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On the Road: An Evolving Turtle Island Odyssey

After walking 3,500 miles from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and arriving somewhat south of the place native people know as the Western Gate of Turtle Island, a band of pilgrims encountered the poet Gary Snyder on the last night of January, 1996. We had been walking toward this Western Gate for eight months, so we were paying attention to the portents.

With several other pilgrims, I heard Snyder speak that night at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He said that when he considered modern man’s relationship to the earth, he felt it lacked a conscious spiritual connection. “The fire of catastrophe,” said he, “has burnt out all.”

Snyder revealed himself as one the many elders we had set out to find on our prophetic quest across the back of North America. He’d sounded a steady incantation for decades on behalf of the earth, his words finally reaching our pilgrim ears at the end of our epic walk specifically in quest of sacred places and steadying voices.

As it happens, poet Snyder won a Pulitzer Prize for authoring the collection, Turtle Island. He summoned his title from the creation stories native to our North American continent – the old, old name.

That night in Santa Barbara, Snyder said that ,as he saw things now on Turtle Island, people have organized themselves by race, gender, belief systems, and so forth. But we have not yet organized ourselves by ecosystems – the actual places where we live, and the actual resources native to these places.

“Nature is no social construction,” Snyder said. “The land sees no colors.”

Using high language and artful rhythm, Snyder told us that when we come to comprehend this, it will help us all to finally and truly become Native American in the full spiritual sense that embraces all the land and all the people, the plants and the animals.

Through hearing the poet’s lyric, I came once again to a basic realization about why we had walked, and what we – a multicultural, all-faiths band of pilgrims — hoped to accomplish with our procession on foot across North America to meet some of the contemporary elders of our land. We were striving to help establish the kind of authentic spiritual connection with the earth that Snyder invoked with his words.

Eleven years after the end of the walk, in 2007 shortly after I finished writing the story of our walk in the form of an epic nonfiction saga (Odyssey of the 8th Fire), Gary Snyder reappeared. This time the poet came to Santa Fe to speak about his late compatriot, Jack Kerouac, the writer who crafted an undulating, enduring paean to America and freedom with his novel On the Road (1957)

Snyder was invited to Santa Fe by the Museum of New Mexico and the Palace of the Governors. They asked him to speak as a complement to their exhibit of Kerouac’s work, including the original, continuous and amazing 120-foot teletype scroll that Kerouac used for writing On the Road – a novelized account of open, mad, freedom-expressing rushes across the back of Turtle Island in the late 1940s and early 1950s, with beauty to behold and creative souls to encounter.

Poster for the Santa Fe events.

On stage in downtown Santa Fe at the packed Lensic theater, Snyder told the audience that back in 1956 he had use of a cabin near Homestead Valley, just north of San Francisco. It was a rude structure, lacking glass for the windows. In this country abode, Kerouac moved in with him for 5-6 weeks – a place to crash.

Very much in command as he stood center stage, Snyder spoke directly of his friend Jack Kerouac as a man who was well intentioned, sweet, playful, sometimes goofy, non-judgmental, and imbued with the spirit of compassion. He said Kerouac was keenly intelligent, well read, and had a mind for words. One of Kerouac’s prime spiritual gifts, the poet said, was his ability to confront the immediacy of his imagination.

I listened to Snyder attentively. I wanted to understand more. In preparing to write the nonfiction saga of our long walk across Turtle Island — Odyssey of the 8th Fire — I’d been informed by books telling of our human journey: Homer’s Odyssey, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie, William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and Paolo Cohelo’sThe Pilgrimage. Inevitably, Kerouac’s On the Road also touched me with its entraining cross-America accounts of reaching outward, inward, downward, upward.

The miles that Kerouac’s Beatniks traveled in cars and buses and by hitchhiking, we odyssey pilgrims later traversed on foot – as if that were an era wanting speed to break free of bonds, and the era of our walk a time to slow down, to take measure of the vast, multi-faceted spiritual landscape sprawled out before us, to proceed across it at a more deliberate pace.

With the overarching thrust of their works, Kerouac and Snyder were among a multitude of inspirations for me. In Odyssey of the 8th Fire, the actual Turtle Island emerges from the depths of North America with immediacy and relevancy. Spiritual elders of North America step forward by the dozens to share teachings of our land.

The spontaneous, howling, Beat pilgrims Jack Kerouac wrote about were, in one conception, on the road for truth, freedom, and spiritual realization advancing in their time and place. Our on-the-road walking quest some fifty years later was, in part, a natural extension and evolution of this fundamental quest, and also a part of the overall, amazing, grand, hope-lifting odyssey of all of us: multicolored, multi-faith masses of people over centuries of time striving awkwardly, unceasingly to establish a conscious, realized connection with the spirit of this beautiful land that we might finally be truly at home here on Turtle Island, and that the land and water and air might cleanly support our children and grandchildren in health and freedom.

