Category: Spiritual

Ceremony

Nature’s beauty cannot be dissected nor understood through mere thought or system.  What fills your eye and then your heart is understood whole.  It’s more like a symphony—there is magic in the melding.

Each morning before I write, I light a candle or two in celebration of the new day.  If I have a bundle of white or purple sage, I burn a leaf or two and let the fragrance of its spirit cleanse my soul and body, and I offer a prayer to the Giver of Life.  When I lived in the West, I always had this mystical plant at hand.  I miss it in the Southeast where I now reside, and have not found a substitute—perhaps pine needles from the great long-leafed pines of this low, coastal landscape.

A writer-friend of mine, Byrd Baylor, wrote The Way to Start a Day which describes the ways that peoples around the globe greet the dawn of a new day. Here’s an excerpt.

The way to start a day is this —

Go outside and face the east and greet the sun with some kind of blessing or chant or song that you made yourself and keep for early morning.

The way to make the song is this —

Don’t try to think what words to use until you’re standing there alone.

When you feel the sun you’ll feel the song, too.

Just sing it.

But don’t think you’re the only one who ever worked that magic.

Your caveman brothers knew what to do.

Your cavewoman sisters knew, too.

They sang to help the sun come up and lifted their hands to its power.

A morning needs to be sung to.

How do you greet the day? No need to do it any particular way, in fact, you may even be unaware of how you are paying attention and feeling gratitude for this one good day.  Sometimes we are so wrapped in our individual challenges and tragic circumstances we forget to breathe, to look up and see the beauty all around us.  Create a tiny sacred space to recognize the gift of life and the wonder of nature and you.

The Nature of Liberty

Liberty presses on the American mind.

A true American cannot be moved from his or her conviction about Liberty.  No eloquent speaker, powerful force, mind-altering influence; no bribe, or set of tragic circumstances, no ideology can shake an American from the knowledge that Liberty is at the heart of America:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.  ~ Declaration of Independence 1776

Liberty caused these thoughts to be written when minds were shaped by an America present long before the Europeans walked upon our shores.  Liberty presses on the American mind still:  Let them all be free – black, brown, red, yellow, woman, child, plant and animal!  Liberty stands firm on this.  True Americans understand it.

Americans believe all people should know Liberty.  A true American will not participate in, or support, anyone or any nation (even her own nation) that would deny Liberty to another human being.  Americans look across the globe with the hope of Liberty’s promise for all.  A true American is generous and long-suffering for just causes.  Listen:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….  ~ Declaration of Independence 1776

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it. ~ Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States (1809 – 1865)

He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

~ Thomas Paine, American Patriot (1737 – 1809)

Americans raise their flag to honor Liberty and burn their flag when Liberty is in jeopardy.  Liberty for All is the creed of true Americans.  They cannot be swayed. They have tasted her intoxicating liberation.  No government, no religious doctrine or person can deter true Americans from their pursuit of freedom.  Liberty is their only religion, their only banner.  True Americans are free to think and free to live.

Liberty whispers in their ear throughout the land.

The First American Democracy

“The future is a construct that is shaped in the present, and that is why to be responsible in the present is the only way of taking serious responsibility for the future. What is important is not the fulfillment of all one’s dreams, but the stubborn determination to continue dreaming.”

~ Gioconda Belli, The Country Under My Skin

Nothing can replace the act of seeking knowledge for oneself. I can read about it, have it explained, or live it through another person’s experience, but in each case I see it incompletely, like the blind man holding the elephant’s tail.

For Americans eighteen and older this has never been more relevant.

In 1990 I sought to learn about our nation’s first people by going to them. I left a high profile position at a well known institution, sold or gave away most of my possessions, packed up my pick up, and traveled to a dusty border town trusting my inner compass. There was a man and woman who agreed to take me on as an apprentice and student to help me understand American culture and my own life’s course through an examination of my country’s historical relationship with the First Americans and with the land, water, air, and wildlife of the North American continent.

Why did I do that, you may wonder. I had come to the realization that instead of my nation being a beacon of light in the world, it was in fact an empire to many other nations and peoples whose cultural beliefs and lands were at odds with ours.  How could there be hunger in a land of plenty? Why were democratic rights applied conditionally to members of our own society and in the world – and my culture accept that? How could we destroy the great natural beauty and abundance of our lands even while extolling how much we love it?

