter, the granddaughter would teach the great granddaughter. And the same for the men. The grandfather would teach the fathers, and they would teach their sons and grandsons, and it was supposed to be kept in the home. The weaving of the women was like books of oral tradition. A lot was kept in oral tradition. A lot of times the elder circle has been closed to non-Native people. Only First Nations people were allowed in there, and so there’s a huge gap, where maybe our own children, our own wives or husbands are not allowed in there. And the elders keep crossing over. We see more of a mess and more cares in the world. We need to share something. So I’m opening up. I’m making my own decision, with a lot of support with a lot of our elders, to build places so we can unite the four colors of the corn. All the different colors. We’re not going to discriminate, you know, black, white, yellow, blue, vegetable or animal. We need to come together. We need to hear each other in the way of the council. Because the fire creates a place of respect. And we’ve got to honor that. I remember seeing a council one day with elders from the United
States saying, “No pictures. No film.” And our (Mayan) people—because we’ve lost so many elders, and we know how precious it is to document them—our argument went like this, saying, “Yes, you better do this, for our children’s sake. Look at here, we’re numbering maybe 50—how are we going to share with millions?” Because we can’t go and share with millions by word. The kids are not coming. What if they saw a little video? A YouTube thing? The Mayan elders said, “I’ll bet you that almost every single one of the North people has at least two TV’s in the house. And I can bet you that they’re not watching anything that’s gonna help the people, you know?” It’s true. So they allowed the filming of that. We’ve got a lot of hours of things documented because we want to share, to show and inspire what our work and Deer Mountain is about; because we offer an invitation to come participate, to be part of the change you want to see. Where can we go wrong if we grow our own food? Where can we go wrong if we are in the land and in nature, praying, working with the elements there? Where can we go wrong if we share the spiritual experiences with people? It’s opening their minds and their hearts to a spiritual way. That’s the invitation. It’s not like it’s going to be “go and find your teacher,” you know?
invent it. But I think the opportunity is there. Why reinvent the wheel when you have indigenous nations that are holding the last bits of the rainforest, or the desert, or the medicine and the cosmology and the ceremonial ways? But so often they cannot come in and support that. They do not have the respect. It’s like if I come in and I go to your house, I’m under your roof. When you get to that level of ceremony, there’s a lot of respect and a lot of norms. You don’t just do whatever you want to do. There are norms of respect and ways of being. That’s how indigenous people have kept their relationships so long and strong. That’s the way it is. So that’s the invitation. All people are welcome, but it’s how you conduct yourself in it that makes it a success or not. We’ve had to ask people not to come back. What is your advice to those people who have this experience and then return to the “real world” of the consumer culture?
Yes, you know, that’s hard. Sometimes we have these divine experiences and it is hard to go back to business as usual, because now we see. And so I see many people really taking the effort to change their whole patterns. And that’s when we have to reinvent. Now, how are we going to behave? How are we going to restructure community so we can hold the model of what the whole is?
Some Euro-Americans disregard teachers entirely and rely only upon their own guidance for spiritual direction.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: ERICK GONZALEZ; NANCY KITTLE; HEDDI NEALE; ERICK GONZALEZ.
I think the white nation, the white corn people, have to find their roots again, and some of them have to re-
Clockwise from left: The sacred mesa (altar) with the medicine, the gateway into the Spirit world, Tata Erick in conversation with the Divine, Lifting the children’s imaginations through Seven Macaw, Celebrating the gift that runs through the Shamans of the Maya
Nature is changing, and we’ve got to adapt to it. But we’ve got to feel that the indigenous relationships have been kept alive and vibrant with nature. The spiritual is going to be one of the guiding tools of humanity. The American model of consumer culture continues to colonize the world. What is the lure of economic progress? Are greed and acquisitiveness part of human nature?
That’s like a sickness of our minds. It’s the illusionary world we think we live in, where we can continue doing this at the expense of our relations in the world and the species that we are destroying. And it is very attractive. I mean, this is the seduction that separates us spiritually from the universe—the thinking that by creating this, and making that, and by having these, that we’re going to be even better. For a time it seems like it makes it better because, you know, now we have a blender, we don’t have to spend so much time stirring; or we have a radio that can keep good track of the weather. But a lot of the third world, the “poor people,” don’t know the consequences of all these technologies yet. Even here, in the United States, we still don’t know. We’re starting to see our way of life is destroying the earth. So what are we doing? We’re not doing anything about it. Most of the people don’t really get the thing because we feel comfortable. Now we’re tied up into the system, so we gotta go to work. Everyone’s got two, three TV’s and whatever. So it’s very seductive. It’s like a drug. We’re all kind of guilty of that. As we start to decontaminate ourselves, to reorient ourselves, we start being awake. We say, “I can’t keep eating the divine mother’s body. It is not healthy now. I can’t keep doing that.” And we start making changes. Whether Nature is going to give us that time is another question. We’ve seen this ourselves in our own communities. There’s a lot of sleepiness and a lot of shutting down. We’ve been requesting more com-
I have to ask you about 2012.
It just gives me a cosmic map to apply myself. Our people, the Maya, were astronomers and visionaries. They said, at this time, this is a natural moment when we are crossing different energies of the galaxy. It is in the records, for four times before, how the earth was destroyed. We are living in the fifth world, and even the Mexika/Aztec calendar talks about how this fifth world will be destroyed, through changes. And it’s a time-view, the era where everything is pointing to a symbol—Oxlajuj, Thirteen Aj. It is the thirteen staffs, and that’s what a lot of the prophesies are talking about. It translates to collaboration, cooperation, and having your intentions be planted. The indigenous nations need to unite for this transition. It’s the same thing with the Maya and our oral tradition, and the Hopi prophecies, and the Kogi, the Q’uero down in Peru and other places, talking about the same thing. It’s like you can’t ignore it. Growing up with that and being inside the circles with these people FROM LEFT: HEDDI NEALE; DIANE MCWILLIAMS; HEDDI NEALE; KURT FOELLER.
From left: Mayan elders overseeing ceremonies, Participants from Norway, New Zealand, and the United States, Mayan Deer Dancer at Patziapa, The Mayan future.
mitment and more dedication. You can’t go wishy washy. We’ve got to make the commitment to make the change. It’s not up to our convenience. Right now, in the worst year, we still have the illusion that we’re not going to pay the price for that. Thinking we have time for our luxuries. “Um, I have a luxury, I want to become an activist. Uh, I want to become a student of a shaman.” Or the luxury, “I want to go to this ceremony today, then, next weekend, I’ll go to another one.” It’s an illusion, thinking that we’re gaining something and then we go back to the city and do whatever we want, you know? No. If we can even contemplate a little bit of that, then ask Nature, “What is my future here, my Creator? What is my future here, Spirit?” then we will be worried. We should be worried. We should be like busy bees like when you see it’s going to be a rough winter. “The bees were real busy this summer. Everybody’s been busy.” We should be, like, “Don’t these people ever rest?” No, they’re preparing for something.
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Erick and his wife Heddi Neale are founders of the non-profit Tinamit Junan Uleu, Mayan for “Earth Peoples United (TJU-EPU). The organization finds ways to preserve indigenous wisdom and traditional practices towards renewing a custodial relationship with the Mother Earth and all her beings. A major focus of Erick’s work is the re-establishment of the “spiritual trade routes”—the ancestral exchange of traditional knowledge and ceremony that once connected nations across vast distances. Their spiritual model of land stewardship is evident in their two healing centers, Patziapais in Guatemala, and Deer Mountain in the U.S.. Patziapais has hosted 12 international gatherings, with elders attending from Africa, New Zealand, Europe, Canada, the U.S. and Latin America. It is a 24 acre retreat located on the shores of Lake Atitlan across from the village of Santiago Atitlan. With its 40-foot, 13-sided round house, small guesthouse and gardens, it offers Mayan healers and spiritual leaders a place to prepare and conduct initiation rites, as well as to preserve and document their sacred oral traditions and knowledge for the next generations. “It’s already too small when we have councils,” says Erick. “We’ll have 150 people, seven lines of elders in there, in ceremony.” Kalpull Kiej Juju, “Deer Mountain,” is about 70 miles northeast of Mt. Shasta outside of Yreka, CA. Its 1,700 acres and seven springs were donated to TJU-EPU in 2007. The center has already constructed a 40-foot arbor for fires, ceremonies and councils. Gardens, a seed bank, and residential improvements are in the works. For more information visit earthpeoplesunited.org
talking, the beautiful elders, and seeing the changes for myself and having my own spiritual experiences at all the sacred sites, I can say from these experiences, “Wow!” They tell us to prepare here. They tell us what happened here. They gave us very simple instructions: “Don’t let the fire go out. Don’t let the fire go out. Don’t let the fire go out.” Just like when you’re named three times, the important things they tell us three times. The fire for us is motion, the heart, the love, the connection to the sacred fire the sun, the sacred fire the ceremonial fire, the sacred fire that we play with inside our pipes. When you stand in line, and you look through your pipe and you look in that fire and you look down on the ground where you have your fire, and you connect with that Grandfather Fire, and you know the fire that you have in your body is aligned, whew, you are a light being and it transports you. It transports you to having a divine experience. So my instruction is—work with that. Follow where the sun is. Follow what the water is doing. Say what she’s saying. Follow where the relatives are gathering. Who’s there? When you get there, who’s around? Who? The ceremony for us is a place with a different focus. The third element comes up strong. It’s like if you and me are husband and wife, and we’re having a trouble, we need a third element to come in if we want to work it out. We need somebody to be objective. So humanity, we’re having our problems. And we’re having a problem with Nature. We’re like bashing Her, our Grandmother. So what do we need? We need a third element. The third element is the focus on the ceremonial fire. And so with 2012, it’s our moment to prepare to celebrate, not to mourn. You see, we can celebrate for another era. Because the people after this can become the people made out of honey. Or we will be lamenting for all times. I didn’t know there was a choice like that.
That’s what we are told in our oral traditions. That when the Fifth Sun closes, and the people made out of corn return to the earth, return to wherever the spirit... The fifth age is the people that are made out of corn?