We odyssey walkers stretched out our legs and strode toward what we felt could help. We did what we could. We walked to a great many of the holy sites of Turtle Island, and there enacted ceremony for all of the sacred hoop of life on Turtle Island, respecting all spiritual traditions and all colors of humanity – as had been the agreed-upon philosophy of our pilgrimage band, some 40 or more multicultural souls.

As it happened, as it happens. Circumstances impend. Roadways exist. Poets sing.

END

Resources

Jack Kerouac – On the Road
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Road

Gary Snyder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Snyder

Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe, NM, USA
http://www.palaceofthegovernors.org/

Odyssey of the 8th Fire
http://www.8thfire.net

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Final Embers of Hiroshima Peace Flame Expire in Ceremony at Big Mountain

hiroshima1 The fire that was ignited 57 years ago on August 6, 1945 when the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, was ceremonially extinguished by a band of pilgrims May 27, 2002 at Big Mountain on Black Mesa in Arizona, in a high desert range sweet with the smell of sagebrush.

In 1945 when the “Little Boy” bomb detonated 2,000 feet above Hiroshima, the city was instantly shrouded in an awful cloud. Witnesses beneath the cloud remember that they “saw another sun in the sky…” When the wave of light, heat and wind from the flaring atomic sun reached the ground it roasted to fine ash all that came before it. The wave raced outward until it reached the mountains on the edge of Hiroshima, where it was reflected to roar again through the city center. Over 140,000 human beings died during or shortly after the blast. Many more lingered — dying later, or developing genetic mutations.

Aftermath of the nuclear bomb.

A man named Tatsuo Yamamoto recovered embers from the Little Boy blast 57 years ago. His family, with the help of a nearby monastery, has tended the flame continuously ever since, feeding it with prayers of forgiveness, understanding, and peace. This is the source of the flame the pilgrims carried across America, the flame they recently extinguished on Big Mountain.

The Hiroshima Flame Interfaith Pilgrimage brought the flame to America in January, 2002 and then carried it cross-country, walking West to East. They began in Washington State at the grave of Chief Seattle, and took their final steps toward the East in May in New York City at UN Headquarters and the site of the World Trade Center disaster.

(To read about the background of the walk, and the walk’s earlier pilgrimage to the emergence point of Los Alamos, New Mexico, click here).

While led by Japanese Buddhist Nuns and Monks, the prayer walk included people of all colors and faiths. They walked not in protest, but rather with prayers of hope to end war and destruction. The walkers concluded their epic pilgrimage with multicultural ceremony, including traditional elders of the Hopi and Dine’ (Navajo) Nations at Big Mountain, one of the high sacred places of North America.

Four Corners: Spiritual Center of the Continent

While the Hiroshima Flame borne by the walkers has notable significance as a living representation of a redeemed spirit, the place where it was extinguished also carries immense importance.

Four Corners is a sacred region in the Southwest, long appreciated and honored by traditional peoples. Although the relationship between the larger Dine’ and Hopi governments, and between those nations and the US government and corporations, has often been a morass of conflict and confusion, the sacred teachings about the Four Corners handed down from antiquity echo — at some level — in the soul of every person involved.

Dine’ tradition holds that at the start of the present epoch of world history (Glittering World), the Holy People put four sacred mountains in four different directions: Mt. Blanca (Colorado) in the East. Mt. Taylor (New Mexico) in the South, San Francisco Peaks (Arizona) in the West, and Mt. Hesperus (Utah) in the North. In this manner, they established Dinetah, readily knowable boundaries.

Within the bounds of the Four Corners lies the formidable and imposing Black Mesa, and the ridge that runs along part of it, called Oyama by the Dine’, also known as Great Mountain or more widely as Big Mountain.

To the casual observer, Black Mesa seems a barren and inhospitable place, devoid of value. But to traditional wisdom keepers, this is high holy ground, an energy center of importance to the overall balance of life. For others, Black Mesa is a storehouse of natural capital, just waiting to be converted to bankable wealth. Evidence of this material value lies in the gangling high–tension power poles and lines which picket the mesa, the exceedingly wide and deep roadways, and the industrial installations of every description, including a private airport for mining executives.

Ceremony at Big Mountain

When the Hiroshima Flame Interfaith Pilgrimage arrived at Big Mountain about Noon on May 27, the pilgrims walked a half mile out onto the range, scanning the sagebrush and the blue sky, and chanting their familiar Namu Myo Ho Renge Kyo. Their combined voices sent the chant ringing widely across the mesa.

