Getting to Yes Through Shamanism

     This Autumn is different than any other, I felt it for certain this morning. Usually I don't notice the spirits of the land speaking this loudly until late in October. The potency of this season catches me off guard time and time again.
     The late pumpkins enveloping half the garden are bawdy and proud. Lizards come out to talk, frogs make adventurous treks across open ground, pausing to croak a crotchety observation or two. The chickens continue to choose new hiding places for their eggs, I think they delight in our endless hunts.
     For many of us, our shamanic practice is a way to enter into the animistic world of our ancestors. Less for healing others, we journey to reawaken our awareness of spirits that make up our world. Autumn is the time of year when I'm drawn most to those practices that pull me more deeply into the spirits of nature.
     This is a time to make altars and offerings, a time for gratitude and preparation for the growing darkness. The new year looms for agrarian cultures, for us with the coming of Samhain.

clutch of hidden treasure

     I feel the need to unburden myself of old suffering, old blocks. As I separate more and more from some long held patterns they become more distinct and somehow heavier. I'm really ready to let go of things I thought were me. Time to move on.
     I recently spent a few weeks with my Mom. Her life partner, my Dad, died about a year and a half ago. I see her struggling with her own issues of renewal and vitality. Where will life lead her now? There are small seasonal changes in our lives, and great seasonal changes. I watch her and try to learn.
     I'm also moved by the spirits I encounter in my shamanic work. Their new energy ensures my cauldron will continue to bubble, I am safe from stagnation. I learn and grow. Walking the land is an invitation for the spirits to fill me with ripeness.
     I'm reminded of the resources for personal transformation that surround us always. Its impossible to be alone, its impossible to be without. When we say yes to the compassionate helping spirits we're given the chance to join in the celebratory cycles of planting and harvest. We're given the opportunity to renew our spiritual and emotional vitality. We might even find a new clutch of green eggs out in the tall grass by a fallen pine tree.

Mending Our Animal Ways

     One of our chickens has a dislocated talon. Terry and I tried to capture it for about five minutes, before our 3 1/2 year old walked up and showed us how it was done. He's been creeping up on the chickens for so long (despite ALL of our efforts), they're used to his amorous attention. Likely they think he's a strange looking rooster about to begin a new genetic line. They hunker down and wait for whatever comes next.
     My sons fabulous chicken embracing skills allowed us to examine and make pitiful attempts at getting the errant digit back into place. I massaged it, experimented with setting it right. The hen was inquisitive, but didn't seem to mind our clumsy efforts.
     When we accepted failure and headed back to the house, an exquisite jade-gray praying mantis alighted gently on Tadg's shoulder. There were mystical designs along its back, as if carved by a master jeweler from the Green World. I took it as a blessing from the land, a sign of his connection to the creatures we share this place with.

     This is how I got started in the first place, with animals. I wanted to find a way back into the Earth, deeper into an authentic spirituality. Twenty years ago all roads led to shamanism, they still do. I find myself relating to more and more animals, learning to listen with greater reverence.
     How does a culture put the Earth back together after spending so many decades dislocating as many of its creatures as it can? How many generations does it take us to preserve the wholeness of a single child's connection to the web of life that sustains everything? I ponder while my son dances with chickens.
     I'd forgotten what powerful fliers praying mantis's were. This one quickly left Tadg's shoulder to fly two stories up to an oak canopy. A mantis has four wings, and is a somewhat ungainly flier when compared to the icy grace it embodies during a hunt. I'll journey on the meaning of its visit, especially its flight.
     The earth is always talking to us, in tiny ways and loud ways. We would listen more, but we're otherwise occupied. We've been taught to think of the conversations going on around us as being irrelevant to us, as if we were strangers in our own lands. We turn omen's into ordinary distractions.
     The chance to reconnect with the animal world that not only feeds many of us, but helps us to deepen our spirituality, is always available to us. We just have to open our hearts to receive the gift. We are all worthy, we are all needful in our own ways.
     Interacting with our domestic animals gives us a valuable entry into the animal world. Scaly chicken feet, a dogs inquisitive eyes are thresholds for many of us, first steps on bigger journey. The earth knows what each one of us needs to give, and how we must give it.  It asks us to come forth with what is most true within ourselves and trade it for priceless blessings and broken toes. Look for signposts along the way, like jade praying mantis.

9/11/1857 - 9/11/2001 The Wakeful Dead

    We are called to remember, mourn, grieve and perhaps parade a bit today - in honor of lives lost to violence ten years ago today. The stories of those who died or suffered familial losses in the Twin Towers, at the Pentagon or in planes involved, are traded by the media with tasteful sincerity. Our leaders gather with stone faces and tightly crafted words. The media speaks of the dead, if not for them.

