Hopi Prayer For Peace

Rare Archival footage Of Hopi Elders

A rare opportunity to listen to some of the last traditional Hopi Elders. This archival footage was first released in 1987 with the intent to show it at the United Nations.

https://youtu.be/AmKyAVTyPiA

Conversations Our Feet Don't Hear

I talked about summer, and about time. 
The  pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night.  About this cup
we call a life.  About happiness.  And how good it feels, the
heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.

He looked neither up nor down 
which didn't necessarily mean he was either afraid or asleep.
I felt his energy, stored
under his tongue perhaps,
and behind his bulging eyes.

I talked about how the world seems to me, five feet tall, the
blue sky all around my head. 
I said, I wondered how it seemed
to him, down there, intimate with the dust.

He might have been Buddha - did not move, blink, or frown,
not a tear fell from those gold-rimmed eyes 
as the refined anguish of language
passed over him.

Mary Oliver (from "The Truro Bear")

Old pond,
frog jumps in -

splash.

Basho

We have been underground too long

we have done our work,
we are many and one,
we remember when we were human.

We have lived among roots and stones,
we have sung but no one has listened,
we come into the open air
at night only to love
which disgusts the soles of boots,
their leather strict religion.

We know what a boot looks like
when seen from underneath,
we know the philosophy of boots,
their metaphysic of kicks and ladders.
We are afraid of boots
but contemptuous of the foot that needs them.

Soon we will invade like weeds,
everywhere but slowly:

the captive plants will rebel
with us, fences will topple,
brick walls ripple and fall,
there will be no more boots.
Meanwhile we eat dirt
and sleep; we are waiting
under your feet.

When we say Attack
you will hear nothing
at first.

Margaret Atwood, from "You Are Happy"

A Poem to nourish us at this time

A Poem to nourish us at this time

By Rev. Dr. Lynn Ungar, poet and minister for lifespan learning 

and editor of Quest for the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Larger Fellowship.

Pandemic
What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?

Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.

Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.

And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.

(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)

Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.

Promise this world your love--
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

David Abram and the Storied World

"For we are born of this animate earth, and our sensitive flesh is simply our part of the dreaming body of the world."

 I am still unable to write much, illness and a neck injury making it hard to do.  My friends say I should write about that too.................well, I'll think about it, but the healing process is often a very boring process, it is hard to find metaphor, poetry, or story in it.  But here is an article well worth sharing, by a visionary I admire greatly, David Abram, that continues the discussion of a living, CONVERSANT Earth, geomantic reciprocity, and our own part in that great Life as Story Tellers.

I posted this  article with the permission of the author on this blog in 2009.  High time to share it again.  

David Abram – cultural ecologist, philosopher, and performance artist – is the founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics. He is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Pantheon/Vintage), for which he received the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. An accomplished storyteller who has lived and traded magic with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas, David lectures and teaches widely on several continents.  An early version of this essay was published in Resurgence, issue 222, and another in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Taylor and Kaplan, ed., published by Continuum, 2005

Storytelling and Wonder:
 on the rejuvenation of oral culture

by David Abram, Ph.D.

In the prosperous land where I live, a mysterious task is underway to invigorate the minds of the populace, and to vitalize the spirits of our children. For a decade, now, parents, politicians, and educators of all forms have been raising funds to bring computers into every household in the realm, and into every classroom from kindergarten on up through college. With the new technology, it is hoped, children will learn to read much more efficiently, and will exercise their intelligence in rich new ways. Interacting with the wealth of information available on-line, children's minds will be able to develop and explore much more vigorously than was possible in earlier eras -- and so, it is hoped, they will be well prepared for the technological future. 

How can any child resist such a glad initiative? Indeed, few adults can resist the dazzle of the digital screen, with its instantaneous access to everywhere, its treasure-trove of virtual amusements, and its swift capacity to locate any piece of knowledge we desire. And why should we resist? Digital technology is transforming every field of human endeavor, and it promises to broaden the capabilities of the human intellect far beyond its current reach. Small wonder that we wish to open and extend this powerful dream to all our children!