The pilgrims spiraled sunwise around a center point on the range, forming a multiracial hoop of about 50 human beings. In the center of the hoop, the native elders and walkers kindled a small wood fire from the Hiroshima Peace Flame. It roared to life.

When the fire was burning and buckets of water had been blessed, the pilgrims spiraled single file into the fire and to the bucket of water. One at a time, they anointed themselves with the water, and then with prayer each flicked a few droplets on the slowly dwindling flame.

The hour when the Hiroshima Peace Flame was extinguished, 57 years after it was sparked to life in an unprecedented nuclear conflagration, was a quiet, sweet, solemn moment in the high desert. It was marked in the distance by birdsong and children’s laughter. The Sun was high overhead. The people in the circle were relaxed and at peace in friendship. They walked off the range quietly, and down a dirt road.

Then came whirlwinds. The breeze had blown freshly all day, sweetened by the newly sprouted sage, and it made standing in the open sun comfortable. But after the ceremony things changed. Powerful whirlwinds arose in succession and presented themselves directly before the pilgrims with a harsh, dusty moan. Just as the Wind Nation had spoken dramatically weeks earlier as the walkers carried the flame into Los Alamos, New Mexico, so it spoke again through mini–tornadoes that swirled right up to the walkers, then changed direction. The whirlwinds did no damage, but demanded attention.

Until Human Beings Live in Harmony

After the ceremony the walkers and several residents of Big Mountain gathered to share a simple feast, and to talk among themselves in the shade of a shed. Several traditional elders addressed the walkers at this time, to thank them for coming and to speak of how they see things in the world.

Hopi Grandfather Martin Gashweseoma

Hopi Grandfather Martin Gashweseoma, 78, spoke briefly. He reminded people of the crucial importance of the Four Corners Region, and of Black Mesa and Big Mountain in particular.

As he had explained at UN headquarters in 1993, and on many other occasions, Grandfather Martin told of how, at the beginning of the present–day 4th World, by Hopi tradition, the people who had survived the great flood that cleansed the Third World assembled at Four Corners. From there they spread out in the Four Directions to live out their destinies.

Before the human beings parted ways, Creator established Four Nations, told them they would come together again towards the end of this Fourth epoch, and gave each the responsibility for one of the Four Elements: the Black Nation to keep the water; the Yellow Nation to keep the air; the White Nation to keep the fire. The Red Nation was instructed to caretake the Earth, hesaid,to hold fast to traditional ways, and to protect Four Corners at all costs, and without violence.

They were told that there is great power under the land. If this power is allowed to escape, he said, it would result in great destruction.

Traditional elders recall in their ways that the Hopi were instructed to remain as custodians of this region while war still stalks the world. Four Corners is a microcosmic image of the entire planet. There are specific knowings that refer to Black Mesa and Big Mountain, teachings that warn they should not be dug into.

Still Under Siege

There is an ongoing war for Big Mountain, a war older than a generation that is waged with legal edicts and bulldozers on one side, and prayer, song, and dance on the other. Because Black Mesa is a key center of spiritual energy for North America and the world, and because it represents a hornet’s nest of crucial karmic and environmental issues, it is an issue that should be of intense interest to everyone.

It is a bitter irony that American corporations and government have targeted one of the principal sacred sites on the continent, and exploited it with technology, ripping it open to fulfill explicitly material intentions.

Speaking in the Dine’ language (interpreted by a relative), Grandmother Louise Benally told the walkers, “Here we are still at war with the U.S. Government over energy. I feel like I am still living in the 18th Century, when the cavalry started harassing us. Dineh people remain on Black Mesa, and oppose the forced relocation of traditional peoples so this place will not be taken over for the coal and uranium that are here. We have a spiritual responsibility to this place.”

Black Mesa

For over 20 years, Peabody Coal Co. has been strip mining Black Mesa for coal, and consequently, residents believe, reducing the water table and causing radioactive pollution as uranium deposits are disturbed. Over 30 billion gallons of water have been sucked up from the aquifer at Black Mesa by coal company pumps, then mixed with pulverized coal, and used to slurry the mixture to a power plant in Nevada, where the guts of sacred Black Mesa is burned to provide power for the Las Vegas strip. Meanwhile, family wells on Black Mesa have dried up. So have the springs. Some elderly people in the Black mesa region must travel up to 50 miles to get drinking water.