Memorial at Mountain Meadows

     154 years ago today another tragic massacre occurred in southern Utah. A group of a 120 immigrants, making their way to a new life in California, were slaughtered by a group of Mormon militia men. That day marked the beginning of a cover-up that lasted until 1999, when the dead were unwilling to stay silently buried. Click here to read more about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a horrible event wrongly blamed on the Paiute tribe for well over a century.
     The dead spoke loudly in 1999, and not without a sense of irony. After a backhoe accidentally uncovered the remains of some 25 victims, it became clear they would not be re-interred without examination. A law created to empower anthropologists to review the buried remains of Native Americans that might be discovered accidentally or otherwise, forced the state of Utah to allow forensic examination of the emigrant remains. Denying the dead their voice would be a violation of a federal law designed to excise the solemn secrets of the wrongly accused native dead.
     Governor Mike Leavitt, direct descendant of early settler Dudley Leavitt, commuted the standard 2 week examination to 48 hours, ostensibly to protect the feelings of the descendants of the massacred Baker-Francher party. Leavitt's ancestor was not only a purported participant in the massacre, he was a Mormon liaison to the local native tribes, the same tribes who took the fall for the massacre. I wonder if the spirits of the people he betrayed, both emigrant and native, chose to unearth the truth when a descendent of Leavitt was in office - pointing a firm finger at the religious/political machine that kept a lie alive for so many years.
     For a moment it must have seemed like the truth would be hastily reburied, silencing the dead once again. But those wronged had foreseen this possible travesty. A highly motivated, experienced forensic anthropologist was on staff at the University of Utah. Shannon Novak had examined the recent mass graves of Serbia, and the bones of British soldiers who died in 1461. The dead would have their due by the hands of passionate students and an extraordinary investigator, working without rest until the remains were taken away. Shannon must hear stories flowing from the bones she sees, truths revealing themselves like newborns waiting to find their way into the world. The stories she saw all but exonerated the native people who were framed, pinning the mass murder solidly on the local Mormon militia.
     9/11 was a massacre with no single location of violence. A crime carried out in the theatre of global power, it includes the former site of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the homes and graves of thousands of Iraqi's. It includes our first responders who suffer and die today without adequate healthcare. It includes our military families who's active duty soldiers continue to chase ghosts across the middle-east though Bin Laden has been killed.
     This morning I sit in the 9/11 echo chamber as it rattles its messages of hope, grief and American might around the world. I can't help feeling that we are weaving a story that - just like the lie of Mountain Meadows - hides many truths, though it might not be an outright lie. I'm not even talking about the many conspiracy theories that surround this event, some that have credibility, some that do not. In personalizing the losses of this ongoing tragedy, focusing so much on those who died on US soil that day, we turn away from the powers that gave birth to this murderous event, galvanizing a perspective that may serve a few of the living, but perhaps not most of us and certainly not the dead.

911 Memorial viewed from NJ

     Some accounts of the Mountain Meadows Massacre suggest that Mormon militia dressed as Indians to execute at least the initial stage of their attack. From the beginning they planned to pin the attack, however it ended, on the Paiutes. Even if we've gotten the list of hijackers right, I can't realistically attribute all the deaths on 9/11, and the tens of thousands who died as a result of military actions since then, on that small group of patsies.
     The Bin Ladens, Bushes, and Cheynes of the world play chess with pieces made up of corporations, cities, armies, and the humble families of our world. One cannot hear about the supposed principal players in 9/11, both attackers and defenders, without recognizing their obvious connections to wealth, oil, power and each other. Perhaps descendants of Bush will, like the descendants Leavitt, seek to hide his connection to Saudi power.  This has never been about freedom or even religion. Its always been about the way we're consuming the earth, who gets what piece of the pie.
     Like Leavitt's both then and now, the powerful seek to hide bones from view today and forever by wrapping them in warm, dignified ceremony and government reports. They entice us with the idea of a return to normalcy, albeit the new normalcy of terrorism and peak oil. Like the bodies of Mountain Meadows, the wreckage of 9/11 was swept from view and replaced with a memorial designed to protect our feelings. I'm reminded of the catch phrase that heralded the end of the Nixon administration "the long national nightmare is over". Our 'feelings' are not helped by half-truths, questions left unanswered, and lessons left half-learned. The feelings of the ancestors of the Baker-Francher party were not helped by a limited exploration of how their kin died. Only lies are helped by such thinly disguised, poorly executed political theater.
     There is a monster afoot, it respects no nations borders, protects no single peoples. It craves oil to maintain its power, it consumes more lives each year. Today we morn only a few of its victims while bodies continue to pile up the world over. Lets not forget that people die every day by the hands of those who crave power over peace and justice.
     The dead can help us to battle against the suffering this monster creates, they can lead us to truths that expose the monster and render it powerless. We all have a responsibility to listen for the messages the dead might send us, to help them tell their truths when we can. Lets remember those who died today by honoring the uncomfortable truths of our lives, making sure they're given their due. Lets honor the dead when they return to us with messages meant to liberate and truly heal us.