It made no sense to me and created a pervading sense of living a lie. I remember the unreality of my life then as I drove to work where architecturally beautiful buildings and the expansive green of a golf course tumbled down to the deep blue of the Pacific ocean. My day was stressful administering programs at a world renown health care facility where patients—banged up in the American market wars and social striving—suffered from heart problems, addiction, or complications from obesity.

One day I sat looking out the picture windows of my corporate office on a singing blue-sky day in southern California. Internally I felt lost and weak.  My eyes settled on a book that had lain unread on my shelves for many years:  Touch the Earth (T.C. McLuhan.) It is a book of Indian values from Indian voices.

At the first reading I experienced a profound sense of sanity return to me. In them I found a direction to pursue the answers to my deepest questions. I became aware of a pulsing hunger at my core for this knowledge, like something precious lost and then vaguely rememberd. Could it be that we have within us the knowledge of past human wisdom buried in our brains at birth? Looking back now, I realize that I had no choice but to make the decisions that led me to seek guidance and leave all I had known before – to clear the decks and make way for something new.

The next three years of living in the daily presence of two American Indian educators (one a Mojave elder, college professor, Korean veteran and social worker; the other an Iroquois artist and musician.) Their guidance changed the way I see myself and the world around me. I still believe the experience made me a better person. But the story of how that evolved is a hard one and definitely not what I had expected. The path to self-understanding is a crucible where falseness is burned away and a tender new skin grown. It requires humility, determination, and humor. It is anything but glamorous.

I hope you will return to my blog for journal entries about my experiences. Until then, here are some links to explore:

The First Democracy: the Haudenosaunee

Basic Call to Consciousness

What Does It Mean?

The Earth Charter

American Pubic Media “On Being”

I know that my discovery of “On Being” at 6 am on my local public radio station, WUWF.org, reveals just how out of it a person can be in a world with a cornucopia of media sources. Apparently the program has been broadcasting since 2008! However, humbly, I submit this link to this interview with Terry Tempest Williams.

The recorded podcasts on their main page are a treasure trove of some of our greatest spiritual voices and cultural innovators. This might be a very good way to “reset” your moral compass after a day or week out on Main Street.

Krista Tippett is the moderator. The link above to the unedited discussion with Terry includes many personal statements by both Terry and Krista that give additional insights into their focus and personalities.

I’ve been reading Terry’s books, blogs, and following her activities for the last 15 years. I am convinced that she is on the forward edge of an emerging sensibility that seeks to bring together divergent perspectives in American culture  for open dialogue and understanding. She gives numerous examples of how she personally is able to sit with people who hold opposite points of view and learn from them and stay in the dialogue….

If you read one book by Williams, read Refuge. You will understand then how Terry weaves the deeply personal, landscape, religion, spirituality, politics and the art of dialogue. This perspective might be similar to present and previous Earth – focused cultures  (e.g.  native cultures worldwide; ancient earth-based cultures.) However, what is evident in this interview and many others on the site, is an emergent blend of our best past and present thought. There is a heightened awareness of something much greater than ourselves, the issues at hand, and what we can perceive.

Listen and learn from a person who has learned to stay in the crucible of conflict and transform it into something of beauty….

Hope Beneath Our Feet

Hope Beneath Our Feet, Restoring Our Place in the Natural World is a new anthology of essays by authors who responded to this question: In the midst of environmental crisis, how can we live NOW?

I am unabashedly promoting the book because I am one of the authors. To be published along with the writers and thinkers to whom I have turned for inspiration over the last twenty years, is a huge honor for me. Some of these mentors are: Frances Moore Lappé, Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez and Howard Zinn.

The book’s genesis is the work of Martin Keogh, its Editor.  In the forward, Martin describes how his children expressed a sense of hopelessness about the future as they considered climate change or nuclear war—challenges that dwarf our sense of being able to make a difference. He wondered how human beings can keep hope and live well in very uncertain times. In 2006 Martin issued a call to writers to submit an essay answering the question above.

The book is published by North Atlantic Press and is now in its third printing – barely a month after its release.

Oil Globs on Santa Rosa Island: It’s Here

The People of the Forward Stampede

Late this afternoon I drove to Santa Rosa Island, to the entrance of a seven-mile stretch of undeveloped barrier island, protected by the Gulf Islands National Sea Shore, one of our priceless U.S. National Parks. While there was a long stretch of beautiful beach, as I walked west toward the end of the island, I began to see oil – firsts dime-sized, then bottle-cap, then hand-sized: thick crude oil, pooled and hardened among shells and sea grasses on the high tide line. Adjacent to this pollution, black skimmers sailed by with their long lower jaw skimming in the shallow edge of the surf and Least Terns dive-bombed for small fish not far off shore. Surely they must be tasting and smelling this invasion of foreign substances. We can only guess what is happening to fish, corals, jellies, dolphins, plankton…I am so profoundly sad about this awful time when we are facing our ourselves –  our ways and wants. It is NOT a pretty picture.