We are The People Made Out of Corn. And the rising of the Sixth Sun will be The People Made Out of Honey. So if we start thinking, “How do we get honey? What is honey?” Then we have our guidance. How do we get honey? What is honey about? We see the bees dying across the land. The bees are dying. What’s going on? What do they do? They pollinate. What do they carry? Medicine. They carry the genetic codes that takes love
from one to another to procreate life. If we don’t become the people made out of honey, we won’t procreate. We won’t survive the earth changes. I’ve never heard this before. It’s a choice, or the Sixth Age will be lamentation forever?
Lamentation for all eternity. We see the Hopi and the rhythm of sun, and they say we’ve already passed the place of no return, the place of destruction, because we took the wrong road already. At an Earth Day on Maui several years ago, they asked me to do a closing prayer. And you know, Maui, of course, reggae on the beach—everybody’s high on something, drinking, pot, mushrooms—and they asked me to do the closing prayer. And I was like, “Wow, how do you—you got to be kidding!” But I got to meet the spirit of Maui—a 60-foot tall, huge warrior came through me. And you know, I’m a soft-spoken person, but I yelled so high that the microphone and the speakers were about to blow up. I yelled, “If you’re ready, I’m ready!” And there were some Navy guys drinking, saying “Yeah, dude, go ahead!” But when I yelled it again, they were like, “Whoa, what’s going on with this guy?” And by the third one, I had their attention. And I grabbed a big drum, a Mayan drum, and I sang a powerful war song and everybody was quiet. Even the ocean. And you could hear a pin drop on the sand. Everybody was there—the beer, and the drunken, you know—and everybody is quiet and standing and I did my prayer in Maya. And I said, “Remember what Earth Day is about. It’s not just a celebration, to get high, and have a good time. As we speak, our earth is dying, and we’ve got to have the strength to make the changes we need.” It took me 30 years of training—praying by myself or with our people, listening to and sitting around our circles, listening to people talk around the fires—that made the difference. There have been some other times that I’ve done that, too, where spirit has come in and I’ve focused everybody. Because if I’m given the opportunity to say something, I don’t want to jeopardize the moment just because I might make somebody angry. We got to take the moment and make it count. Because that might be our last opportunity. Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 27
Photograph by Carla Funk
TO SAVE THE SACRED WATERS
THE TSILHQOT’IN FIGHT FOR THEIR LIVES AND THE HEART OF THEIR L AND. by Emilio L. Williams Portal
In 2007, Taseko Mines filed an application to create an open pit gold and copper mine near Teztan Biny (Fish Lake), a lake deep within the heart of the Tsilhqot’in Nation’s ancestral homelands in British Columbia. The 20-year project would create a two kilometer wide open pit, generating up to 700,000,000 tons of tailings and waste rock. Upper Fish Creek and Little Fish Lake would become a tailings pond, and over a half dozen area lakes and rivers could be polluted by arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium and other toxic metals. In the middle of Teztan Biny, whose pristine waters would be completely drained and replaced with waste rock, sits an island, the ancient home of healers and healing spirits. Taseko has named the mine “Prosperity.”
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A culture and their traditions Are like a little door, Opening. Go through and See, feel, touch the magnitude Of mystery. Every Peoples have their own doors. Every Peoples have their own languages. Every Peoples have their own truths. These portals are encoded for Specific Peoples, Specific Lands, Specific Tongues. Take these sacred openings away, Take away the People. No doors, No stories, No vision, No people, No knowing, Only a wandering mind, Hungry for the next desire. Carved into our souls Are the keys for these doors.
A genocide, an extermination of a People, of a culture, of a tradition is happening. This genocide is not taking place with guns, bombs, or biological warfare, but with money, land & mineral claims, and the utter dismissal of the rights of First Peoples in Canada. “Taseko Mines Ltd. is proposing to develop the Prosperity Mine, a massive open pit gold and copper mine, deep within the traditional territory of the Tsilhqot’in Nation. The proposed Prosperity Mine is located in south central British Columbia, approximately 125 km southwest of Williams Lake, on an alpine plateau in the Chilcotin, beneath the rugged glaciated peaks of the Coast Range. The Prosperity Mine, if developed, would be situated in a site of exceptional natural splendor, close to the Nemaiah Valley, Ts’yl-os Provincial Park, and the Elegesi Qayus Wild Horse Preserve.” Teztan Biny Background Information April 2009, Tsilhoqt’in Nation. 30 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
“For our people, it [Prosperity Mine] is another in a long series of trespasses against our territory—a trespass into one of the few remaining areas untouched by industrial development, and a trespass into one of the areas where the court has declared we have an Aboriginal Hunting and Trapping Right protected by the Canadian Constitution. Our entire territory is sacred to us. This is one of the only areas left to us where the land and water hasn’t yet been harmed, where we can still feel our connection to the land and to our ancestors, where we can still teach our Tsilhqot’in traditional ways to our children and grandchildren.” Roger William, former Chief of the Xeni Gwet’in First Nations Government, and current Tsilhqot’in National Government Director of Lands and Stewardship.
Teztan Biny’s door is waiting for Tsilhqot’in keys. Take this door away, Take a piece of Tsilhqot’in away, Forever. As the Tsilhqot’in continue to fight the incessant advance of mining ventures, and protect the invaluable sacred lands they’ve been given, including the water, the mountains, the sky, the plants and the animals, Taseko Mines Ltd flaunts their progress and success on stolen land. The following excerpt is from Taseko Mines’ website (www.tasekomines. com). The first quote describes the expansion of Gibraltar Mine, an existing mine in Tsilhqot’in territory, which has been in operation for 30 years. “Gibraltar is undergoing a major, multiphase expansion and modernization program. Over the last two years, approximately $250 million has been invested at Gibraltar in both mining equipment and
DAVID SPRINGBETT
As you read this an unspoken genocide continues.
PHOTOS CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: LORETTA WILLIAMS; DAVID SPRINGBETT; MONICA AND BARRY SHELTON; CHIEF MARILYN BAPTISTE.
concentrator upgrades. By the end of 2010, Gibraltar’s annual production capacity will increase to 115 million pounds of copper and 1.4 million pounds of molybdenum....” The second quote paints the real picture of why Taseko wants to mine Teztan Biny: “The Prosperity deposit is a gold-copper porphyry with a 1.0 billion tonne measured and indicated resource containing 5.3 billion pounds of copper and 13.3 million ounces of gold. At today’s metal prices (US$900/ounce gold and US$2.00/pound copper) the project has a pre-tax net present value of C$1.6 billion and a 30% pre-tax internal rate of return.” OVER THE PAST THREE YEARS, Taseko has significantly advanced the proj-
ect, completing the feasibility study and entering the Provincial and Federal Environmental Assessment process. Prosperity is a project that holds the potential to dramatically increase shareholder value. Development of this large-scale deposit will be a major step towards transforming Taseko into a mid-tier mining company.” If you take the chance to look through Taseko’s website, you might notice that some critical information has been omitted from the content. Namely, the exact locations of any of their projects and the existence of the Tsilhqot’in. It is a website created to give the impression of progress, of movement forward, and absolute dismissal of the past. Furthermore, there is absolutely no mention of the Tsilhqot’in in Taseko’s address to the progress of the environmental assessment. In fact, the address only, specifically and strategically, states their involvement with the Provincial and Federal Governments of Canada; the smell of their response is of arrogance and
extreme confidence, in that, in Taseko’s perspective, the project cannot fail. Through reading the stories of Teztan Biny, of the history of the Tsilhqot’in, the words of the Elders and the Ancestors, and bringing them inside me, I feel many different emotions. Having been born to parents, both of “mixed-blood,” I have experienced this Western world, yet something inside me has pulled me to know the past, know the
the
LAKE SPEAKERS From July 13 to 16, 2009, more than 200 people from the Teztan Biny community gathered by the shores of the lake to protest the planned development of the Prosperity Mine. Documentarian Susan Smitten and director David Springbett videotaped nine hours of interviews with the villagers, to bring awareness to the devastating losses that are pending for the Tsilhqot’in peoples, if the project is allowed to go forward. The Tsilhqot’in people can speak for their lake and their lands, but when it comes to assessing the environmental impact of the mining project, many of the critical issues fall within the realm of science. If they can secure the funding, the Nation will com-
mission scientific studies to explore early indications that the mine’s hydrology plans are faulty and dangerously understate the potential impacts of the mine on adjacent watersheds, and they’ll commission a report by an expert limnologist that explains why a “manmade reservoir” is no replacement for a healthy, functioning ecosystem. For information about supporting these studies, contact RAVEN a charitable organization with tax status in the U.S., at raventrust.com
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP Pre-
paring to enter the waters of Fish Lake; Tsilhqot’in Elder Joseph William contemplates loss of his home; the view from canoe; appreciating the lake’s gift of fish. OPPOSITE Songs and drumming honored the lake during the gathering.
Chief Ivor Myers “This land, this water,
all the plants, all the wildlife, all the air that we breathe in, are very sacred to us. All the waters, all the trees, all the grasses, the rocks, the air, they all have spirits. They are part of a living structure, a living nature that we all adapt to. And as part of our culture, if this lake was destroyed, we would definitely lose our culture. It’s my flesh and blood. Stop destroying our country.”
Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 31
People that lived here before “we” came, and learn the old ways. I have felt both the loss, the hopelessness of this modern world, and the peace, the interconnectedness, and the joy of the Indigenous. This reminds me of something I used to say: If you come across a People that can survive in -60 Celsius, while living in houses made of snow, they can’t be wrong. If you come across a People living in balance with their environments, where all people in the community are looked after, they can’t be wrong. If you come across a People who do not create any garbage, they can’t be wrong. If you come across a People who revere all things, and love and respect them as though they were their own children, they can’t be wrong. If you come across a People who see even the smallest most insignificant event as filled with mystery and sacredness, they can’t be wrong. When will the day come when Indigenous People can stop fighting for the right to live in a sacred manner? “Listen now! You cannot sell the ground you walk on.” Crazy Horse. Author Emilio Laurier Williams Portal is an architect living in an intentional community near Victoria, British Columbia. His article, “Mapping Black Elk” appeared in Sacred Fire Issue 8.