It is possible, however, that we are making a grave mistake in our rush to wire every classroom, and to bring our children online as soon as possible. Our excitement about the internet should not blind us to the fact that the astonishing linguistic and intellectual capacity of the human brain did not evolve in relation to the computer! Nor, of course, did it evolve in relation to the written word. Rather it evolved in relation to orally told stories. Indeed, we humans were telling each other stories for many, many millennia before we ever began writing our words down -- whether on the page or on the screen.

Spoken stories were the living encyclopedias of our oral ancestors, dynamic and lyrical compendiums of practical knowledge. Oral tales told on special occasions carried the secrets of how to orient in the local cosmos. Hidden in the magic adventures of their characters were precise instructions for the hunting of various animals, and for enacting the appropriate rituals of respect and gratitude if the hunt was successful, as well as specific insights regarding which plants were good to eat and which were poisonous, and how to prepare certain herbs to heal cramps, or sleeplessness, or a fever. The stories carried instructions about how to construct a winter shelter, and what to do during a drought, and -- more generally -- how to live well in this land without destroying the land's wild vitality.

Such practical intelligence, intimately related to a particular place, is the hallmark of any oral culture. Continually tested in interaction with the living land, altering in tandem with subtle changes in the local earth, even today such living knowledge resists the fixity and permanence of the printed page. Because it is specific to the way things happen here, in this high desert -- or coastal estuary, or mountain valley -- this kind of intimate intelligence loses its meaning when abstracted from its terrain, and from the particular persons and practices that are a part of its terrain. 

Such place-specific savvy, which deepens its value when honed and tempered over the course of several generations, forfeits much of its power when uprooted from the soil of its home and carried -- via the printed page or the glowing screen – to other places. Such intelligence, properly speaking, is an attribute of the living land itself; it thrives only in the direct, face-to-face exchange between those who dwell and work in this place.

So much earthly savvy was carried in the old tales! And since, for our indigenous ancestors, there was no written medium in which to record and preserve the stories -- since there were no written books -- the surrounding landscape, itself, functioned as the  primary mnemonic, or memory trigger, for preserving the oral tales. 

To this end, diverse animals common to the local earth figured as prominent characters within the oral stories -- whether as teachers or tricksters, as buffoons or as bearers of wisdom. Hence, a chance encounter with a particular creature as a tribesperson went about his daily business (an encounter with a coyote, perhaps, or a magpie) would likely stir the memory of one or another story in which that animal played a decisive role. Moreover, crucial events in the stories were commonly associated with particular sites in the local terrain where those events were assumed to have happened, and whenever one noticed that place in the course of one’s daily wanderings -- when one came upon that particular cluster of boulders, or that sharp bend in the river -- the encounter would spark the memory of the storied events that had unfolded there.

Thus, while the accumulated knowledge of our oral ancestors was carried in stories, the stories themselves were carried by the surrounding earth. The local landscape was alive with stories! Traveling through the terrain, one felt teachings and secrets sprouting from every nook and knoll, lurking under the rocks and waiting to swoop down from the trees. The wooden planks of one's old house would laugh and whine, now and then, when the wind leaned hard against them, and whispered wishes would pour from the windswept grasses. To the members of a traditionally oral culture, all things had the power of speech. . .

 Indeed, when we consult indigenous, oral peoples from around the world, we commonly discover that for them there is no phenomenon -- no stone, no mountain, no human artifact -- that is definitively inert or inanimate. Each thing has its own spontaneity, its own interior animation, its own life! 

Rivers feel the presence of the fish that swim within them. A large boulder, its surface spreading with crinkly red and gray lichens, is able to influence the events around it, and even to influence the thoughts of those persons who lean against it -- lending their reflections a certain gravity, and a kind of stony wisdom. Particular fish, as well, are bearers of wisdom, gifting their insights to those who catch them. Everything is alive -- even the stories themselves are animate beings! Among the Cree of Manitoba, for instance, it is said that the stories, when they are not being told, live off in their own villages, where they go about their own lives. Every now and then, however, a story will leave its village and go hunting for a person to inhabit. 

