Woman Shaman of the Inuit, 1920

The great sea stirs me.
The great sea sets me adrift,
it sways me like the weed
on a river-stone.

The sky’s height stirs me.
The strong wind blows through my mind.
It carries me with it,
and moves my soul with joy.

-Song of Uvauk, Woman
Shaman of the Inuit, 1920’s

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Animals and People: The Human Heart In Conflict With Itself

By Pattiann Rogers

Some of us like to photograph them.  Some of us like to paint pictures of them.  Some of us like to sculpt them and make statues and carvings of them.  Some of us compose music about them and sing about them.  And some of us like to write about them.

Some of us like to go out and catch them and kill them and eat them.  Some of us like to hunt them and shoot them.  Some of us like to raise them, care for them and eat them.  Some of us just like to eat them.

And some of us name them and name their seasons and name their hours, and some of us, in our curiosity, open them up and study them with our tools and name their parts.  We capture them, mark them and release them, their lives and affect their lives and abandon their lives.  We breed them and manipulate them and alter them.  Some of us experiment upon them.

We put them on tethers and leashes, in shackles and harnesses, in cages and boxes, inside fences and walls.  We put them in yokes and muzzles.  We want them to carry us and pulls us and haul for us.

And we want some of them to be our companions, some of them to ride on our fingers and some to ride sitting on our wrists or on our shoulders and some to ride in our arms, ride clutching our necks.  We want them to walk at our heels.

We want them to trust us and come to us, take our offerings, eat from our hands.  We want to participate in their beauty.  We want to assume their beauty and so possess them.  We want to be kind to them and so possess them with our kindness and so partake of their beauty in that way.

We want them to learn our language.  We try to teach them our language.  We speak to them.  We put our words in their mouths.  We want them to speak.  We want to know what they see when they look at us.

We use their heads and their bladders for balls, their guts and their hides and their bones to make music.  We skin them and wear them for coats, their scalps for hats.  We rob them, their milk and their honey, their feathers ad their eggs.  We make money from them.

We construct icons of them.  We make images of them and put their images on our clothes and on our necklaces and rings and on our walls and in our religious places.  We preserve their dead bodies and parts and their dead bodies and display them in our homes and buildings.

We name mountains and rivers and cities and streets and organizations and gangs and causes after them.  We name years and time and constellations of stars after them.  We make mascots of them, naming our athletic teams after them.  Sometimes we name ourselves after them.

We make toys of them and rhymes of them for our children.  We mold them and shape them and distort them to fit our myths and our stories and our dramas.  We like to dress up like them and masquerade as them.  We like to imitate them and try to move as they move and make the sounds they make, hoping, by those means, to enter and become the black mysteries of their being.

Sometimes we dress them in our clothes and teach them tricks and laugh at them and marvel at them.  And we make parades of them and festivals of them.  We want them to entertain us and amaze us and frighten us and reassure us and calm us and rescue us from boredom.

We pit them against one another, and we gamble on them.  We want to compete with them ourselves, challenging them, testing our wits and talents against their wits and talents, in forests and on plains, in the ring.  We want to be able to run like them and leap like them and swim like them and fly like them and fight like them and endure like them.

We want their total absorption in the moment.  We want their unwavering devotion to life.  We want their oblivion.

Some of us give thanks and bless those we kill and eat, ad ask for pardon, and this is beautiful as long as they ones dying and we are the ones eating.

As long as we are not seriously threatened, as long as we and our children aren’t hungry and aren’t cold, we say, with a certain amount of superiority that we are no better than any of them, that any of them deserve to live just as much as we do.

And after we have proclaimed this thought, and by so doig subtly pointed out that we are allowing them to live, we direct them and manage them and herd them and train them and follow them and map them and collect them and make speciimens of them and butcher them and move them here and move them there and we place them on lists and we take them off of lists and we stare at them and stare at them.

We track them in our sleep.  They become the form of our sleep.  We dream of them.  We seek them with accusation.  We seek them with supplication.