The Healer Woman of Fish Lake FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH CATHERINE HALLER
Roger Williams “It’s hard to imagine,
you know, somebody wanting to destroy a lake. You know, one hand to destroy a lake, you’re destroying a culture…like going to a large graveyard in a city and destroying it, to make money. You know, how would someone feel? You go to Vancouver, to a cemetery and you destroy it to make money. Maybe they do that, but I’m looking at generations before me that had rituals, that lived off this land. There’s pit houses here, and you want to destroy it for money. Our elders just can’t see. But you’re looking at the history of what money has done to our people.” 32 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
I’ve been in and out of Dasiqox since I was at the young age of eight years old with my mom. Travel from Nemiah Valley by wagon and sometimes we came on the other side of Tatlow (Mount Tsy’los) by packhorse. Nothing didn’t stop us to come across travelling to Fish Lake. I’ve been living at south end of Fish Lake because there’s an elder rancher there, had a big family. I used to help them hay, I used to help them chase horse. I need to learn from him, ‘cause he had a horse power. That rancher, Jimmy Bulyan, was a really traditional, spiritual person. And he taught me and talked to me about that island there, too. The island has a sacred traditional pit house and there was a healer there. My mom was telling me about that pit house and I questioned that rancher to be on the safe side because he was
Edmund Lulua “Like
PHOTOGRAPH BY DOUG FUNK
say if they put an open pit mine here, it’d be like cutting somebody’s heart out. That’s what it is. That’s what they’re doing. They’re just putting more wounds in mother nature and creating more global warming. They wouldn’t only be killing us. But they’d be killing everybody down river from us. I don’t know if they see that, or just see the dollar signs. So if greed is all they’re after, then leave the beauty out. I’d rather take the beauty and throw the money away and live off the land.”
a healer, and Mom had a touch of that healing, spiritual, and she told me that that rancher, Jimmy Bulyan might be safer to go across with. I was about 10. So, I had a way of talking to him, offering him tobacco and what not, and then, in return, I told him, I’ll just help you hay for taking me across because I wanna learn and I wanna be a healer. I wanted to know that much about that spiritual woman that was on that island. And, he talked to me, told me the healer was a woman. I seen that pit house. I wanted to go across to the island. We didn’t have a boat. So I asked if I could borrow an axe and make a raft to get across to the island. And he helped me, and we didn’t have no nail. So we went home and got a deer hide. Mom had scraped it and I asked Mom if I could borrow one hide. And she was telling me, “What are you gonna do?” I’m gonna make the raft. Because we got no nail, we’re gonna tie the raft together with the deer hide. And she gave me the deer hide. She told me, “You better go hunting for another buck.” So I went hunting after that and I shot another buck. We got to the island and he was telling me to brush off with the juniper before we hit the sacred grounds. And he told me to do it in a traditional way so we don’t get hit and that was true because I could feel it. I could feel the spirit. And he was telling me to offer tobacco. He taught me how to offer before we left the shore. Then I met the healer woman. Um, yes, in a spirit power I felt it. He said he could see it, but I couldn’t, but I could feel it. Um hmm. I got the experience to be her and I’m her right now. I’m a healer. Uh huh. I’ve been working on this since I went to the island and I got a gift from her and that man that guided me
across there. So my power is different from will see her if you call for her. hers. My power is out of everything. I can I really felt a lot of touch in me because talkturn into anything. Um hmm. ing about this has brought a lot of memories I have to really acknowledge in more traback for me, because I believe in what Jimmy ditional ways that experience in the guide Bulyan was teaching me. He didn’t do it just and the teaching from an elder. I really thank to waste his time. I learned from every foot of him still and when I go by there it hurts me the traditional step he made with me. I made because what they’re talking about doing for sure I asked questions to be on the safe side, gold is going to affect all the water and the and Mom made sure I asked the right queswater’s our spiritual water. If that water gets tion. To respect him. And I respect the land. contaminated, it’s gonna hurt me, killing Anything that I do to make a mistake I have to everything. I can’t understand why are they go back and pray for it and offer tobacco. And gonna do this because this is our living and what I do here, I pray to step out on the earth. all. What’s gonna happen to my grandchildren I always pray to the water. I always pray to the that are gonna survive here. And live from the earth. And these are my traditional healing earth and what we’re teaching here. What is resources that I really believe in through my gonna be the loss? What is worth doing? heart and my mind. Um hmm. It feels like they’re gonna take my heart It’s just like we’re respecting an elder that’s out and my brain. That’s how I feel. No, it’s sitting over there. And that’s how I feel of it. just like we are nothing anymore, if they That Fish Lake. It’s just like an elder sitting did walk over us. But I doubt if we will let there. And that traditional woman is still seatthat happen. ed on that south island. If they’re not listening to us, then I could go back and set up something for myself and talk to that woman. Ask, “How does she feel?” in that power of spirit that I’m a healer. This summer I’m gonna go over there and talk to her. She’s still there. What I’m telling you is that power is up there. That woman. That Lois Williams “It’s woman that has that pit house – it’s like the death of our people in a not just a pit house. She left some way. The way I see it, it’s a form of genocide. You know, some stuff there and she goes back over people may not see it that there to see what’s happening. If way but I do, because you’re a healer, if you understand we depend on this lake, how to be a Tsilhqot’in, if you unwe survive from it, and derstand any healing that has to our ancestors…they survived from the lake. So we just can’t imagine being without it or having it destroyed, because it happen, you will see her. You will will leach into every other lake that’s in our territory and so on. It see her in the sweat house. You will won’t stop there, it will keep going. It will destroy everything.” see her in healing ceremonies. You Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 33
IT’S NOT NATURAL FOR BABIES or other living things
am more concerned with the problems of human interaction than with technology. I am, however, immensely grateful for all the technological achievements of our human ingenuity. My doctor, my pharmacy, and my fitness club have many wonderful aids to my well-being which were not known in my childhood; my little Japanese car brings me to them reliably, and in an emergency my telephone connects me and aid can be quickly dispatched. The Pilot pen, extra fine point, with which I wrote these words is a smoothly responsive delight, and the laptop into which I transcribe and edit them now is a continually improving marvel. My snug little hand-made house in the woods was easier to build with electric tools and more efficient to heat with wood cut by chain saw, than the homes of my ancestors. I do carry my water from nearby springs, but I heat it and cook on a gas range. The light by which I write this comes from the latest improvement on Mr. Edison’s invention, powered by a distant plant. The background music for my musings comes through a wondrous but inexpensive system, realistically reproducing the sounds of instruments recorded long ago and far away. How grateful I am for that! I would not like to give up any of it. But if some power appeared one night and put a deal to me like this: “Okay, Manitonquat, here’s the offer: I can grant your deepest wishes, and in exchange take away all the technological achievements of the past ten thousand years,” could I accept it? My deepest wishes—a healthy planet Earth filled with great forests, ninety percent of which are now gone, with clean breathable air and pure drinkable water everywhere; world peace; people living in small 34 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
tribal groups where they are loved and cared for, to whom they give their love and care all their lives; a universal understanding that life is not unbearably harsh and hurtful, not only supportable, but generally exciting, quite fascinating, beautiful and joyful when we are close to others who love and support us—are these worth all the medical and scientific advances of a hundred centuries? If I had that choice, I would willingly choose the world of positive human interaction, of relaxed, friendly relationships flourishing in love and playfulness and interest in each other, a world where human beings do no harm and need never fear anyone. Of course, such a deal is not possible, and I don’t believe it’s necessary to eschew technology in order to achieve either harmony among all people or a healthy planet that is nurtured rather than exploited by them. Technology is not our problem. I believe the basic issue we need to investigate together is human greed. It is greed that has produced all the oppressions, the injustices and inequities visited upon most of the Earth’s inhabitants and so degrading, defiling and disturbing natural processes as to threaten disastrous consequences to all life in the not-very-distant future. My experience observing the developing traits of babies suggest that greed is not inherent in human beings any more than it is in other species. It is rare in nature for any living being to become obsessed with getting more of anything than they actually require to survive. It makes sense to me that human beings are not born with this urge and do not display it in their early development. Babies have no concept of ownership. I have known parents who have conscientiously removed the words “my” and “mine” or “ours” and
MACE FLEEGER
“theirs” from their active vocabularies. Their children grew up in families that shared. Everyone had access to the thing they wanted with no idea to possess them individually. The psychologist, Erich Fromm, said that greed was a construct of society, where that society allowed private ownership of the Earth and natural resources. He pointed out that in those tribal societies based upon equality and cooperation and mutual support, there was no greed. The fortunes of each were the fortunes of all, they struggled and thrived together. This is how it was for our people on Turtle Island. No human being could own any part of the Earth. The concept was absurd. Does a child own his mother’s breast, or her arms, her skin or her hair? The Earth is a living being who nurtures us. As her children we care for her because she is so good to us and we love her. We would not destroy her beauty that is dear to our hearts, and we could not imagine stealing from her or selling any of her for money. Creation intends that what she provides for us is meant for all equally. In our tribal ways if one is more fortunate, he shares his bounty, because to have more than others would be an embarrassment and he would feel ashamed. These tribal ways were begun very early in the evolution of our first humanoid predecessors, probably over two million years ago, and became highly developed during the past fifty thousand years or so by our homo sapiens ancestors. When agriculture began some seven or eight thousand years ago in certain fertile valleys, the population exploded in those areas, overwhelming the small communities with their tribal circles. With no circle to support each other, there was nothing to ensure people’s survival.