That person will abruptly be possessed by the story, and soon will find herself telling the tale out into the world, singing it back into active circulation...There is something about this storied way of speaking -- this acknowledgement of a world all alive, awake, and aware -- that brings us close to our senses, and to the palpable, sensuous world that materially surrounds us. Our animal senses know nothing of the objective, mechanical, quantifiable world to which most of our civilized discourse refers. Wild and gregarious organs, our senses spontaneously experience the world not as a conglomeration of inert objects but as a field of animate presences that actively call our attention, that grab our focus or capture our gaze. 

Whenever we slip beneath the abstract assumptions of the modern world, we find ourselves drawn into relationship with a diversity of beings as inscrutable and unfathomable as ourselves. Direct, sensory perception is inherently animistic, disclosing a world wherein every phenomenon has its own active agency and power.

When we speak of the earthly things around us as quantifiable objects or passive "natural resources," we contradict our spontaneous sensory experience of the world, and hence our senses begin to wither and grow dim. We find ourselves living more and more in our heads, adrift in a sea of abstractions, unable to feel at home in an objectified landscape that seems alien to our own dreams and emotions. But when we begin to tell stories, our imagination begins to flow out through our eyes and our ears to inhabit the breathing earth once again. 

Suddenly, the trees along the street are looking at us, and the clouds crouch low over the city as though they are trying to hatch something wondrous. We find ourselves back inside the same world that the squirrels and the spiders inhabit, along with the deer stealthily munching the last plants in our garden, and the wild geese honking overhead as they flap south for the winter. Linear time falls away, and we find ourselves held, once again, in the vast cycles of the cosmos -- the round dance of the seasons, the  sun climbing out of the ground each morning and slipping down into the earth every evening, the opening and closing of the lunar eye whose full gaze attracts the tidal waters within and all around us.

For we are born of this animate earth, and our sensitive flesh is simply our part of the dreaming body of the world. 

However much we may obscure this ancestral affinity, we cannot erase it, and the persistance of the old stories is the continuance of a way of speaking that blesses the sentience of things, binding our thoughts back into the depths of an imagination much vaster than our own. To live in a storied world is to know that intelligence is not an exclusively human faculty located  somewhere inside our skulls, but is rather a power of the animate earth itself, in which we humans, along with the hawks and the thrumming frogs, all participate. It is to know, further, that each land, each watershed, each community of plants and animals and soils, has its particular style of intelligence, its unique mind or imagination evident in the particular patterns that play out there, in the living stories that unfold in that valley, and that are told and retold by the people of that place. Each ecology has its own psyche, and the local people bind their imaginations to the psyche of the place by letting the land dream its tales through them.

Today, economic globalization is rapidly undermining rural economies and tearing apart rural communities. The spreading monoculture degrades both cultural diversity and biotic diversity, forcing the depletion of soils and the wreckage of innumerable ecosystems. As the civilization of total commerce muscles its way into every corner of the planet, countless species tumble helter skelter over the brink of extinction, while the biosphere itself shivers into a bone-rattling fever.

For like any living being, earth’s metabolism depends upon the integrated functioning of many different organs, or ecosystems. Just as the human body could not possibly maintain its health if the lungs were forced to behave like the stomach, or if the kidneys were forced to act like the ears or the soles of the feet, so the planetary metabolism is thrown into disarray when each region is compelled to behave like every other region – when diverse places and cultures are forced to operate according to a single, mechanical logic, as interchangeable parts of an undifferentiated, homogenous sphere.

In the face of the expanding monoculture and its technological imperatives, more and more people are coming each day to recognize the critical importance of revitalizing local, face-to-face community. They recognize their common embedment within the life of this breathing planet, yet they know that such unity arises only from a vital and thriving multiplicity. A reciprocal respect and interdependence between richly different cultures -- each a dynamic expression of the unique earthly place, or bioregion, that supports it – is far more sustainable than a homogenous, planetary civilization.

Many of us have already worked for several decades on ecological and bioregional initiatives aimed at renewing local economies and the conviviality of place-based communities. Yet far too little progress was made by the movements for local self-sufficiency and sustainability. To be sure, our efforts were hindered by the steady growth of an industrial economy powered by the profligate burning of fossil fuel. Yet our efficacy was also weakened by our inability to recognize the immense influence of everyday language. Our work was weakened, that is, by our inability to discern that the spreading technologization of everyday life in the modern world (including the growing ubiquity of automobiles and telephones, of televisions and, most recently, personal computers) had been accompanied by a steady transformation in language -- by an increasing abstractness and generality in daily discourse. Local vernaculars had fallen into disuse; local stories had been forgotten; the oral forms and traditions by which place-specific knowledge had once been preserved and disseminated were no longer operative.