Ad in the ultimate imposition, as Thoreau said, we make them bear the burden of our thoughts.  We make them carry the burden of our metaphors ad the burden of our desires and our guilt and carry the equal burden our our curiosity ad concern.  We make them bear our sins and our prayers and our hoes into the desert, into the sky, into the stars.  We say we kill them for God.

We adore them and we curse them.  We caress them and we ravish them.  We want them to acknowledge us and be with us.  We want them to disappear and be autonomous.  We abhor their viciousness and lack of pity, as we abhor our own viciousness and lack of pity.  We love them and we reproach them, just as we love and reproach ourselves.

We will never, we cannot, leave them alone, even the tiniest one ever, because we know we are the oe with them.  Their blood is our blood.  Their breath is our breath, their beginning our beginning, their fate our fate.

Thus we deny them.  Thus we yearn for them.  They are among us and within us and of us, inextricably woven with the form and manner of our being, with our understanding and our imaginations.  They are the grit an the salt and the lullaby of our language.

We have a need to believe they are there, and always will be, whether we witness them or not. We need to know they are there, a vigorous life maintaining itself without our presence, without our assistance, without our attention.  We need to know, we must know, that we come from such stock so continuously and tenaciously and religiously devoted to life.

We know we are one with them, and we are frantic to understand how to actualize that union.  We attempt to actualize that union in our many stumbling, ignorant and destructive ways, in our many confused and noble and praiseworthy ways.

For how can we possess dignity if we do not allow no dignity?  Who will recognize our beauty if we do not revel in their beauty?  How can we hope to receive honor if we give no honor?  How can we believe in grace if we cannot bestow grace?

We want what we cannot have.  We want to give life at the same moment we are taking it, nurture life as the same moment we light the fire and raise the knife.  We want to live, to provide, and not be instruments of destruction, instruments of death.  We want to reconcile our  “egoistic concerns” with our “universal compassion.”  We want the lion and the lamb to exist in amity, the lion and the lamb within finally to dwell together, to life down together in peace and praise at last. ”

Pattiann Rogers

From Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women And Animals

Edited by Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger, and Brenda Peterson

http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Nature-Between-Women-Animals/dp/0449003000

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This Tree

This tree listened
when my husband died.
I leaned my head
against its trunk
and cried.
No words passed,
but I took its strength
and knew
that life at last
secretly transforms
until what is seen
becomes unseen,
and what has been
is still to be.

by Moyra Caldecott

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Cocoon

I lie
curled
in the green cocoon
of my garden
spun of sunlight
and leaves…
ready
to be born.

Moyra Caldecott

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love

Generally, in a loving environment, human beings show humanity as naturally as fruit trees give fruit in the summer. Love is to these beings as sunshine is to these trees. It helps them grow into what they are meant to grow into (unless their nature is flawed from the start, which is an exception to the rule): beautiful and bountiful creations, as opposed to ugly and puny aberrations.

Laurent Grenier

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listening in a deeper way

I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watching the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Tonight, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and Listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.
Linda Hogan, Walking from Dwellings

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sunsets

Every Sunset a place where the tension of  the opposites embrace. This  still point  a promise of balance between day and night, light and dark, out and in. Each Sunset is a treasure as i stand in stillness and silence allowing  thankful hellos and grateful goodbyes to embrace and  let-go. It is here i linger and turn my eyes to the approaching darkness to gaze upon the star that links this heart to Grandfather and count 1-2-3.  One is for Thee, Two is for me, and Three is for All. It is here past and present commit to now and forever.  Here  there  is a knowing time is an artificial concept of the dualistic mind, it is all Now.

When  a child  i became enchanted with Sunset as wild turkeys would take their miraculous flight to old tall Cottonwood trees and diverse animals would gather at the pond to share a drink of water.  As if in the balance a free zone for peace was declared.  Each Sunset as big breasted turkeys took flight reaching the high branches of safety, it was an opening  for truth remaining through the years;  All things are possible no matter how difficult the day or dark the night.

It is here at Sunset the edges of other/outer dissolve as the sharp contrast of daylight fades. The  known (i) that has walked through the day begins to appear minute and insignificant.    In the silence, glimpses of Her Oneness are known. With Sunset i bow the head and give thanks for the Dark Mother’s All embracing vastness of Thou and Thouness.