Instead of cooperation of equals, This article previously appeared domination became the motiva- in Talking Stick, Spring-Summer tion, and greed was born. 2007, the newsletter of MenI don’t mean to imply that all nitonkit Outreach, a nontribal societies were perfect uto- profit learning center which is pias. Nor were they all egalitar- dedicated to healing ourselves ian, although it seems that most and our world. Programs and were. Nevertheless a bit of greed services respectfully incorpomust have emerged from time to rate the ancestral wisdom of time, because old stories are full Native Americans and others of cautionary tales of greed in the who honor harmonious living tricksters, like Coyote, Iktomi, with Mother Earth and spiritual Raven, Nanabush and so on. But connections with Creation. For the stories make them out to be more information about Mennifools to be laughed at, that no one tonkit and Manitonquat’s work, would wish to be like. go to circleway.org. My own two sons were raised in a close-knit band of between 15 and 5 people, depending on the season, who shared pretty much everything equally. We lived simply but well, and greed was something we only heard about in the great world and shook our heads over. Today my boys are both kind, caring, generous men. From my experience of the last forty years, in communities, in schools where I have taught, in the prisons where I have volunteered, I have become convinced of one thing, that all the problems that beset our world, all of the greed, the violence, the domination and oppression of people and the destruction of the Earth are the results of the way we treat our children and the things we teach them. Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 35
Healing the Torn World Lessons from TatewarĂ, the God of Fire
Question | Grandfather, the world has been so damaged. As I drove here tonight, and saw hillsides clear-cut with raw tree stumps and mangled, slashed earth where new roads were made, I was devastated. I feel it deeply, the sadness of the land. How can we, as individuals, work to revive our relationships with the land? I want to know how to help heal the land. GRANDFATHER FIRE | You want to know how to heal the sadness of the
AMONG THE HUICHOL INDIANS of Mexico’s remote Sierra Madres, a people whose ancestral tradition has been bruised but unbroken by missionary or conquistador, the God of Fire is a constant presence—not only cooking food, giving light and warmth, but also bringing wisdom, counsel and protection. Affectionately called Tatewarí, “Grandfather Fire,” the Huichol see him as “the first shaman,” the one who brings divine guidance and holds the tradition. In the Huichol creation stories, Tatewarí appears, usually riding down on a snake of lightning, in answer to their cries of desperation. When humans lose their way—typically as a result of unbridled egotism, jealous greed, or some other form of tempting, isolating illusion—Tatewarí shows up to offer a course correction. The stories of gods taking physical form to offer erring humans a path to reconnection are not unique to the Huichol. Indeed, “divine visitation” is a common theme in virtually every culture, spiritual practice or formal religion, and Fire has played this particular role many times in stories of old as well as in indigenous cultures today. What might be unique, in Western Civilization in the year 2009, would be the recognition that this is one of those times. And yet now, as much as ever, a course correction would seem in order. The world has been careening on a blind, unsustainable collision course toward environmental, economic and ethical collapse for well over a hundred years. Enter... Tatewarí. Since 1997, Grandfather Fire has been making regular appearances, often before gatherings of several hundred people, in the United States, Mexico, Australia and Great Britain by “wearing the suit” of a human, a Tsaurirrikame (a fully initiated Huichol shaman) who lives in Tepoztlan, Morelos, Mexico. When Grandfather Fire emerges from the Tsaurirrikame, usually after an hour or so of jokes, songs and poems, sometimes aided by drumming and by his smoking of a large strong cigar and drinking a hot, potent chocolate, the man who hosts him goes away. He says it’s what he imagines being under anesthesia is like. Often Tatewarí will answer questions until just before dawn. With humor, compassion, fierce honesty, eloquence and what could be interpreted as an apparent disdain for political correctness, Tatewarí offers divine guidance to those who care to listen. The following exchange took place in August, 2009, on the Oregon coast just north of Tillamook.
torn world. Human beings, any human being, have the capacity to open themselves to the world. First, you must open what I refer to as your heart, that which is beyond the mind, that connects you with yourself, each other, to the living world, to all there is. This isn’t the “heart” that people sometimes refer to as a fragile, sentimental capacity that is disparaged for its weakness. Next, when your heart is open, you will begin to feel the land and streams, the animals and plants around you. And they will feel your opening. When they feel this, you will begin to hear them. And finally, when you begin to hear them, they will begin to speak— and you will speak back. Together, this is the first step. The bounty of the land is no stranger to giving, but giving must be received with respect—taking only what is needed, giving back with offerings. Those who lived here before you, at different times of year, held special ceremonies, going to the mountain, the stream, the ocean, and placing offerings in appreciation for the gifts of those great beings. These offerings were prescribed by divine beings, held in the sacred ancestral stories, and kept by the elders so the obligations would never be forgotten. When you open your heart, your attitude begins to change. And when that changes, you take new actions, make new decisions. And those new decisions from an open heart begin to spread like fire from heart to heart throughout the people. Then true, respectful change begins to happen. So the first thing is to learn to open your heart. And sometimes, when you feel called, offer a little tobacco. Tobacco is not the same as the ancestral offerings that were given to the people who used to live here, but the land can see you are working, you are trying, you are reaching. And it will reciprocate. At some point in time, the original offerings will return. But until then, if you open your hearts and listen and hear the forest, even with its scars and roads that crisscross all over these mountains, your offerings will be received with respect.
Question | Can you talk about grief and the power of water in the ritual of grief? GRANDFATHER FIRE| When there’s grief, you cry a lot, and your clothes get dirty and you have to wash them. Water is good for that. [People laugh] No…. The rituals of grief depend upon the ancestral cultures and what was given to each people for these ceremonies. When there is life, there is loss. Loss is happening all the time—just as new experiences come in, others leave. Like this time sitting around the fire, sitting with each other in this exact way, will never happen again. Yes, there will be other gatherings, Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 37
other fires, but there is something unique about each time. Will you ever meet the people again? How will they have changed? But there are more profound losses, of a close and intimate nature, the loss of life of someone you’ve loved, passing away never to be seen again. The human being living in this world is made to grieve. This is a natural response to loss. And when loss occurs, depending upon the profound depth of the loss, the first and foremost response is simply letting the tears come from your eyes, feeling the emotion of loss. This is a cleansing energy, preparing the body for something new. In this culture, many people reject grief. Rather than allowing the emotions to run, letting the tears flow, rather than being part of a renewal process, they see sad as bad. When the tears flow, when the emotions flow in grief, it prepares you for the new experience that is arising. So this should not be feared or condemned, but embraced. Grief is a profound part of the human experience. It allows you to realize what is lost and experience that loss and release that loss to the world. But the mind in its fear doesn’t want to acknowledge loss. Even so, when loss has occurred, grief is always there. Now, at times, special rituals using water are used to help move grief, grief that can be so deep that it becomes debilitating. But these rituals are performed to immerse one in grief so that he or she can feel its power and cleansing energy. Some people look at these rituals as a way to jump over grief, to be rid of it. This is not the purpose—not as avoidance or convenience, not something promoted by fear. For the mind fears grief because, in the presence of loss, in that uncontrollable emotion, it feels that everything will be taken away. And this is not so. The ancestors knew that only by embracing that powerful emotion, by floating, moving in the waters of grief, inside the profound energy of grief, could the new beginnings, clean and clear, begin.
Question | Grandfather, I’d like to return to the previous question. You said that the first step toward healing was to open our hearts. What would be the first step to opening our hearts? GRANDFATHER FIRE | Quiet the mind. In modern people the mind is seen as the answer of all answers because it appears effective in particular types of action. This capacity, given to human beings, is, let’s call it a tool. Let’s call it an advantage, given the disadvantages that human beings appear to have compared to their animal brothers and sisters. When the mind becomes so loud and directive in all the ways of one’s life, that noise drowns out a natural voice that no longer can be heard—this natural voice going on inside of you, between you, in what you refer to as the natural world. The voice of the mind drowns that out. It drives you to a particular action— to avoid loss or to gain over others, to gain for itself to avoid loss. So now days you have put so much stock into that voice. It is such a strong filter that the mind is quick to label the heart as destructive, irrational, disorganizing. But if you look at the natural life around you, it’s organized in the most fantastic way. Look at the trees, their structure, their pattern of interacting. They have a place they live and a place they don’t. This self-organizing is an organic way of living with all the creations of the world. That is an aspect of heart, the same aspect you have pumping through your veins. This is how you are born, to interact 38 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
with the world in a special way. But if you see the world as something to conquer, then the mind engages in this endless attempt to avoid consequences that are nothing more than the natural ambient of the world, a world that you are clearly designed to live and prosper in within certain natural limitations. The trees, the plants and animals, the river and fish create a natural balance amongst themselves. But the mind’s desire is to escape that, to classify it as dangerous, destructive. Therefore, the mind looks for ways to manipulate materials, to create new technologies to protect against loss, to accumulate artifacts, to invest in comforts. This is the desire for perfect safety, even though that perfection is never to be had. And these technologies create new consequences that new technologies have to solve. So, the first step in reversing this is to quiet the mind and listen to the voice of the heart, not the voice of fear, alienation, or manipulation. Quiet the mind. That other voice, the voice without a voice, will rise up and guide you. It has always been there. It will always be there. You just have to learn how to listen.
Question | Grandfather, if grief comes with loss, and the mind wants to avoid loss, then does the avoidance of grief also lead to a closed heart? Is the acceptance of grief also a way to open our heart? GRANDFATHER FIRE | Yes, because heart, as I define it, is what I would call a meta-emotion, an emotion that holds all emotions. It doesn’t say that emotions are bad, or that emotions should be arbitrarily restricted, banished. That would be like saying trees are bad because they are different. No, opening the heart comes with an acceptance of all emotions. And thinking is an expression of emotion itself. Cognition isn’t some clear unbiased expression of unattached perfection. It’s detached! It’s an expression of what you call fear and it’s a type of fear that wants to limit or eliminate other emotions. Look at all the agendas the mind has. It is not emotions that are the problem. It is when the mind acts as governor in its strong desire to control, to produce a planned outcome, saying, “The world must be like this, like that.” It begins to build dams. But a human being is designed to have a natural flow like the rivers and streams here. When your emotions flow in the natural relationship with the world, there is the sense of being alive. You feel alive from that feeling. You do not feel alive from your thinking. But when fear blocks that, when the mind says the world needs to be this way and your neighbors need to be like that, then conflicts arise. The mind justifies your desire to take more. And your neighbors say, “No, this belongs to me.” And the pent-up out-of-balanced anger from your blocked emotions explodes and pretty soon you are at war. Among the people who lived here before you, situations that led to conflict rarely resulted in death. There was always this sense of ethics and justice that required people to sit down and work things out. One family might say, “I am angry because my sister died and your actions contributed to that.” That anger defined a natural boundary. Work would then be done to find a resolution between families without further death. Restitution according to the cultural requirements was made. Anger would be released. Order and movement restored.