Only a few days ago this was the image of this treasured coast at sunrise:

And to think we are risking this and our families health for a culture addicted to speed and consumption and which cannot function without an enormous and uninterrupted supply of oil. Will it be worth it when all this plays out? And, it will continue to playout over months and years and there will be other catastrophes like it where we have taken enormous risks as the People of the Forward Stampede.

They will all be impacted by the oil catastrophe and eventually it will reach to our children and us through our air, food, and spirit.

Oil Plumes Measured at 1140M Depth

Trust your senses.

This morning I checked into Skytruth.org to learn the extent of the oil plumes. A blog contributor took me to the Gulf Oil Blog of the U.S. Marine Sciences. There you can find results of sampling in suspected deepwater plumes of oil. The measure is called a CDOM (colored dissolved organic matter). Scientists measured above and below the plume then sampled from the middle of the plume. Above and below they found no organic matter but within the plume they got a strong reading and could see an oily residue left over on the filters. Skytruth is tracking the movement of oil plumes from the Maconda well and it appears to be moving in the loop current and toward the Florida straits.

Skytruth cautions that there are natural processes that can also create oil sheen on the surface. But when you go to the U.S. Marine Sciences site you learn to “trust your senses”. This spill, if as White House energy and environment adviser Carol Browner warned, goes on through August when relief wells will be in place to receive the oil, we could see lasting and extensive impact on marine ecosystems along the whole of the Gulf, Florida and perhaps even the Atlantic shorelines where the loop current turns north and runs up the eastern coast.

Take action to prevent this happening again.

A jewel of nature: in the path of the Oil Spill?

For today I thank God for the Gulf – a nursery and a home to creatures big and small and innocent to our machinations.

Pensacola, Florida. Santa Rosa Island. Gulf Shores National Seashore. Observed wildlife: dozens of spotted eagle rays skimming along the shoreline; dolphins pursuing schools of silver mullet offshore; two small loggerhead turtles bobbing along (looking for a place to come ashore tonight under the moonlight – to lay her eggs?). Least terns dive-bombing over white sands under translucent green seas, a small fish for breakfast; 14 brown pelicans, gulls, and two black skimmers with long jaws dropped to scoop up the least terns meal; and one handsome man from Scotland who showed me how to find small, whole sand dollars.

I cannot tolerate the idea that a black tide is on the way here. I pray that it does not so that our shores can provide accommodation for wildlife on the move from the tragedy happening in Louisiana. But I am probably too optimistic. For today I thank God for the Gulf – a nursery and a home to creatures big and small and innocent to our machinations. See links on this site for updates on the spill in our region: Oil Spill Academic Task Force, Skytruth.org.

For now this jewel of nature’s creation persists….

Oil Spill Perspectives

…what if we did something revolutionary and base our decisions on a set of conditions that assures we don’t harm the Earth and thus ourselves since we are one community, interlinked?

Most of us have copious information about the oil spill (I think we can agree that GOBS MORE oil is spilling into the Gulf waters than we have been told by BP and by the EPA. Go to links on this blog for more accurate estimates).

The impacts are starting to show up in Louisiana and threatening Alabama and Florida. Things are not static this time of year with the tropical storm season and strong south easterly winds and thus currents. We can only guess what is happening to plankton and all the vulnerable life underneath the surface, out of site. It has to be devastating.

What has been growing in my mind is much greater than the stats on this spill, though important. What I am thinking about is how we make (or don’t get a chance to make) decisions about our technologies, even at the origin when inventors are “out there” thinking up stuff. Right now the values that underpin most of our biggest industries are based on providing a natural resource or product from it that has been evaluated to make a lot of money for its creators and sellers. Our principle is: if it can be made and make money, make it! Figure out later if it is harmful in which case the American citizen or the natural systems that support us will take the blows, and while down, have to wage a near impossible battle to bring the barons to court. Even then there is no certainty justice will be done.

What if there was much more thought on the front end of the process where we carefully consider the impacts on the health and well being of our people and all the wildlife and natural systems that produce health and wealth? And what if we did something revolutionary and base our decisions on a set of conditions that assures we don’t harm the Earth and thus ourselves since we are one community, interlinked?