Crisis is upon the Four Corners again this summer. The fire element is wildly out of balance, and that has impacted everything. No one has ever seen a year like 2002. Wild fires are burning hundreds of thousands of acres throughout the Southwest. Elderly Dine’ who have herded their sheep, goats, and cattle here for generations, say they have never seen a drought so ferocious. More than 7,000 stock ponds have dried up across the Dine’ reservation. Thousands of head of livestock are dying or expected soon to die from lack of water and grazeable forage.

bmelders The assault on the material resources of Black Mesa continues. Peabody Coal Co. is planning on expanding operations by opening a new mine, which will ultimately infringe upon Big Mountain itself.

“It hasn’t changed,” Grandmother Louise Benally told the pilgrims. “The feds still want our energy, and they still want our land. There has been coal mining here for 20 years. Now the land is drying up. We feel ourselves drying up, too.”

Black Mesa elders remain determined to stay on their ancestral lands. They need support to hold this spiritual center. Some of the strongest support they have received over the years has come from the people of the Yellow Nation.

Spiritual Friendship

Twenty–five years ago a friendship was inaugurated among the traditional Dine’ and Hopi at Big Mountain, and the Monks and Nuns of the Nipponzan Mihogi Order. The friendship began during “The Longest Walk,” a pilgrimage organized by various American Indian movements. This walk journeyed from the Pacific to the Atlantic to call attention to a host of issues of concern to indigenous peoples.

Pilgrim Tom Dostou

Traditional elders from the Four Corners region decided that the Big Mountain issue should be a part of this effort. Over the course of the walk they informed all the Indian nations about coal mining on Black Mesa, and the relocation of Dine’ people. Traditional people have been resisting government–mandated relocation for over two decades. Despite their resistance, thousands of Dine’ men, women, and children have in recent years been forcibly removed to a barren area, far from their ancestral homes.

Buddhist Monks and Nuns joined the Longest Walk, and they were touched by what they learned about Black Mesa. They walked and prayed the whole way alongside the Indians. Later, through the 1980s and into the 1990s, several Buddhist people lived at Big Mountain to help defend it. In this way traditional Dine’ and Hopi and the Japanese people became a family. As portrayed in the newly released film, Windtalkers, earlier in history, during World War II, they had been enemies.

The friendship deepened when people of the Yellow Nation joined people of the Red Nation at Sundance. According to long–held Lakota tradition, the Sundance ceremony was to someday travel throughout Turtle Island, and to bring many Nations into the Sacred Hoop of Unity. The first Big Mountain Sundance was held in August 1983.

The intention of the Lakota Sundance in Dine’ country was, and remains, for purifying body and mind so that the people of Big Mountain can defend the ancient lands. The people dance to strengthen themselves spiritually. Although harassed and challenged, the Big Mountain Sun Dance still happens every summer.

Steps Along the Trail

With this background of friendship, it was natural that the Hiroshima Flame carried by the walkers should, in the end, guide them to Big Mountain, not far from the place where the uranium used to build the Hiroshima bomb was long ago dug from the Earth.

After the feast and the remarks of the elders, the walkers had an opportunity to reflect on their pilgrimage. They said that, as a group, they felt good about what they had accomplished. They said they had been faithful, and that they listened to spirit the whole way. They never made decisions on any other basis.

flamr The Hiroshima Flame Interfaith Pilgrimage had its origins in the year 2000 under the inspiration of Tom Dostou while he was in Japan. At that time he was entrusted with a spark of the Hiroshima Flame (the source flame remains burning in Japan). Tom conceived the vision of returning the flame to where it had come from — not as a protest, but as a necessary deed of spiritual redemption, because not only the people of Hiroshima had died, but also many native peoples were poisoned by the uranium dug up, without spiritual permission, on their lands.

Tom passed his vision to Jun Yasuda of the Nipponzan Miyohoji Buddhist Order. Then they started walking. They walked 1,300 KM in Japan, and then brought the flame to America. Over the months and miles of the walk, there were many remarkable developments. At the start, they could find no plane willing to carry the flame across the Pacific to North America. But at last they secured a boat ride to Hawaii, and by serendipity arrived at Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 2001 — 60th Anniversary of the Pearl Harbor bombing.

Sister Jun Yasuda at Oyama

That bombing raid by Japan killed over 2,400 people, crippled the US Pacific Naval Fleet, and radically accelerated the world war which later ended at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Kahunas at Pearl Harbor

In Hawaii the pilgrims were welcomed by a delegation of Kahunas, the traditional Medicine People of the islands. The Kahunas took them to the former site of a sacred shine on the island of O’ahu, overlooking what had once been an uninhabited tropical lagoon. This quiet lagoon, held as deeply sacred for generations by the indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands, was dredged and bulldozed to create the military base of Pearl Harbor. For the Kahunas, there was an obvious karmic link between the desecration of one of their sacred sites and the bombs that later rained upon the military base.