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Prairie Dog Sun Sadhana

Prairie Dog Sun Salutation

“I watched prairie dogs every day, rise before the sun, stand with their paws pressed together facing the rising sun in total stillness for up to 30 minutes,” says Williams. “And then I watched them at the end of the day take that same gesture 30 minutes before the sun goes down they would press their palms together in perfect stillness. I don’t mean to anthropomorphize, but when you look at a creature that has survived over the millennium begin and end each day in that kind of stance, it causes one to think about one’s own life and speed and rapidity in which we live.”

–Terri Tempest Williams,
Finding Beauty In A Broken World

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Part VI: Universe

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UNIVERSE

is Space
which contains Energy

Energy
of its nature moves
as it moves
it produces Change

Change is
it was<>it is<>it will be

sometimes we call this past, present, future
and we say it is Time
it is not time
it is Change

you see how it is
how everything in Universe
is Energy
flowing from one place to another

what we call matter
is merely a relatively stable form
of Energy
which is also changing
also moving
only more slowly
like Earth and Ocean
each at its own pace

all things that contain Energy
are alive
as all things are formed of Energy
all things are alive
and all things are related
each to the other
always
*

from the Strong Spirit Path
a Native American Tradition

and expressed in English by
Paula Underwood Spencer

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Part V Indigenous Science, Rule of Six

The Rule of Six

One of the attitudes taught in my tradition is the Rule of Six. The Rule of Six says that for each apparent phenomenon, devise at least six plausible explanations, every one of which can indeed explain the phenomenon. There are probably sixty, but if you devise six, this will sensitize you to how many there may yet be and prevent you from locking in on the first thing that sounds right as The Truth.
But your task isn’t over yet. Because you can’t just float on a multiple option basis. Now your task is to apply your life experience, which is unique to yourself, and use it as a base to evaluate each of those options. Now you assign a probability factor. That probability factor can never be 100% . . . and absolutely never zero.

.
You keep a floating attitude toward life, but you constantly know where you are in that context.
When I was very young my father would stand me on my left foot and say, “Answer this question in the manner of the people.” Wholeness. And then he would stand me on my right foot and say, “Explain this in a way your mother would understand.” Sequence.

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Then he would stand me on both feet and ask, “What do you see now?” Because it isn’t enough to do only one, only the other. The critical thing is to strike a balance between the two.

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In my tradition you get mind puzzles a lot. One of the questions that my dad gave me as a mind puzzle was, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” When I discovered that is also a Zen question, I was delighted. I’m reasonably confident that they come from the same source. I spent months trying to come up with an answer, and I came up with all kinds of different things. My father would say, “No, that’s not really the sound of one hand clapping, that’s . . . ” Then, “No, that’s not really the sound either.” And finally , he suggested to me the kind of clue that you get under this pedagogic structure–“Maybe Eagle has the answer.” And I knew immediately he was right, because of course Eagle would understand the sound of one hand clapping.

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As with all his suggestions, I taught myself. This process is called go-and-be-Eagle. You become Eagle in your mind and heart, and look at the world from Eagle’s perspective. As a result of that, you may come up with an entirely different concept of what the answer might be, which, limited to this body, you could not have come up with, because this body doesn’t work that way.

.
In this pedagogic tradition, nobody tells you what to think or how to process information. Instead, you discover it for yourself, you keep discovering it for yourself. And only at the other end of this long process of self-discovery would my father say, “That’s another generation that’s reached that conclusion.” In this case, however, he said that my answer was a whole new answer, that he knew of eight others, but that was a whole new answer to the question. He didn’t tell what the other eight were at the time, and I won’t tell you what mine is now, because if I did, that would prevent you from ever discovering it for yourself.
The basis of learning, the basis of the pedagogy, is to cease preventing people from learning things for themselves. This way of thinking, what goes on in here, can really be taught from the inside out. When it’s taught from the outside in, someone else comes between you and yourself, and that’s not considered a wise idea. That’s the tradition.

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by  Paula Underwood

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