Consider what Wendell Berry suggests are bad solutions to problems versus a good solution:

“A bad solution is bad because it acts destructively upon the larger patterns in which it is contained. It acts destructively upon those patterns most likely, because it is formed in ignorance or disregard of them.” ~ p. 137 The Gift of Good Land

“A good solution is good, on the contrary, “because it is in harmony with those larger patterns.”

Good solutions:

  1. Accept given limits
  2. Accept the limits of discipline (i.e. agricultural problems are solved by agriculture not technology, etc.
  3. Improve the balances, symmetries, or harmonies within a pattern
  4. Solve more than one problem
  5. Will satisfy a whole range of criteria
  6. Embody a clear distinction between the biological and the mechanical
  7. Have wide margins
  8. Answer the question, “how much is enough?”
  9. Should be cheap and should not enrich one person by the distress or impoverishment of another
  10. Exist in proof
  11. Imitate the structure of natural systems
  12. Are good for all parts of a system
  13. Preserve the integrity and pattern that contains it
  14. Are in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law~ pp 141-145 Ibid

In 1970 during the oil crisis of that day, President Carter was laughed at for his efforts to develop energy independence by switching to alternatives such as wind, solar, and geothermal sources. What stopped all that effort, removed the electric car from the road?

Simply, greed. Could that be why we have an incredible 3500 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico and 1500 miles of pipeline criss crossing the ocean floor in a hurricane prone zone. Follow the money and you will discover the reasons why we do most of what we do in America. Our bottom line is STILL profit. Preoccupation with the market and belief in it, which is a metaphysical movement unnamed as such, is driving us to the edge of environmental degradation after which no one can really predict outcomes – exactly where we are with this oil spill.

See the Lindbergh Foundation website. They support innovative research that establishes a healthy balance between technological development and preservation of the Earth’s ecosystems. Click on each of the funded scientists and educators whose work they are supporting to understand the concept that Wendall Berry was getting at. We need a lot more of this kind of thinking!

Read Barry Lopez to understand what it means to live connected to everything around us, our own nature knit tightly into the fabric of all the creation.

For a very thoughtful article by Joshua Reichert of PEW Environmental Group published in the Miami Herald, “The Future of Oil and Water.”

Passages and Oil Spills

While the Deep Water Horizon platform exploded and began to spew oil into the Gulf of Mexico, my loved one lay in the ICU suffering from post heart surgery from which she never recovered. She died on April 27 at 3:43 pm. I know because I was there with her, my other sister and her daughter. We were the ones who would escort my older sister to places beyond our reach. We navigated terrifying medical procedures, tubes, drains, trachs and vents, dialysis machines, and watched my sister’s body swell beyond belief, turn red and raw; we gently kissed the scabs and bruises on her arms and hands that crusted over or oozed with edema. On her last day of life the sheets were soaked from her body fluid oozing out of every pore. The machines peeped and winked; the vent breathed in and out from a taped area around my sweet sister’s neck. I wondered, Does it hurt, Bev? But she could not answer me, rendered speechless for a month, with only mouthing which we could not lipread and which toward the end was not even possible. I kept a piece of computer paper on which my brilliant, accomplished sister struggled to write a message but it is only scribbles that run eventually off the paper…

It has been one week now and she has been cremated and her remains await her family to scatter in her favorite places. We gave her a wonderful memorial at which her friends assembled and many from my family including my son and daughter. While together we held each up somewhat, when we separated I felt the vast pain and sadness that washed up against my chest like a sea pushing against pilings.

Meantime the oil continued to billow into the ocean waters of the Gulf which my sister loved, and it crept toward the crystal white beaches on which we sat watching a green translucent sea lap against the snow-white sand. Langdon Beach with brioche and coffee…our habit….

The Gulf is lying as she did, helpless to an approaching disaster, with concerned people all around whose efforts cannot prevent something set in motion that cannot be undone.  I walk the shores weeping for Bev as I weep for dolphins and schools of silver pompano and the microbial hordes whose haven, the waves, will soon be something like a wrath – innocent to the machinations of a misdirected culture.

Was the medical treatment of my sister also misdirected? Invasive, entirely without humanity, all numbers and organs and technology in the name of life.

Why can’t I help thinking my sister died an early death as the beaches on the Gulf will, too, from events so complex and indirectly applied as to cloud our perception?

Now I know what it is to feel totally helpless.