It’s only now days, when emotions have been bottled up, that the anger becomes explosive, dangerous. It’s dysfunctional, murderous. And instead of feeling the beauty of life, the connection with each other and the natural world, people feel lost, disconnected and enraged, or disabled by depression. So yes, emotions are important. You will never get rid of them. You would say, that by definition—since emotion is a modern word, a psychological description of spirit—that everything is emotion. The ocean is emotion. The animals are emotions, the plants and the wind. You are moving among them, these flows of spirit, flows of different flavors, entwining with each other, forming and reforming. This is what produces that feeling of being alive. It is everywhere, like heart, like fire, like joy. I speak about joy not as happiness. Happiness is fleeting, momentary, as it moves to something else that leads to another and another, like walking through the forest and experiencing so many things: fog hanging in the canopy, insects, birds. Joy, as I define it, like heart, is a metaemotion that holds all the others and allows them to move in wondrous, engaging ways, not like a danger meant to destroy life. In that way, as poets say, love has its own reasons, reasons that defy the logic of the mind.
Question | Is love a meta-emotion? GRANDFATHER FIRE | Love, as I describe it, is not a sentimental feeling.
ing to give oxygen to the birds and leave these other animals to fend for themselves.” Or the river saying, “I’ll give water to the fish, but the people didn’t meet my expectations today, so they have to eat cold gruel.” Even the gruel might not like them. [People laugh] This world is designed for exchange. The ancestors knew that when you took life, whether it was tubers or edible ferns, cedar to make houses or canoes or shelter, or bark to make clothing, or prepared land to make their village or for their burials, that they had to give something back, some offerings and respect. They made prayers and promises that said, “I need this for myself and my family, please open your generosity. I will take only what I need.” In this way, when the bird eats the worm, the bobcat eats the bird, the fish eats the insect, and the bear eats the fish, the exchange goes back and forth. You eat and one day something will eat you. Your bones will become part of the land. Your flesh will fertilize the plants. It is all legitimate engagement. Everything has its place. And this free flow is love. The air bringing moisture to the plants, the animals feeding, the river nurturing—this is all love. It is only the human being that has reservations about this flow. And the traditions, the guidance of the elders, the gods, have always been there as the antidote for human blindness so that this free flow of movement brings acceptance. That is living love for all things, not just a few.
Love is the feeling that every presence is a legitimate other. Even as you’re eating a plant, or an animal is eating another animal or a bird is drinking water, that plant, that animal, that water is giving life. This free flow, the exchange of the world, unconditionally, that is love. You don’t hear the plants, when they give off oxygen say, “l’m go-
Heard Around the Fire, Teachings from Tatewari, will be published in December, 2009. It will be available from sacredfirefoundation.org, sacredfirecommunity.org and amazon.com. Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 39
Sacred POETRY Fire
The Ocean
I am the little stroke of a brush in a masterpiece.
Call me a dove a sparrow a robin or a swallow.
The dove that has no desire to fight and be strong
by Hydeh Aubon
A tiny flower a tiny fish a raindrop or a speck of dust. The shiver of life in a protective mother bear or an amazing whale . The grace of a deer, how ancient a tree can be how old a tiny rock how majestic a high mountain that disappears in mist and clouds how enigmatic the drawings on an old cave’s wall how pregnant the silence between the lines of a poem a sheet of music two souls
that meet without ever knowing but just feeling, meeting and connecting in the land of dreams in the land of the beyond. Realms so unknown so untouched that are the core of one’s soul the essence of one’s heart. Yes, there is beauty in an eagle’s soar strength in a stallion wilderness in a wolf magic and beauty in a warrior’s dance in a climber’s journey awesomeness in never, not ever, reaching and endless amazement in accepting but fighting just to feel existence just to feel aliveness and connectedness through oneness, through aloneness
the sparrow that is unnoticed in a tall ancient tree the robin that hides behind the bushes and the tiny fish that floats in the vast mysterious ocean and greets the whale in silence, love, awe and fear. I am blessed for, seeing, feeling and dreaming of beauty, and remain the song of creation in a tiny heart in a tiny being. A small heart knows the ocean with no vivid definition and that is all.
would like it to be known that her poem, “You,” which appeared in Sacred Fire, Issue 9 with an illustration of a bee, was not about a bee, but about beingness itself.
40 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 9 10
“ ”
THEY’RE CALLED WISDOM KEEPERS, the peo-
For more information about Sacred Fire Community and the Interspiritual Conference, visit sacredfirecommunity.org and interspiritualconference.com
ple who hold space for remembering. They know the stories and the traditional knowledge, and they live in deep relationship with the many realms of spirit. Most importantly, they know how to weave these teachings into the fabric of people’s lives. Each tradition, every people, has its wisdom keepers. These elders spend most of their lives preparing for their duties. They spend years in service to their elders, supporting their needs, apprenticing with them, learning from them. And they spend years in service to the deities of their tradition, making offerings and prayers, embracing the rigors of ceremony and ritual, and sacrificing their own desires to the common good. We call them wisdom keepers. And yet, what purpose does keeping hold, if not to share? Indeed, the essence of their work is to maintain the
continuity of the ages by passing that wisdom on. In March, 2009, The Sacred Fire Community hosted the second Interspiritual Conference in Joshua Tree, California. Nine elders gathered with an audience of 150 to share stories, teachings and ceremonies in a desert setting anchored by a 72hour sacred fire. The event celebrated oneness and diversity, honoring both the common spiritual essence underlying all the world’s traditions and the diversity of spiritual expressions that keep this world alive. Sacred Fire had the honor to interview each elder on video. Excerpts of the almost five hours of conversation can be found at youtube.com/user/ interspiritual.
We concluded each interview with the same question, giving the elders the opportunity to share their essential wisdom:
“If you could have the ear of everyone, if all the world could hear you for this one moment, what would you say?” Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 41
It seems the whole world is struggling with a lot of concern and anxiety—fear—because people see once-powerful and seemingly invincible institutions beginning to wobble and crumble. It’s important that we realize that life is constructed so that life supports life. And for us human beings, the way we support life is through respect for the world as a living divine manifestation—recognizing that the world is alive, that the plants, and the animals, the rocks, the rain, the rivers, the wind, the sun, all of it, are our brothers and sisters. We’re designed to get along with the world, and the world is designed to give us what we need so long as we do our part. It’s important that we take just what we need. And, when we take something, that we offer back what the world wants from us—not necessarily what we want to give—and that we appreciate that the world is alive and aware and has feelings. That way of living is one of the basic teachings of all the old traditions. That’s the way that we human beings are designed to keep the world in a good way. A way of life that lives under the illusion that we can take whatever we want without any consequences, a way of life that’s built on greed and disrespect, is not sustainable. The world ultimately will take that apart. How many empires have grown and become powerful, only to crumble? This isn’t the first by any means. But it’s inevitable. The structures of greed and disrespect must fall. And yes, this creates concern for us. But in the end, it’s going to be good news. And the key is finding our way back to those teachings and practices that helped our ancestors keep the world in a good way for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
Grandmother Bertha Grove, Red Earth Woman, is a Southern Ute Elder whose grandfather, a spiritual leader, raised her and taught her traditional ways. A mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother and great-greatgrandmother, Grandmother Bertha pours the sweat lodge. She is a sun dancer and a member of the Native American Church. 42 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
Love! God is love. Everything is love. You’ve got to have love. You’ve got to have belief. You’ve got to have faith. Faith—I live by that faith. I know He’s [points upward] going to take care of me. Even in your Good Book it says that. I learn by my experience too. I take care of the animals, the trees, the birds, and the flowers. What makes you think I can’t? That God over there says, “What makes you think I can’t take care of you? If you think you can do it yourself, go ahead and do it.” Boy, yeah! I’ve had the hard teachings. So I said, “Okay! You take care of it for me.” See? And things are always taken care of. I found my way over here. How? What happened? The funds were provided. I had a driver, had my helper to help me. See? God made a way for me. So you have to have that belief, and the love. And then you’ve got to know what charity means. You’ve got to know what hope means. And all of those things are big subjects that could take a long time to explain to you. If people would really know that we’re all here, on this same planet, we’re all traveling through space. We’re all the same. We’re human beings. So, why fight? What are we doing? We’ve all got the same heart, the same feelings. But we’re fighting. But that’s Christianity. [She laughs.] What I’ve learned is the way of life. My people call it the Way of Life. You have to find the Way of Life. See? What I’m talking about is that we live it day by day by day, minute by minute by minute, second by second—not just on Sundays.
Senior Teacher Daniel Hessey became a student of Trungpa Rinpoche in 1973 and is now a student of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. He has directed Shambhala training programs in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Australia and has taught Warrior Assembly three times. He was director of Shambhala Mountain Center for six years and now serves on its Board of Directors. Daniel You don’t have to be afraid. You don’t have to be afraid of who
you are. You can trust your heart. You don’t have to build walls around yourself. You can actually become intimate with your nature and dis-
“
the way we support life is through respect for the world as a living divine manifestation
FROM TOP: WILL BERLINER; DANIEL HESSEY; KATE BALDWIN.
Tsaurirrikame Eliot Cowan is a fully initiated healer and ritual leader in the Huichol tradition of Mexico. He rediscovered Plant Spirit Medicine as a viable healing modality to the Western world. He is also the founder and chairman of The Blue Deer Center, a teaching and healing retreat center in Margaretville, New York.
cover the depths of the world. And that way you won’t have to injure yourself, or be cruel to yourself and cruel to other people.
Hawaiian Kahuna Lei’ohu Ryder channels the voices of wind, rain and sea through the soil of the land she walks. The Singer of Aloha Rising, she and her partner, Maydeen ‘Iao, interweave music, story, chanting and dance. Lei’ohu I would hold the earth in
FROM TOP: INTERSPIRITUAL CONFERENCE; KATE BALDWIN; INTERSPIRITUAL CONFERENCE.
my heart. The ancient ones, the indigenous ones of this planet, my kupana, my grandmothers and grandfathers, tell us that the collapse of our various systems is something that we must experience because everything has to become equal. So it is that the earth, which is in our hearts, is changing. If anything, it is a time to celebrate. What we are going to find with the collapse of the financial, the social, the political, the religious and the spiritual structures is that community is going to begin to come together, to take care of each other. So it’s not a time to cry. It is simply a time to know that we are all going to be cared for because we are here. We have all chosen to be here in this time and we will be here to support each other. And I think it’s just fantastic.