We in the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE) now recognize that a rejuvenation of real, face-to-face community – and the sensorial attunement to the local earth that ensures the vitality and sustenance of such community – simply cannot happen without a rejuvenation of the layer of language that goes hand in hand with such attunement. It cannot happen without renewing that primary layer of language, and culture, that underlies all our more abstract and technological forms of discourse. A renewal of place-based community cannot happen without a renewal of oral culture.

But does such a revitalization of oral, storytelling culture entail that we must renounce reading and writing? Not at all! It entails only that we leave space in our days for an interchange with one another and with the earth that is not mediated by technology – neither by the television, nor the computer, nor even the printed page.

Among writers, for instance, it entails that we allow that there are certain stories that one might come upon that should not be written down -- stories that we instead begin to tell, with our own tongue, in the particular places where those stories live.

It entails that as parents we set aside, now and then, the storybooks that we read to our children in order to actually tell our children a story with the whole of our gesturing body – or better yet, that we draw our kids out of doors in order to improvise a tale about the wild wind that’s now blustering its way through these city streets, plucking the hats off people’s heads…

And among educators, it entails that we begin to rejuvenate the arts of telling, and of listening, in the context of the living landscape where our lessons happen. For too long we have incarcerated the potent magic of linguistic meaning within an exclusively human space of signs. Hence the land itself has fallen mute; it now seems little more than a passive backdrop for human affairs, or a storehouse of resources waiting to be mined for purely human purposes. Can we return to the local land an implicit sense of its own inherent meaningfulness, its own many-voiced eloquence? Not without renewing the sensory craft of listening, and the sensuous art of storytelling. Can we help our students to translate the quantified abstractions of science into the language of direct experience, so that those abstract insights begin to come alive in our felt encounters with the animate earth around us?

 Can we begin to affirm our own co-evolved, carnal embedment within this blooming, buzzing proliferation of life, stirring within us a new humility in the face of a world that we did not create – in the face of a world that created us? Most importantly, can we begin with our students to restore the health and integrity of the local earth? Not without restoryingthe local earth. For our senses have become exceedingly estranged from the earthly sensuous. The age-old reciprocity between the human animal and the animate earth has long been short-circuited by our increasing involvement with our own creations, our own human-made technologies. And yet a simple tale, well-told, can shatter the spell – whether for an hour, or a day, or even a lifetime. We cannot restore the land without restorying the land. 

There is no need to give up reading, nor to discard our computers, as long as we recall that such mediated and technological forms of interchange inevitably remain rooted in the more primary world of direct experience. As long as we remember, that is, that our involvement with the printed page and the digital screen draws its basic sustenance from our more immediate, face-to-face encounter with the flesh of the real.

Each medium of communication organizes our awareness in a particular way, each engaging us in a particular form of community. Without here analyzing all the diverse media that exert their claims upon our attention, we can acknowledge some very general traits:

~ Literacy and literate discourse (the ways of speaking and thinking implicitly informed by books, newspapers, magazines, and other printed media) is inherently cosmopolitan, mingling insights drawn from diverse traditions and places. Reading is a wonderful form of experience, but it is necessarily abstract relative to our direct sensory encounters in the immediacy of our locale.

 Computer literacy, and our engagement with the internet, brings us almost instantaneous information from around the world, empowering virtual interactions with people from vastly different cultures. Yet such digital engagements are even more disembodied and placeless than our involvement with printed books and magazines. Indeed cyberspace seems to have no location at all, unless the “place” that we encounter through the internet is, well, the planet itself, transmuted into a weightless field of information. In truth, our increasing participation with email, e-commerce, and electronic information involves us in a discourse that is inherently global and globalizing. (It is this computerized form of communication, of course, that has enabled the rapid globalization of the free-market economy).