The Kahunas and the walkers also journeyed to Mount Kilauea, carrying the Hiroshima flame into the volcano’s caldera. The pilgrims arrived in Mexico on Dec. 15, for the major spiritual festival honoring Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Hiroshima Peace Pilgrims after the final ceremony.

Hiroshima Pilgrims at the final ceremony.

Then they walked for months from the grave of Chief Seattle on the West Coast past nuclear installations in Hannaford, WA, Los Alamos, NM, Huntsville, AL, and elsewhere. Walk initiator Tom Dostou rejoined the walk in May in New York City for the UN and World Trade Center vigils. Thus the walk finished with the circle completed, the hoop whole.

“We followed the flame,” the walkers said. “We were not carrying the flame, but carried by it.” At the end, the flame led them to Big Mountain to add the awakened forces of their pilgrimage to the defense of the Earth and the cause of peace.

– 30 –

Nota Bene: Roberta Blackgoat, respected Big Mountain elder and lifelong defender of sacred lands, died in April, 2002 at age 84. For obituaries check the Big Mountain web sites

To learn more:

Black Mesa Indigenous Support

Hopi Notes

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Redeeming an Unholy Fire: Pilgrimage to the Poisoned Heart of Avanyu

Los Alamos, New Mexico — Here in this place of Poplar and Cottonwood trees — where fire has at times bellowed up from the earth with catastrophic consequence — a purified flame of nuclear energy returned on February 26, 2002 to its spiritual, intellectual, and physical point of origin.

The flame, flickering in a lantern borne by pilgrims on foot, was largely unrecognized and unacknowledged in Los Alamos. Still, the pilgrims completed the work of spiritual redemption they had come to accomplish, and then they walked on toward the East, planning to arrive in New York City on May 12, 2002. Their visit to this place of fire is of marked spiritual significance.

On Turtle Island (North America) there are many sophisticated and distinct teachings from ancient times. Yet there is one widely held understanding about the great story of the continent, a story that concerns the origins of human beings and their relationships with one another and the Sacred Hoop of life that supports them. In the beginning, some traditional elders say, Creator established four nations of people and gave each the responsibility for one of the four elements. The Red nation to keep the Earth; the Black nation to keep the water; the Yellow nation to keep the air; and the White nation to keep the fire.

In the beginning, it is said, the four nations lived together as one and shared their gifts. Then came a time when it was necessary for spiritual growth that the Four Nations disperse to the Four Directions and live apart. Over time they could develop as human beings and master the mysteries of their element for good or ill, according to their free will. Earth, air, fire and water — the peoples went apart.

At a crucial juncture of world history, the story relates, the four nations would come together again on Turtle Island. By intermingling again, it was said, they would have an opportunity to share and teach — to put their gifts together in a new and beautiful way. If they neglected to do this, if they were distracted by fear and greed, then the people would face a monumental challenge.

The imminence of that colossal challenge — a global convergence of war, environmental destruction, earth changes, and social chaos — was illuminated by the courageous spiritual deed of 30 pilgrims on February 26, and by the sacred fire they carried. Their story is worthy of note.

Walkers Behind the Storm

A bruising, roaring, dust–choked wind preceded the pilgrims and their flame. The stinging dust storm ripped across northern New Mexico and the streets of Los Alamos all day Monday, Feb. 25, 2002. Then that evening as the winds finally eased, 30 motley peace walkers entered Los Alamos bearing their flame. They quietly moved into the Unitarian Universalist church for the night, to share a meal and shelter.

The region they entered — now called Los Alamos — has been a fire center since pre–historic times. It was widely known and marked as a special node of material and spiritual fire, a place to be enaged only with the utmost respect. Now it is more widely known as the birthplace of the atomic bomb, and the home of the nation’s nuclear weapons, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Pilgrims walk east from Los Alamos
toward the Sangre de Christo Mountains.

Los Alamos is built on the eastern flank of The Valles Caldera, one of the largest “dormant” volcanoes in the world — a vast, sleeping source of molten fire from the bowels of the planet. “Caldera” is the Spanish word for cauldron. Such a place on earth is formed from massive but infrequent eruptions. After the eruption — much like a nuclear bomb but without poisonous radiation that endures for hundreds of thousands of year — the blast hole fills with volcanic ash and pumice. Scientists say the vast, 15–mile diameter Valles Caldera last erupted a million years ago, and that it is now dormant.

When American scientists were drawn to this region in the 1940s to build the atomic bomb, they were — as a matter of mystical consequence — being magnetically drawn to the most potent and significant fire center of Turtle Island.