Sangoma Colin Campbell grew up in rural Botswana, where he was steeped in Tswana culture and spiritual practice. Now a practitioner of traditionzal African medicine in Cape Town, South Africa, Colin co-runs a training school and resource center in Botswana for traditional doctors and Sangomas and teaches Indigenous cosmology and African customary law. Colin As human beings we’ve reached a point where we have to change
fundamentally and significantly. And we don’t really know what we need to become in order to continue our relationship with this thing called life and the world in which we live. We’re faced with some colossal problems at this point—not the least of which is our sheer population. We’re 6.8 billion people. And this is a really severe challenge because the way we live also is very destructive in terms of our relationship with our environment and our relationship with each other as well.
What do we do about this? What’s important to remember is that we’ve been around for a long time as human beings. If we accept the model of evolution, we stem out of the world in which we live. We’re related to animals and birds and rocks and rivers and trees and everything that we find around us—that’s part of who we are as human beings. The difficulty is that we’ve lost that relationship. We’ve moved further and further away from a relationship with our environment—that which sustains us. We’ve isolated ourselves, encapsulated ourselves. And we’re finding more and more the detriment of this. Pre-industrial traditional cultures look at things in quite the opposite way. They understand that everything is related. And that relatedness is intrinsic to the survival of human beings. So we need to look at how we relate to each other, how we relate to the environment in which we live, how the environment relates to us, how others relate to us. Traditional cultures really understood this in a very profound and very deep way. It’s important that we go back and look at traditional cultures and begin to bring some of the understandings that exist in those cultures into more modern frameworks and contexts to help us grapple with the question of where we go from here in terms of our relationship with the world.
Bokara Malidoma Patrice Somé is an initiated elder from the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso, West Africa. A healer, ritual leader, wisdom keeper, visionary, cowry-shell diviner and author, Malidoma is the founder of Echoes of the Ancestors, a nonprofit charitable organization. Malidoma The most funda-
mental thing is that we can no longer hang on to the good old usual. As individuals, and as a collective, we must look beyond the boundaries of our comfort zones and seek that which will negate anything that stands in the way of us coming together as a people sent to this dimension to beautify it far beyond what we have seen since we entered into the arena of this world. Furthermore, I want people to be aware of really how powerful they are as individuals in their capacity to effect change, their capacity to use their innate medicine to bring healing. This is in contrast to wanting and expecting some kind of authority figure to come down from God knows where to tell us what to do, how to do, when to do, and so forth. The delegation or the surrender of our individual power to some suspicious authority is an avoidance of our own limitless power. It is a desertion of that innate strength that propelled us into this dimension. And therefore it’s not graceful. It’s not celebratory. It negates the beauty that we are, that we brought into this world, that we intend to use as a weapon against scarcity, illness, Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 43
Grandmother Flordemayo is a member of The Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers. A Healer by Divine Spirit and Keeper of the Plants, she is the founder and director of the Institute for Natural and Traditional Knowledge. Flordemayo We have to be realis-
tic. And other than prayer there is action. We have to act on things. We can’t expect one person to pray. We can’t expect one person to do the change. If we don’t change collectively, if we, as humans, don’t come together and stop thinking that one group is better than another, we’re going to perish. Everything that everyone is afraid of will happen because we are spiraling out of control right now. We’re so out of control as the human race. It’s not about one country or the other. Everybody is doing the same thing, everybody. There’s such destruction and inconsideration. We are so out of balance right now. We need to be back in balance with nature.
Murshida Tasnim Hermila Fernandez, a senior teacher in the Sufi tradition, heads the Church of All in Burbank, California, and is the foremost leader and mentor of the Dances of Universal Peace. Her lifelong immersion in the practices of numerous and diverse mystical traditions leads her to emphasize religious unity and taking a broad vision of the world’s religions. Tasnim The more identified I
am, and you are, and each of us is, as individuals, as individuated beings, the more it feeds the illusion of separation and allows tremendous harm and injury, not only to ourselves and each other, but to the planet, to all of creation. 44 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
“
There is a beauty here. This is the Garden. How are we to be harmonious, integral members of this creation?
”
So, I ask that individuals begin to look at what ways that we each separate ourselves. How do I describe myself? How do I define myself? Let’s see, there is my genealogy, my ancestry. If I happen to be an attractive person, I’m identified with my beautiful body. If I’m a very intelligent, erudite person, I’m identified with my mind and my intellect. And anything that says “my” is separating. Anything that says “I,” in that context, is separating. It allows thinking of others as “the other,” as “not me.” The diminishment of the ego is absolutely important. Not its annihilation, but the diminishing of that which declares itself the ruler, the owner, the doer, the maker, the decider. But what is the essence, the truth and reality of my being? We are all a part of Being. I am “a being,” but no, I am “In Being.” So even though my skin seems to separate me from you, it’s only an appearance. And the word maya as it’s used in the Hindu tradition, is very applicable. It’s not deprecating, as in, “Oh this is all an illusion, and it’s therefore to be shunned and scorned”—not at all. There is a beauty here. This is the Garden. How are we to be harmonious, integral members of this creation? That is the essential question in almost every wisdom path. Tsaurirrikame David Wiley is a fully initiated healer and ritual leader in the Huichol tradition of Mexico, as well as the Corporalmayor of the Nahuatl Weather Working tradition. He is an Elder and advisor for The Sacred Fire Community. David I would say, as important as
life amongst ourselves as human beings is, that the moment we cut off the rest of the world we enter into in a kind of profound blindness. That it’s only about me, or it’s only about you. That it’s only about addressing our fears and satisfying our ambitions. And even as we see human involvement in the world focused more narrowly on human concerns, I would say that there is an enormous, wondrous, living world beyond what anybody can ever imagine, right there in front of our faces. If we set aside everything that our minds can cook up to deal with our fears or what we can have, we will discover a new world. And recognizing that world will change our lives. It will change all of our lives together.
FROM TOP: MARISOL VILLANUEVA/GRANDMOTHERSCOUNCIL.ORG; KATE BALDWIN; KATE BALDWIN.
disease—all of these things that are implanted in this world to try to keep us separate, different, suspicious of one another. It is dangerous, indeed, to think that we are so small that everything that we need must be negotiated. It is important that sometimes we clench the fist and stomp the ground and call to a halt all that which doesn’t smell aromatic to us. It is important for us to know that we do have that power, that we do have that force to effect change.
The Realms of
Coincidence By Robert Moss
IS ANYTHING EVER ONLY COINCIDENCE?
H
ow often have you said, “It’s only a dream”—to yourself or someone else? How about, “It’s only a coincidence?” How often have you told yourself, “It’s just my imagination?” We routinely dismiss thoughts, feelings, intuitions, and mind-pictures this way, telling ourselves that what we imagine is somehow less than real. Ironically, these three “only” things are extraordinary sources of guidance, healing and power—if we will only pay attention. Paying attention—even for just five minutes of dedicated time each day—we put ourselves in touch with our inner truth. We find our inner compass and get a “second opinion” on vital personal issues in the midst of confusing and conflicting agendas. We open and sustain a dialog with a Self that is wiser than what Yeats called “the daily trivial mind.” We allow ourselves to move effortlessly into creative flow. We also allow our Big Stories to reveal themselves. Australian Aborigines
say Big Stories hunt the right people to tell them, like predators stalking and sniffing in the bush. The trick is not to go chasing them, but to let them catch up with us. Sometimes a Big Story seizes us through a riff of coincidence we simply cannot dismiss. When we are seized by a Big Story, our lives are different. We have the power to cope with everyday dramas with greater courage and grace, because we are aware of a deeper drama. We have access to mythic resources, in the sense Joseph Campbell conveyed when he reminded us that healing is what happens when we “move beyond suffering into myth.” We now travel with a sense of mission, and when we travel with that sense of mission, we draw different events and people and opportunities toward us. We make ourselves available to the Big stories when we make room in our lives for dreams, coincidence and the play of imagination. Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 45
For example, coincidence may be wild, but it’s never truly random. The play of coincidence follows certain rules: 1. There are things that like to happen together. 2. Thoughts are actions and produce effects. 3. Coincidence multiplies when we are in motion. 4. Life rhymes. 5. The world is a forest of symbols. 6. Every setback offers an opportunity. 7. To find our way, we may need to get lost. 8. Look for the hidden hand. 9. The passions of the soul work magic. Let’s spend some time with coincidence. Let’s dive into the first three rules together.
1. There Are Things That Like to Happen Together
Jung’s theory of synchronicity may be flawed, but his life practice is a model of how to navigate with the help of coincidence and let the interweaving of inner and outer experience open a path to “absolute knowledge.” Jung had a little garden room on the lake, where he would often receive clients and colleagues in his later years. He would receive all the natural phenomena that were buzzing or splashing or sighing within his field of perception—the flight of insects, the wake of a boat, a shift in the wind—as a commentary on whatever was going on in his interaction with his visitor.