~ Oral culture (the culture of face to face storytelling) is inherently local. Far more concrete than those other modes of discourse, genuinely oral culture binds us not only to our immediate human community, but to the more-than-human community – the particular ecology of animals, plants and earthly elements in which we materially participate. In contrast to more abstract forms of media, the primary medium of oral communication is the atmosphere itself. In other words the unseen air, which is subtly different in each terrain, and which binds our own breathing bodies to the metabolism of oak trees and hawks and the storm clouds gathering above the city, is the implicit intermediary in all oral communication. As the most ancient and longstanding form of human discourse, oral culture provides the necessary soil and support for those more abstract styles of communication and reflection.

The Alliance for Wild Ethics holds that the globalizing culture of the internet, and the cosmopolitan culture of books, are both dependent, for their integrity, upon the place-based, vernacular culture of face-to-face storytelling.

When oral culture degrades, then the literate mind loses its bearings, forgetting its ongoing debt to the body and the breathing earth. When stories are no longer being told in the woods or along the banks of rivers -- when the land is no longer being honored, ALOUD!, as an animate, expressive power – then the human senses lose their attunement to the surrounding terrain. 

We no longer feel the particular pulse of our place – we no longer hear, or respond to, the many-voiced eloquence of the land. Increasingly blind and deaf, increasingly impervious to the sensuous world, the technological mind begins to lay waste to the earth.

We can be ardent readers (and even writers) of books, and enthusiastic participants in the world wide web and the internet, while recognizing that these abstract and almost exclusively human layers of culture will never be sufficient unto themselves. Without rejecting these rich forms of communication, we can nonetheless discern, today, that the rejuvenation of oral culture is an ecological imperative.

1 I am reminded here of the Australian Aboriginal ideas of the "Songlines", tracks in the land that bear the "stories of the land" and the ancestral beings.

2 Like the Pueblo people's  Spider Woman/Thought Woman  ("Tse Che Nako"), the Creatrix spins, sings or tells stories that become the world - perhaps this Creation emanates  from a  universal, ensouled, non-local imagination, a participatory kind of creative consciousness that includes, but is not exclusive to, us.

3  "Story" includes the Numina, the participation of the intelligences of Place, and in this respect, the author is saying that an oral tradition is a much richer tapestry of direct sensory experience that includes body movement, sound, the environment, and the various psychic energy exchanges that go on in the prescence of such.

Earth Speak: Envisioning a Conversant World

I was looking forward to presenting this at the Association for Women and Mythology Conference in New Mexico, but unfortunately I have had to cancel because of illness.  But I just felt like posting it again anyway................brings back the revelations of that wonderful trip!

Earth Speak Power Point presentation from Lauren Raine

Earth Speak 2019 presentation from Lauren Raine

Earth-speak:

Envisioning a Conversant World

By Lauren Raine MFA

"Speak to the Earth and it shall teach thee"

Job 12:8

This fall I attended  a  conference on  sacred sites and dowsing in the UK, and  continued my visit as a personal pilgrimage, visiting  Avebury, Glastonbury, Arbor Low, and other sites.

 After a 15 hour flight from LA, I waited in line 2 hours in Customs, then  made my way  to Paddington Station in London, then to Swindon by train, finally to Avebury by bus, and wholly  exhausted  stepped from the bus to see, perfectly aligned with my sight,  rising from the mist,   the great prehistoric monument  of Silbury Hill, the mysterious  Omphalos of an ancient  world.  

When I saw Silbury through the mist, what opened before me was a vision of a time when the entire landscape was the  sacred body of  the deity,  a cyclical mythos  of an animated Earth that ensouled and enlivened and enstoried every hill, spring, river and forest within a cosmology of conversant belonging.

Situated just south of Avebury, Silbury Hill is Europe's tallest prehistoric structure.   Michael Dames, in his book THE SILBURY TREASURE,  demonstrates that Silbury, like other "neolithic Harvest Hills" associated with nearby henges and standing stones,  literally represented the pregnant belly of the  Great Mother, and was associated with a certain time of the year, in particular, the harvest of July/August.  