Carrying a Lantern

The prayer walk that came to Los Alamos in late February began January 15, 2002, at the grave of Chief Seattle in Washington state. A small band of pilgrims, coming from nations all over the world, began a walk across the US carrying a lantern with a flame ignited from the fires started by the nuclear bombs which obliterated Hiroshima, Japan.

They are walking without recriminations, grievance or protest, but rather in solidarity with life and in peace. They seek mainly to give people an opportunity to partake of the flames’ redeemed meaning and power.

Nuc-Bomb The flame the pilgrims carry was ignited 57 years ago and has been tended with prayer ever since. In1945, after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, a man named Tatsuo Yamamoto walked into the ruins of the city to look for friends and family. In shock and anger, he collected some of the embers still smoldering from the bomb and carried them home.

Yamamoto’s grandmother preserved the embers and kindled a flame, which was used to illuminate the family’s prayer altar. For Yamamoto the smoldering embers symbolized his rage over what had happened; for his grandmother it symbolized love and the memory of the over 300,000 people who died directly from the atomic blast. Thousands of other human beings later died of cancers and related illnesses, or suffered mutations, directly attributable to the bomb’s nuclear radiation.

Over the next 12 years Yamamoto’s grandmother kept the flame with honor and respect. During this time Mr. Yamamoto underwent a complete change of heart. The flame on the altar transformed for him from a flame of hate and hostility into a flame of respect and love. Thanks to his family and a nearby monastery, the flame has been burning — surrounded with prayers and incense — since the moment of the Hiroshima blast on August 6, 1945.

Through the last decades the prayers of the people of Japan — and others around the world — have transformed that fiery expression from material to spiritual. The flame no longer harms people and destroys no life. It has become a quiet but potent focus of light and peace.

The 2002 Hiroshima Flame Interfaith Pilgrimage includes people of all colors and faiths.They say their effort is not a political statement, but a spiritual act. By walking and praying for peace, they say, they focus a common hope of all peoples and a common prayer for our mother the earth.

The Pilgrimage was organized by Sister Jun Yasuda, a Japanese Buddhist nun, and Tom Dostou, a citizen of the Wabanaki Alqonquin Nation in the Northeast region of Turtle Island. Jun San and Tom have been joined by peace pilgrims from around the world, an international group of all colors and faiths.

Material Realization

The very nature of the walk, and the very fact that the redeemed flame was returned to the source, promps realization. They symbolize a crucial choice the world must make now. That choice is between an essentially materialist culture fenced in by desire and dogma, or a fundamentally free culture that respects the living spirit in all of life.

atomicBomb The nuclear bomb is an ultimate expression of materialism. When the atomic scientists of Los Alamos took the secret of the atom — the fundamental particle of matter — and developed it into a weapon of mass destruction, they unleashed a scathing, wrathful demon of fire rather than a higher angel of warmth and illumination.

In splitting the atom scientists realized the core power of matter. In using it against life they became immersed in awe of and deference to the ultimate death—dealing expression of materialism. This can be seen as a failure altogether to recognize and respect the spirit that resides in all sentient beings, and as trespass against a universal spiritual law: thou shalt not kill.

In works such as Lyrics from the Book of Nature and the Second Coming over Lindisfarne, Welsh poet Charles Lawrie has expressed the excruciating polarity of this choice in vivid terms, describing his inner images in response to the first nuclear explosion.* His thoughts, even in paraphrase, are arresting:

Contrast the eye–scalding light of the world–shattering bomb, against the radiant light of authentic spiritual revelation as in the Transfiguration.
Contrast the flash of heat that causes sands to melt to glass, against the warmth of love which touches every human being.
Contrast the blast wave of sheer energy moving swiftly out as a destructive shock, against the moral impact of what humans feel in response to the revelation of the indwelling spirit and the shame of their personal imperfections.
Contrast the death–dealing nuclear radiation (potent, invisible, lacking honor) against the life–giving radiance which comes from nurturing other people and the earth we share.
Contrast the mushroom cloud, the crown of an anti–king (who dispenses death, illness and suffering), against the coming in the clouds from the East, the radiant sky forms crowning a heavenly source of grace.

Vigil at the Place of Avanyu

At sunrise on Tuesday, Feb. 26 the walkers arose at the Los Alamos Unitarian Universalist Church. They meditated for an hour, ate breakfast, and set out on a short walk downtown to the Los Alamos County Skateboard park. What is now a place for children to play, 50 years ago was the site of the first plutonium processing plant. There the walkers and a small band of local supporters formed a circle.