46 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
Jung’s willingness to trust an unexpected incident—and accept it immediately as guidance for action — is evident in a meeting he had with Henry Fierz, who visited him in hopes of persuading him to support the publication of a manuscript by a recently deceased scientist. Jung had reservations about the book and opposed publication. The conversation became increasingly strained, and Jung looked at his watch, evidently getting ready to tell his guest he was out of time. Jung frowned when he saw the time. “What time did you come?” he demanded of his visitor. “At five o’clock, as agreed.” Jung’s frown deepened. He explained that his watch had just been repaired, and should be keeping impeccable time. But it showed 5:05, and surely Fierz had been with him for much longer. “What time do you have?” “Five thirty-five,” his visitor told him. “Since you have the right time and I have the wrong time,” Jung allowed, “I must think again.” He then changed his mind and supported publication of the book. We’ll do well, in our daily practice, if we simply recognize that there are things that like to happen together, and allow those patterns to reveal themselves. Three Geese in Flight A couple years ago, I was at the Iroquois Indian Museum in the rural Schoharie Valley of Upstate New York. I was giving an informal talk about my book, Dreamways of the Iroquois, and I was gratified that the large audience included many people of the First Nations as well as many descendants of the first European settlers. Afterward, a long line of people wanted me to sign their books. A pleasant, mature woman sprang into action, finding seats for the older people and helping others to stay cheerful while they waited. When things became less busy, she asked if she might sit and talk with me. Of course. She introduced herself with modest dignity. “I’m Freida Jacques. For twenty-seven years I have served as Mother of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga people.” I felt honored and humbled to be in her presence. She said, “I don’t dream in the night so much, or don’t remember. I dream like this. I need to know if I should accept an invitation to go out west, and I look up and there are three geese in flight, flying west like an arrowhead, with a hawk in front of them. Those three geese, the way they were flying, told me to go west.” A man waiting behind her couldn’t restrain himself. He shoved his business card across the table. The name of his business was Three
Geese in Flight, and he specialized in both Celtic and Iroquois books. “That’s very interesting,” I told him. “Since I started dreaming in the Mohawk language, and studying Aboriginal peoples, some of my fierce Scottish ancestors have started walking through my dreams, basically saying, ‘Look here, laddie. We know a thing also. Don’t forget to talk to us.’ Sometimes they say things in Scots Gaelic. I really don’t know how I’m going to cope with that. Mohawk was bad enough.” Then a tall, lean, tweedy man waiting behind the bookseller couldn’t hold back. He pushed forward and gave me his hand. “I’m a retired English professor,” he told me. “I have devoted the rest of my life to preparing the definitive grammar of Scots Gaelic.” He gave me his card. “If you need help translating those Gaelic words in your dreams, I’m your man, laddie.”
2. Thoughts Are Actions and Produce Effects
It was Bonnie’s final day as a curator at a historic site in New York. Retirement, after more than twenty years at a job she loved, was more than usually traumatic because it also meant moving out of the curator’s cottage she had occupied for all that time. As she gathered her last things, a colleague asked Bonnie, “If you could take just one souvenir with you, after all these years, what would it be?” Bonnie said at once, “Oh, I know the one thing I would want. But I can’t have it.”
time she was about to leave the cottage forever. The logistics became a little easier to believe when the artist explained she no longer lived in New Hampshire; she had moved to within two hours’ drive of the site Bonnie had helped to manage. The incident is still amazing. How can it be explained? I believe this is an example of how we reach to others, with our thoughts and feelings, even if we are oblivious to what we are doing. Mark Twain was a great student of phenomena of this kind. He gathered his personal experiences and experiments in this area in a most interesting article he titled “Mental Telegraphy.” He waited thirteen years to publish it, fearing ridicule or incredulity. When public interest and scientific research (notably the investigations of the young Society for Psychical Research in England) began to catch up with his own findings, he came out with the article in Harper’s Magazine. One of his favorite examples of the interplay of psyche and physics that generates coincidence is the phenomenon of “crossed letters.” You know the kind of thing: you write to someone (or just think about them)—maybe someone you have not been in contact with for months—and then you get a letter or a call from that person the same day, or very soon after. Twain noticed that again and again, when he wrote to someone, he would get a letter from that person that was mailed at or around the same time. He concluded that this was very often the effect of distant communication between minds keyed to similar wavelengths. His most extraordinary example is the Great Bonanza book. One afternoon, Twain was seized with the passionate conviction that a great book could be written about the silver bonanza in Nevada. He felt his former newspaper colleague, “Mr. Wright,” would be the man to do it, but Twain was so possessed by the idea that he immediately roughed out an outline and sample chapters to get his old friend started. He was preparing to mail all this material to Wright when he received a package in the mail. Before opening the package, Twain told the people with him that he was going to deliver a “prophecy:” he declared that the package contained a letter from his old friend Wright, with his drafts for a book on the Great Bonanza. And so it did. This incident convinced Twain not only that mental telegraphy is real but that it can be strong enough to transport the complete content of a book across three thousand miles. Fortunately, Twain and Wright were good friends, and Twain had already determined that the Great Bonanza book was to be done by Wright; otherwise, the mental transfer (from Wright to Twain) could have resulted in two books and charges of plagiarism. Minds resonate with each other, and in doing this, transfer ideas and messages back and forth. Twain was very interested to determine whether we could pluck the strings as well as wait for them to vibrate.
Twain noticed that again and again, when he wrote to someone, he would get a letter from that person that was mailed at or around the same time. “What is it?” “An artist came here from New Hampshire, maybe fifteen years ago, and she painted my front garden when the colors were bright and perfect. I begged her for that painting — I offered to pay whatever she needed— but she wouldn’t part with it. She said she never sold her favorite work.” As Bonnie told this story on her porch, a woman with a package made her way along the drive from the car park. “You don’t remember me,” the woman said to Bonnie. “Sorry.” “My name is Marilyn. I came here fifteen years ago and I painted your garden. You wanted the painting but I wouldn’t sell it to you. But I woke up at four o’clock this morning knowing I had to drive here today and give it to you.” She handed Bonnie the package. When she tore off the paper, Bonnie found the painting she had just described. Even with the evidence in her hands, it was hard for Bonnie to believe that the New England artist could have gotten up before dawn and driven across two states to hand her the picture — at the exact
3. Coincidence Multiplies When We Are in Motion
Riffs of benign coincidence tend to come fastest at times of change, moments that stir the soul, when our passions are aroused—when we fall in love, or make a leap of faith, or are embarking on a new creative endeavor, or are close to birth or death. Coincidence multiplies when we are in Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 47
motion, whether that is physical movement or the movement of our hearts and souls. On the other hand, negative synchronicities and counter-currents tend to multiply when we are resisting change or insisting on following an ego-driven agenda. The easiest way to test this yourself is to make a date with coincidence when you are in transit. Pay attention to what happens on the train, on the bus, in your car, or simply walking through the market, which has long been a fertile ground for meaningful chance. The Peach Factor I am in Seattle; I wake up early and decide to take a morning stroll around the Pike Place Market. I notice that the produce stalls are bursting with fresh fruit; the peaches look especially ripe and juicy. I consider buying some fruit, but do not want to carry it back to the hotel. However, as I leave the market, I have second thoughts. I just have to sample some of those peaches. I choose Sosio’s stall, where a sign above the mounds of fruit reads “O My God Peaches.” I joke with the vendor that the sign should actually read “O My Goddess.” I now exit the market a couple of minutes later than I would have had I not gone back for the peaches. As I walk along the street, a VW bug slows to match my pace. A woman’s arm reaches out the driver’s window and plucks at my sleeve. “O my God! Robert!” she cries. “You got me pregnant five months ago! We have to talk!” I am so stunned I don’t immediately recognize the woman in the car. She reminds me, as we move slowly along the street together, that she came to a workshop I led in Seattle five months before. At the time, she and her husband were trying to have a baby through in vitro fertilization. She reminds me that I helped her to journey to meet the soul of the incoming child, and to develop a ritual to add spiritual depth to the medical procedures. She tells me she feels that our work helped. Though she is forty-five and her doctors had anticipated difficulties, there have been none; she and her baby are happily on their way. She is on her way to the market and asks if she can take me for coffee or breakfast to celebrate. She has a sudden craving for clams, and it requires some negotiation to get them at a restaurant at this early hour. As I watch her sucking down her clams, she tells me, “It’s incredible meeting you here. I came for the peaches. Sosio’s in the market is the best place in the world for peaches.” “I know,” I smile, displaying my bag from Sosio’s stand. “You came for the peaches and I came back for them.” She then tells me that she is going to buy two dozen O My God Peaches to make peach pies for a very special picnic—a picnic in a cemetery. She and several of her friends had lost close family in a tragic Alaskan Airlines crash a few years before. The survivors had agreed to hold a picnic, as well as a memorial service, to celebrate the dead and the living. As we speak, I feel the presence of her parents. Her father wants her to bury a personal item at his gravesite; I receive the clear impression of a corkscrew with a twisty wooden handle. I might feel awkward about pass48 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
ing on the message if synchronicity had not opened our path. She identifies the corkscrew immediately; it is a fine one with a vine root handle, one of many her father had collected. Since most of his body had vanished underwater, it feels right to lay something more of him in the earth on the occasion of the peachy picnic. Everything that happened around the market that morning was charged with meaning. From the moment I bought the O My God Peaches, I seemed to have stepped out of ordinary time, into a deeper, juicier reality. The mother-to-be and I met because of the peaches, yet I took my walk with no thought of buying any kind of fruit, and the odds on our meeting in that way, with that connection, are beyond astronomical. There were important reasons for us to meet, involving birth and death. But I was unaware of these at the time of our meeting, and had not thought of the mother-to-be since the workshop five months before, while on her side—though she had apparently had fond thoughts of me— she had no inkling that I was visiting her city that morning. Whatever brought us together was operating from far beyond the conscious mind, or any plausible notion of probability. As we enjoyed the shared sense that we had entered the play of larger forces, it seemed entirely natural that her parents should join the party—from the other side of death—to announce their wishes for the peachy picnic before it took place. What is to be said about an episode like this? The first words that come to me are “Thank you.” The mother-to-be and I both felt blessed to have entered a realm of natural magic, where things operate according to dream logic, and the veil between the worlds thins. This article is adapted and abridged from the book, The Three “Only” Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence & Imagination, by Robert Moss, © 2007. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. “ newworldlibrary.com
Sacred POETRY Fire
Little Bug Kneels Down by Mariana S. Tupper
Little Bug kneels down and bends her head low, no taller than a seedling blade of grass. Overhead, humungous puffy clouds touch the ether. In the distance, a great mountain points like an arrow to the sky. Little Bug kneels down while humungous clouds look far, far across the landscape. From here the great mountain appears small on the horizon. If the mountain looks small, then Little Bug is the dust of an atom. Little Bug bends her head low while up above, huge wind currents sculpt moisture and slide over each other like rivers. The sound of the immense air is deafening. Its spacious strength presses Little Bug low. Little Bug curls up small, smaller even than usual. She bows her head, eyes closed. Little Bug understands that she will never touch the mountain. Even to see it from a distance would take many days of climbing a nearby tree. Wind blows everywhere, connecting small and large. It is this realization that holds Little Bug’s attention. Wind swirls, gusts, blows, and carresses. Way, way down below, beneath the litter of leaves, even Little Bug’s antennae blow in the breeze.