Silbury Hill is part of the Avebury complex, and  has been excavated over the centuries, never once  finding the “great chieftain’s treasure” which it was assumed “must” be there.  We now know that its  interior holds grains, turf, and animal bones, with no evidence of human burial at its core.  Silbury was  surrounded by a henge or moat of water, which Dames points out actually forms the shape of a squatting or birthing  woman in profile.     He likens the "Goddess form" of the henge  to similar ubiquitous Goddess sculptures and sites associated with  Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, Brittany.........as far as the mysterious Temples of Malta,  or the barely excavated stone circles of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey.

 Why has this interpretation of Silbury never been seen before?  Because, Dames points out, to do so one must make a paradigm shift.  “Silbury “ he writes,

“conveys a philosophy which is of exceptional relevance to the modern world.  Silbury has been reduced to an enigma because of the  attempt to impress upon it concepts such as kingship, personal property, and individual male glory. Who put “King Sil” into Silbury?  We did, because we wanted him there - a superman chieftain with a super treasure and hundreds of slaves,  so vain, so aggressive, so acquisitive, so preoccupied with eternal fame, that he could provide us with a monumental tomb and treasure.  All treasure finding  attempts have failed because the builders belonged to a society for which such concepts had little importance, or even meaning.  And yet, since their compelling priorities are not entirely absent from our values, we can appreciate something of what the original Silsbury treasure was, especially since the future of our own civilization may give us urgency and humility to tender our investigation.”

When I later walked  the Avebury complex I experienced  the  intensification of  life force vitality I have come to recognize  in  places of numinosity and  telleric force.  There is no doubt in my mind (or body mind) that these  sites marked places of intrinsic geomantic power, and the placement of stones also served to intensify or channel the  animating  Earth energies  present.   Sacred landscapes  also augment their healing or consciousness elevating properties  through the  interaction  of generations of  people with the "spirit of the land"  through geomantic reciprocity.

 Geomantic reciprocity occurs  as human beings bring intentionality and focus to a particular place.  The communion with place  becomes more active as place itself  accrues story,  in the memory of the people, and in the memory of the land.   Sacred places have both an innate and a developed capacity to bring about altered states of consciousness, especially if people come with the open liminal state of pilgrimage or ceremony.  And myth   is the language spoken, if we wish to engage the numinous presence.

I also went to Glastonbury, to visit the Chalice Well.  Glastonbury  is  the  source of the Arthurian legends,  of Merlin and the Lady of the Lake.  Once the hill called the  Tor was actually surrounded by a lake.  During the Middle Ages it contained the great Gothic  Cathedral of Glastonbury.  Dowsers speak of the “crossing of the Michael and Mary  lines” at the Tor, as well as the more mutable “Dragon lines” of serpentine force .   Now called the "Red Spring" and the "White Spring", the source of the Chalice Well is still revered  by pilgrims.   The red color is iron oxide being deposited by the springs - the white spring deposits calcium, leaving a white tinge as it passes over.  The Avalonian springs are famous………….but in truth, there are hundreds of once revered historical wells and springs throughout the UK, many of them still named for St. Brigit, the ancient Goddess of the Isles of Britannia. 

The Chalice Garden is  infused with  presence, with what locals call  the  Lady of Avalon.  I  took water to bring home, and walked around.  What popped into my mind  was odd - the words "Covenant Garden". 

 What could "covenant garden" mean, and why had I thought of it?  I remembered the  name of the English Goddess,  Coventina, from which the word itself may be related.  Later I considered that the word Covenant, like "coven", "convening" etc.  refers to a gathering of people to reach an harmonious agreement, which can include an agreement that is holy  in some way.    Such as the famous "Ark of the Covenant", which was supposed to hold writings and objects of veneration, as well as "God's sustenance for man" which was called Manna.   Manna was the food, variously described as different substances, that was provided to feed the people; it has also come to be used to mean a kind of numinous power. 

 According to Wikipedia, the Ark of the Covenant  is a gold-covered wooden chest  described in the Book of Exodus as containing the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.  It also is supposed to contain “a golden jar holding manna, and Aaron's rod, which budded" .