Shannyn Sollitt of Santa Fe, who guided the walk through the region, trumpeted loudly through a conch shell to honor the Four Directions. The Nichiren Buddhist monks chanted their familiar central tenet, Odaimoku: Na Mu Myo Ho Renge Kyo, “the Lotus Sutra of the True Dharma.” Tom Dostou called upon several elders, who made prayers according to their traditions. Shannyn Sollitt called upon the Los Alamos National Laboratory to use their intelligence and skills not in service of war and death, but rather in service of life.

And then the pilgrims went on, walking about 10 zig–zag miles through Los Alamos, prohibited by federal security from getting close to any of the many “sensitive areas” around and about Los Alamos. The US Energy Department banned the walk from approaching any of the labs, and from walking on any of the public roads that pass the labs.

Since the walk came not for confrontation but to perform a spiritual service, the organizers changed the route without complaint. They walked and held vigil as close to the labs as they were permitted, and then they walked on.

Place of Avanyu, sealed off within Area G in Los Alamos, NM – now desecrated by the world’s largest nuclear dump.

In the afternoon the pilgrims walked further with the flame. They set out from nearby White Rock, New Mexico along Pajarito Rd, to the barbed–wire fence outside the Los Alamos Lab’s Area 54, Area G. This is a global wonder, the world’s largest nuclear waste dump. According to Shannyn Sollitt, over 50,000 drums of contaminated nuclear waste, plus additional unlined pits and shafts some of them leaking their infernally toxic contents, the waste slowly seeping into the earth to poison it and the scarce waters below for hundreds of generations to come. The DOE says it plans to to bury an additional 2.7 million drums of waste here over the next 65 years.

Just behind the barbed wire and the warning signs which impotently strive to seal Area G off from the rest of the world, yet clearly visible from the road, are rock cliffs marked with a petroglyph.

avanyulosalamos The glyph was carved into the rock face of the outcropping thousands of years ago by the indigenous Pueblo peoples, whose descendents still live nearby. There are such petroglyphs all over North America, serving as signs and signals of importance to native peoples.

The Hiroshima Peace Flame walkers stopped and formed a circle across the road from a particular petroglyph, the carved image of Avanyu. Avanyu is depicted as a great serpent with a lightning–bolt tongue. According to tradition, Avanyu represents the sacred waters of the earth and sky, and the lightning-bolt can be understood to respresent what modern spiritual scientists might refer to as Shakti, cosmic electric fire with the capacity to enlighten, or to burn and destroy if employed without wisdom.

Beholding this ancient stone carving, the walkers viscerally understood that the place where they had come — Los Alamos, the city of nuclear fire — had been built directly upon what has for many thousands of years been considered to be a sacred site.

In this place formerly regarded as worthy of high respect, our National Lab has dumped ton upon ton of desecrating nuclear poison.

Message on the Wind

prayerW From the place of Avanyu, the walkers proceeded — drumming and chanting each step — about seven miles to Tsankawi, a prehistoric site that is now part of Bandelier National Monument. Tsankawi is a spectacular place high on a mesa overlooking the Jemez Mountains to the West and the Sangre de Christo Mountains to the East.

The walkers climbed to the top of the mesa with the Hiroshima flame, an indigenous woman from Ecuador, and two Native American elders from the nearby Santa Clara Puebo — whose ancestors once inhabited Tsankawi. With the sun setting in the west, the elders guided a simple ceremony, emphasizing peace and respect for all of the Sacred Hoop of life.

“You will need to be strong,” said Erwin Rivera, one of the Santa Clara elders, “for you will be called cowards and traitors. But it is an act of courage to choose sanity and peace when others are choosing hate and war.”

“Right now,” the elder said, “the Valles Caldera has the exact same technical classification that Mount Saint Helens had up until the time it exploded in a massive eruption. The scientists say it is dormant. But the caldera is not dormant, only sleeping. Some of our elders say it may have to awaken some day to cleanse all the poison that has been dumped here.”

Atomic Aftermath

HomageWind The wind people, the messengers, brought the flame home to its point of origin, having purified it with their chants, prayers and incense. They offered it to the people of the city without rancor, recrimination, or challenge. They offered the flame with understanding and hope. And then they walked on.

Not one scientist, not one of the new keepers of the fire, came out to behold the flame that was still burning from the nuclear holocaust started 57 years ago by the work done here. No one bore witness.

Except for a handful of locals, the newspapers, and the UU church, the walk was overlooked. Scientists and citizens drove by with barely a flicker of recognition or interest. The only people paying attention were the County Sheriffs. In marked cars they diligently shadowed the walk all day, remaining politely distant.

After the day in Los Alamos the walkers were hosted for a meal and sleeping accommodations at the Rio Rancho community center. The next day — February 27, 2002 — the peace pilgrims departed the Los Alamos region quietly to walk East. On that same day, USA Today reported that radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests across the globe has caused at least 15,000 cancer deaths in U.S. residents born after 1951.