Mariana S. Tupper is lucky to be living in Maine with her husband and daughter
Issue 10 / SACRED FIRE / 49
LIFE RESOURCES HEALING, GUIDANCE & COUNSELING
SACRED FIRE COMMUNITY FIRE CIRCLES
Fire is the energy of warmth, connection and transformation.These fire circles hold a ritual space for people of all paths and traditions to connect with each other and the world through the sacred spirit of fire.
Dan Sprinkles SHAMANIC HEALING: MARAKAME, GRANICERO. LIFE COACH
Feeling anxious, trapped or ‘stuck’ in your life? “The Enemies of Learning” program puts you into an appropriate relationship with the mind & restores a sense of wonder and of life-long learning. Blue Deer Center, Margaretville, NY USA 845-810-0200 enemiesoflearning@gmail.com
Kathy Reid PSM, REIKI MASTER, LMT, DOULA,
Eastern U.S. GA | CARROLTON
The Community Fire Circle of Carrolton Georgia invites you to come join us around the fire! Stir Ancient connections with the natural world. Share our hearts and lives. Deepen our spiritual connections. Sherry Boatright 770-854-5551 sherryboat@Bellsouth.net
PBI SPECIALIST, STUDENT MIDWIF
Experience the profound healing of the plant people. Offering Plant Spirit Medicine, Reiki, Massage, and other birthing services in Salt Lake City, UT. plantspiritmedicine-ut-co.blogspot.com 970-623-1297 plantspirithealing@gmail.com
Sherry Morgan EXPLORING THE PHENOMENON OF PRAYER
My gift is in helping others connect powerfully with the divine through prayer and to pray effectively. I offer workshops, personal coaching and companion prayers. 860-656-6817 (USA) 250-483-5273 (Canada) sherry.morgan@primus.ca
SkyFox
SC | FLORENCE
The Community Fire Circle of Florence South Carolina invites you to come join us around the fire! Stir Ancient connections with the natural world. Share our hearts and lives. Deepen our spiritual connections. Second Saturday of the Month. Annie King 843-665-1340 annieking@sc.rr.com MA | BROOKFIELD
Fire moves you to a different place.The Brookfield Massachusetts Fire Circle invites you to join us to share the warmth at our monthly community fires. Tim Simon & Gwen Broz 508-867-9810 timgwen@charter.net
NY | BOICEVILLE
Are you longing for a sense of community? A place to share your heart with others in a scared space where you can feel safe and heard? We welcome you to join us at our monthly fire! Claire Franke 845-657-2929 clairefranck@gmail.com TN | SUMMERTOWN
The Community Fire Circle of Summertown Tennessee invites you to come join us around the fire! Stir Ancient connections with the natural world. Share our hearts and lives. Deepen our spiritual connections. Susan Skinner 931-964-2452
Western U.S. CA | SANTA MONICA
You have and open invitation. Mark your calendar for the first Friday of every month, rain or shine.We’ll sit around the fire in community as our ancestors did. First Friday of every month. Alan Kerner 310-452-0658 kerners@aol.com WA | OLYMPIA
SHAMANIC ASTROLOGY
The planets speak to you. Know your divine purpose. Know your relationship intent. Know how to live your life in alignment. Mention of this ad for a 20% discount through 02/15/10. Yuma AZ USA.Telephonic readings available. 928-210-5092 foxxita@gmail.com
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The Westford Massachusetts Fire Circle invites you to join us at our monthly fires. Come share a song, a joke and your open heart. Ray Strouble 978-589-0901 Ray.Strouble@gmail.com
The Community Fire Circle in Olympia Washington invites you to join us at our monthly fires. Come be with the fire and each other. First Saturday of every month. Peter and Sharon Brown 360-943-9373 sbrown@sacredfiremagazine.com
SACRED FIRE RESOURCES LISTINGS are designed for healing practitioners, service practitioners, small businesses, and cottage industries offering mail order items. We reserve the right to refuse any ad at our discretion, and all mail order products listed in this section must offer satisfaction guaranteed or money back. // Resources Rates: Resources listings cost $35 each for one issue which includes up to 35 words, name and contact information. Discounts for consecutive issue insertions are offered: $90 for 3 issues or $100 for four issues. All Resources ads must be pre-paid. Send copy with check or money order payment to: SACRED FIRE ADVERTISING, PO BOX 5445, FLORENCE SC 29502-5445
For more information, email advertising@sacredfiremagazine.com or visit our website at www.sacredfiremagazine.com 50 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
Living with Totem:
Sacred Partnership with the World A Class with Eliot Cowan
Whether you know it or not, you have animal spirit helpers. Some have been helping you since before you were born. Others are nearby, politely waiting to be asked for their help. Patience, gentleness, fierceness, stamina, self respect … whatever is needed to help you fulfill your work and relationships, there is an animal who embodies it and is willing to share it with you. All peoples have found it helpful to have good relationship with animal helpers, or totems. They are every bit as useful now as ever in the past. When you don’t know your helpers you can easily feel that you are facing life on your own. Living with totem, you don’t feel alone, for life has given you allies. You don’t feel like a victim; you have been given what you need to learn and grow in your circumstances. Living with totem, you find yourself in sacred partnership with the natural world. The way opens to live in gratitude. With this course you will discover which animals are totems for you. You will be able to receive their help and be in good relationship with them for the rest of your life. Animal Totem !0a.indd
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April 12-15, 2010 Blue Deer Center near Woodstock, NY for more information: 805-967-7853 info@bluedeer.org
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The healing waters produced during the Healing Practice of Sidpé Gyalmo are considered to be a powerful remedy for the physical illnesses arising in modern times. In addition to our practicing together with Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and receiving the healing waters during the retreat, we will receive transmission from Rinpoche and supplementary teachings to allow continued practice in our daily lives. Rinpoche will guide this meditation and healing ritual that concentrates on the compassionate stream of consciousness of the fully enlightened protector of Bön, Sipé Gyalmo. This powerful healing practice was transmitted from master to master and eventually to the great Bön teacher Yongdzin Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche in Northern Tibet, and from him to Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche.
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For more than 20 years Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche has taught the ancient Bön Buddhist wisdom practices in a way that is relevant, inspiring, and applicable to modern Western students. Tenzin Rinpoche founded Ligmincha Institute in 1992 in order to preserve the ancient teachings, transmissions, and practices of the Bön Buddhist tradition. Retreats at our Serenity Ridge retreat center introduce these teachings in an authentic manner to the Western world. Tenzin Rinpoche is the author of: Healing With Form, Energy, and Light; The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep; Wonders of the Natural Mind; Unbounded Wholeness; and Tibetan Sound Healing. His books are available at: www.ligmincha.org/store.
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Sacred FINAL Fire FLICKER
The Prophecy of the Seventh Fire In the time of danger, will the New People chose the path of trust or destruction? he accounts of our life that have been handed down to us by our Ojibway elders tell us that many years ago, seven major nee-gawn-na-kayg’ (prophets) came to the Anishinabe. They came at a peaceful time when the people were living a full and peaceful life on the northeastern coast of North America. These prophets left the people with the seven predictions of what the future would bring. Each of these prophecies was called a Fire and each Fire referred to a particular era of time that would come in the future. Thus, the teachings of the seven prophets are now called the Neesh-wa-swi’ ish-ko-day-kawn’ (Seven Fires) of the Ojibway. THE SEVENTH PROPHET was younger than the
others who had come and there was a glowing light from his eyes. He said that there would come a time when the waters had been so poisoned that the animals and plants that lived there would fall sick and begin to die. Much of the forests and prairies would be gone so the air would begin 56 / SACRED FIRE / Issue 10
to lose the power of life. The way of the mind brought to the red, black, and yellow nation by the white nation would bring danger to the whole earth. In this time there will be a new people who will emerge from the clouds of illusion. They will retrace their steps to find the treasures that had been left by the trail. The stories that had been lost will be returned to them. They will remember the Original Instructions and find strength in the way of the circle. Their search will take them to the elders and the new people will ask for guidance. But many of the elders will have walked the Path of the Souls to the Star Web. Many elders will have forgotten their wisdom and they will not be able to help. Some of the elders will point in the wrong direction and others will remain silent because of their fear. Some of the elders will be silent because no one has asked them for their wisdom. If the New People will find trust in the way of all things, in the circle, they will no longer need the selfish voice of the ego and they can begin to trust their inner voice.
Wisdom will once again be found in dreams of the night and of the day. The sacred fire will once again be lit. The Light-skinned People will be given a choice between two paths. If they choose the right path the Seventh Fire will light the Eighth Fire and final fire of brotherhood and sisterhood. If they choose the wrong path, remaining on the path of the mind, then the destruction they brought with them will come back to destroy them. The people of the earth will experience much suffering and death. From, The Mishomis Book, The Voice of the Ojibway, by Edward Benton-Banai, published and distributed by Indian Country Publications (1988). Written from the ancestral oral traditions of the Ojibway, the major intent of The Mishomis Book is to provide the reader with an accurate and undistorted account of the culture, history and philosophies of the Ojibway Nation so that all people can benefit from these teachings which have endured from antiquity.
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he story is told of an Onondaga peace maker, who long ago walked the land to find a healing place to hold a council fire between two nations on the verge of war. When he came into this valley, he found a perfect circle in the river. This was the sign. As She did in earliest times, this land again offers Herself as a meeting place. People from many walks of life, from many paths of spirit, continue to gather here to share, learn and experience the richness of an awakened, heartconnected life. Visit our website for upcoming programs and to read the story of our land: www.bluedeer.org/ourstory.html
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Future.” “The Wisdom of the Past is the Seed of the Future