Interesting:  holy food and a budding rod or tree.  The Garden is indeed a "harmonious agreement" between earthly beings.  And "Manna" is the food provided by the Garden, which I view as the sustaining power of  nature.  Aaron’s  "rod that blooms".............could also be seen as the ancient Hebrew and Middle Eastern  Goddess Asherah, who was often  represented as a tree, and  in the days of the old testament She was represented as a rod,  or "Asherah pole".  The practice of carrying "Asherah poles" was apparently fairly common in the early days of the Semite tribes, although the Patriarchs later eliminated this custom, along with the Goddess, as the Hebrew deity became exclusively male.  

I reflected that a Garden represents a "Covenant"  between human, animal, plant, soil, air, rain, water.......A successful garden is a harmonious Ecosystem.  A garden thrives through a network of inter-dependant relationships.  Trees communicate  with each other through a vast underground weaving of roots and fungi.  The bees and other pollinators bring new life; the worms, microorganisms and  and other insects  assist in the decay process.  And the birds  assist in distributing seed as well.  Not to mention humans that may plant, sow, admire, and occasionally eat the stray apple or strawberry as well.  It could be said that a Garden is a "Covenant" achieved by many beings, a divine agreement.  THE GARDEN OF THE COVENANT.

As I was leaving my Pilgrimage,  I saw a tiny metallic heart on the ground.  I was going to take it, but then it occured to me that  perhaps someone left it as a kind of offering, and it wasn't right for me to take it.  I put it back on the ground and took a picture.  I was amazed to see this light surrounding it in the photo!  So I took two more - they came out the same!  

 A Green Heart ………  Perhaps the Earth is Speaking to us  all the time, we’ve just forgotten how to listen.

"To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension.  In traditional bardic culture,  every place had its legend and its own identity....what endured was an ongoing conversation with the mythic landscape."

R. F. Foster

In so many  areas of the UK  the 21st Century can seem like  just another layer atop a  pentimento  of  a much older landscape.   Of course this is true everywhere, but it seems so much in evidence there.  That "pentimento" is  circular, serpentine, full of  standing  stones, henges, magic wells. and ley lines.   What, as  theologians and  "geologians" for the future,  might we re-cover and  re-invent from it?

With the evolution of monotheism and patriarchal  religions that increasingly removed divinity from Nature and the body, and in the past century, the rise of industrialization, we have looked at the world  from a "users" point of view.  Renunciate  religions have de-sacralized earthly experience, further complicating our crisis.   Yet every early culture  has insisted that nature is full of intelligence.    Contemporary Gaia Theory proposes that the Earth is a living, self-regulating organism, responsive and evolving.  If one is sympathetic to Gaia Theory, and the innate intelligence of ecosystems,  it follows that everything living  is responsive and conversant in some way, visible and invisible.

We need to learn to "speak with the Earth" again, not in some  abstract way, but intimately, beneath our well-rooted feet, in our creative hands entwined and webbed among a  great planetary collaboration. The  "Covenant" of the Garden.   

How do we regain our  niche in that  great “Covenant”?   I believe  one answer  is  “re-mything” .  Myth is, and always has been, a way for human beings to become intimate and conversant with what is vast, deep, and mysterious. Our experience changes when Place becomes "you" or "Thou" instead of "it".    As Pagans  we are uniquely able to address that question.  In the past, "Nature" was  a relationship with Deity, a relationship  within which cultures, individuals and religions  were profoundly embedded as story and living metaphor.  Cooperation and respect  was essential for well-being.  

And some places were places of special power, places of pilgrimage. 

1/2019

Hecate

So many familiar faces

I have known you all, as you have known me

Time and again, 

We meet when the Moon is hidden

And darkness is strong.

To you, so new, it seems I come from days long gone

From deep pits of forbidden spaces, almost forgotten

Yet I am always here, stirring your deep dreams

Your dreaming self knows me well, very well.

I am Hecate, Grandmother of all

Queen of the Night 

(strikes staff on floor 3x)

Queen of the dark and unborn Moon:

You will find me standing

With my lovely, fearsome, baying hounds

Where three roads meet

Speak well or not at all

And take the road I show you.

Mine is the realm of deep uncertainty

The changing before becoming

The choice of oblivion (strikes staff on floor 3x)

When the wheel of birth and death is turning

You’ll find me haunting the crank

Do not ask, just listen, and know.