This information was obtained from an unreleased government study. Coupled with findings from previous government investigations, it suggests that 20,000 non-fatal cancers – and possibly many more – also can be tied to fallout from weapons tests. When fallout from all tests, domestic and foreign, is taken together, no U.S. resident born after 1951 has escaped exposure, the study says.

Also on that day, to sound an alarm about the rapidly growing danger of a nuclear conflagration, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved their famous Doomsday Clock forward two minutes closer to midnight. The scientists wanted to highlight the dramatically mounting dangers of political instability, the wide availability of nuclear materials, terrorism, and the aggressive unilateral stance of the US government.

The Hiroshima Peace Flame Walk will continue in the eastern half of the United States until May 12, 2002. It will end its eastward trek in New York at United Nations headquarters and at the site of the destroyed World Trade Center. Later the walk will return the fire ceremonially to the Earth at the Arizona mine where the uranium for the Hiroshima bomb was dug from the ground.

To read about the end of the walk months later at Big Mountain on Black Mesa in Arizona, click here.

*For more on poet Charles Lawrie and an essay on the spiritual implications of the nuclear bomb, see “Nuclear Power, the Royal Stars, and the Destiny of Humanity” by David Tresemer, Ph.D. and Robert Schiappacasse

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About Steven McFadden & Chiron Communications

Welcome to Chiron Communications, a conceptual umbrella to unify my diverse work as writer, storyteller, and healer. My passion is casting light upon keys that may serve the health of human beings and the earth we share.

As a journalist, I’m the author of a range of non-fiction books. Most of them are on display at the bottom of the page if you wish to learn more.

I’m honored to have had the opportunity to author an epic, nonfiction saga of North America: Odyssey of the 8th Fire. The 8th Fire tells a true story arising from the deepest roots of our land, but taking place in the present and the future. In it, circles upon circles, elders make a great and generous giveaway of the teachings they carry.

In the early 1980s I initiated Chiron Communications, but then rested the concept in the 1990s. That’s when I took time to serve as National Coordinator for the annual Earth Day USA celebration, in partnership with the Seventh Generation Fund (1993).

Through the 1990s I served as director of The Wisdom Conservancy at Merriam Hill Education Center in Greenville, New Hampshire, as a participant in The Balaton Group, and as one of the pilgrims on a great universal prayer walk from the Eastern Door at the Atlantic Ocean across Turtle Island (North America) toward the Western Gate at the Pacific. I put Chiron Communications back into gear around the turn of the millennium.

For some readers it may look as if Chiron Communications is a sprawling, sporadic, multidimensional, multinational corporation. But no. It’s just me and my laptop, with a little help from my friends.

A Reiki Master of long standing, I’ve had the opportunity to transmit the Reiki healing techniques to hundreds of students across North and Central America. It was my privilege to help John Harvey Gray and Lourdes Gray, Ph.D. write Hand to Hand: The Longest Practicing Reiki Master Tells His Story. I’ve also had the privilege to travel with and to learn from many gifted healers from all over the Americas, as well as healers from Australia, Africa, and Ireland. At the turn of the millennium I was honored to earn certification as a yoga instructor.

As the land calls out ever more powerfully, I maintain an active interest in farming and gardening in general, Food Co-ops and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in particular. I’ve reported on the growth and development of CSA in America since its inception in 1986, striving to articulate The Call of the Land.

My most recent agrarian book, Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future, won the National Indie Excellence Award in the environmental category. I invite you to visit my dedicated blog: DeepAgroecology.net

At home once again in New Mexico, I’m a member of SouthWest Writers, NM Writers, and the New Mexico Book Association,

Thanks for reading. May your steps carry you along the beauty way. Respectfully, Steven McFadden

Thanks to Tim J. Hill of DraftHorse Studio for web design,
to Angela Werneke of River Light Media for the Chiron Communications logo,
and to my darling Elizabeth Wolf for the author photos.

eep agroecology, #deepagroecology

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Homepage

Welcome to Chiron Communications

In Greek mythology the centaur named Chiron
strove to bridge daily life with spirit life.

Working in our era under the conceptual umbrella
of Chiron Communications,
I reach in similar directions as writer, teacher, storyteller.

I invite you to adventure in spirit via Odyssey of the 8th Fire
Engage the call of the land via Deep Agroecology
Prospect the archival depths of Chiron’s Cave
Check out my Youtube channel
Or ponder the possibilities described in my books

Excelsior ~ Steven McFadden

deep agroecology #deepagroecology