Image 1: Mountain Meadows monument by Rick Willoughby
Image 2: 911 Memorial by Sister72
Both images from Flickr, used under 
a Creative Commons license

Sovereign Soil - Sovereign Food

     "We're working on issues like Sovereign Food at our grange." In the last month I must have heard or read the term "Food Sovereignty" three or four times, never having heard it before in my life. Born of movements like Transition Towns, the phrase points to the idea that we all have a right to fresh, nourishing food, and a personal responsibility to grow that food locally.
     There are so many ways to turn this phrase, like a child's puzzle that unfolds to a new message with every twist. Food enables sovereignty: having choice over the quality of your food - its basic nature - is a kind of empowerment necessary if we're all to be creatures of free will.
     Food still in the ground has a kind of wholeness, autonomy, that radiates sovereignty. When I approach the food in our garden I'm never careless with it. Though everything will either be eaten or become compost, nothing behind the garden gates is disposable. It all speaks to me of the spirit of the land. When I break off a leaf or pull a beet, I know I've disconnected it from something sacred, so I can take that sacredness into me.
     Food Sovereignty was mentioned at the first meeting to resurrect our local grange this last Friday. The traditional grange halls of yesterday, gathering places for our countries' farmers and ranchers, are enjoying a renaissance as hubs for green activism and community revitalization.
     Just about everyone I spoke to, from retired Boomers to young Hispanic activists were aware of the need to take ownership of food production once again. Somehow we all seem to see the same writing on the wall. Local, sustainably grown organic food has to be secured for all of us, or we may lose the future. The children of migrant farm workers sat next to back-to-the-land-hippies and all nodded in agreement.
     Food sovereignty, along with national sovereignty has been been a part of progressive politics for many years, if under different names. Third world countries become debt slaves to the IMF, global agri-corporations force people from their food sustaining homes and into the cities so mega-farms can be developed. The debt never goes away and the quality of food begins an inevitable decline.
     Is our local effort to reclaim our own food sovereignty just a romantic fantasy? Is it anything like the spiritual sovereignty I've been writing about? How can one hold down a job and raise their own food while the middle class is being swallowed up by Wall Street? Can we ever reclaim this aspect of our national and individual sovereignty?
     Recently I watched this video on the impact of a widely used pesticide on soil. It has the unwanted side affect of killing too many organisms, resulting in a vacuum that nature has seen fit to fill with an organism that kills livestock and weakens the ecosystem. Like the over-sterilization of nearly all our food, the use of pesticide tends to remove the helpful along with the harmful.
     I recalled a journey I took in which the spirit of the land told me that dirt was the knowledge of the earth. When the soil is rich, filled with knowledge, it brings forth plants. When its diminished it can't bring forth anything - it becomes a blank slate. The soil itself must have its own sovereignty. When we don't respect its nature, don't contribute to that sovereign presence, life begins to fail.
     One of America's oldest seed houses is about to fail. Dr. Landreths Seeds has been around since 1784. You can imagine seeds flowing out from there to farms and homes all over our country, generation after generation, each seed giving forth to another. New heirloom varieties were developed season after season. The land learned new seeds, how they grew, what they needed.
     We seldom realize how much we rely on things that give by their very nature. I'm reminded of the spirit of the land receiving and giving in a gentle dance. I imagine Dr. Landreths Seeds functioning the same way. Generation after generation, it took in money and ideas and orders and gave out seeds, seeds, seeds. I don't think anyone got rich selling seeds. But they were doing the good work of the world: giving and receiving in an endless dance.
     They need a million dollars by the end of this month to survive. Our government will throw billions at banks and new ways to kill people. It will take in millions in campaign contributions and look the other way as we poison the world, but it will likely not lift a finger to help America's oldest seed house. Perhaps this is a necessary loss. Seed swaps are coming back into vogue. Heirloom varieties are stowed away like contraband from one season to the next, traded with rouge delight, at places like our old grange hall. We need to localize, to get to know each other. Maybe we need to build up enough heat and pressure to forge new sovereignty to share amongst us. Loss is part of what feeds a fire of change.
     I spent most of the meeting tending to my son as he ran with another boy outside on the farm where it was held. They took the land in leaps and bursts of screaming laughter, knowing there would always be dust to kick up, tomatillos to pick, and big farm dogs to wrestle with. They were soaking up the sovereignty of the land, driving it into their bones, matting their hair with it. They will come to expect that sovereign feeling, maybe even fight for it. In the very least they'll notice when its missing. Its up to each one of us to secure as much as it as we can, before we join Dr. Landreth, wherever he is now.

May peace and the sovereignty of the land be with you and yours.