It is I who hear Persephone’s underworld cries

It is I who see dim shapes of futures forming

I who bring the nightmare

And soothe the sleepless, disheveled souls.

I am your torchbearer and guide to the nether world

Where the visible meets the invisible

Where all things quicken and begin to grow

Always first in darkness.

Listen! I am speaking to you

(strikes staff on floor 3x)

From the dark side of the moon

From the hidden side of your life

From the ancient end of time

Your challenge is to know me

For only ignorance is truly dark.

by Diane Darling (2001)

The above performance excerpt is from "The Masque of the Goddess", Directed by Diane Darling and performed by members of her community in Sebastopol, California, in 2001.  Having recently finished a sculpture of Hecate,  I remembered this powerful performance and felt like posting the text.  

Reflections on Illness

I keep wishing I could post an inspiring article here, but truth be told, I've been sick.  For two months, and not much improvement yet.  With, after my doctor's tests and a visit to the ER, what they think is a mystery flu, and possibly a neck injury.  Maybe.  I can't eat.  I constantly have fever and chills.  Body aches, and a piercing headache that wakes me up without fail at 3 am every night (which I've gotten used to.  At least it's quiet, and as I wait for the aspirin and coffee to kick in, I continue to catch up on Mercedes Lacky's adventures in Valdemar.  What an imagination she has!  And I've come to feel quite fond of those Heralds and their Companions.)

Now we follow the labryinth like course of trying see what else it might be.............Listeria food poisoning infection? (it seems that those salad bars aren't always as healthy as you might think.  )  It can be confusing indeed trying to get tests for things.  Did you know that to get a blood test for Listeria you first have to be admitted to a hospital?  Catch 22.  You have to be very seriously ill before they'll test you.   I've started seeing a Chinese medicine practitioner, and am hopeful that the acupuncture treatments she gave me, and the Chinese herbs, will help.  And I'll keep pounding the pavements to see if I can get tested for things other than the endless flu, which all assure me, there is nothing they can do about.

I've been blessed in my life with a strong, Leonine constitution - this weakness and chronic pain is an experience I have not had much of, and I am amazed at two things.  I never realized before how fortunate I've been, and how much I've taken for granted. I think I've always driven my body like a truck - give it gas, give it some oil, and plow on regardless of all the ruts on the road.

The other realization is that, when you are sick and in pain, pretty much everything else goes right out the door in importance.  Your consciousness becomes focussed on finding, here and now, ways to NOT be in pain, and the body one inhabits rightfully makes its demands for loving attention.  This 70 year old body is now demanding its due on many levels, including spiritual and psychic.

Back in the end of December I had a revelation when I, literally, stumbled into a Benedictine Monestery  in an out of the way corner of the world, and found myself longing, deeply, for a contemplative life.  Shortly after that I ended my Facebook account, and reduced many of my contacts, even though this will undoubtedly impact my income.  I find I do not miss it...........I really have about 5 friends, not 500.  

I applied to a number of rural artist residencies for the summer (I recognize that most of them want 40 year olds, not 70 year olds, but what the heck.  Worth trying.)  If no one wants me, I'll still get into my car, Goddess willing, and drive East, probably ending up at my beloved Brushwood and Lilydale.  I'll do it slowly, with the attitude of a pilgrimage.  There are some wonderful parks, full of vibrant life, between here and New York.   Who knows, if my health returns, that trip may go so far as Avebury, or Glastonbury, or the Camino. 

Life is short.

Hindus believed that there were three stages of life:  Student, Householder, and Pilgrim.  You learn, you earn and pursue a career or family and contribute, and at a certain age, you leave, giving up a worldly life, and move into the life of contemplation and pilgrimage.  I understand that, now.  This is what has been calling me.

I don't know where that trail is going to take me, but unless this illness is fatal (which I assume it most certainly is not).......... after I finish my obligations that carry into May,  I AM RETIRED.  I will probably forgo AIRBNB for a few permanent tenants in my little "Enclave".  And I will have a great deal more time to write, think, and most importantly, talk to my cats and plants.  

 I am done with promoting things, with ambition,  with schedules.  I wish to find places of peace and contemplation that remove me from the the endless cacophony.............and I will do so, some of it, right here in my own back yard.  

Life is short, and a privilege.