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In Search of Human Beings

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A legendary elder of ancient Greece, the man named Diogenes gained renown by walking through the streets of ancient Athens in broad daylight carrying a lighted lamp. When people would ask him why his lamp was lit in the day, he would reply not that he was looking for an honest man, as is so often reported, but rather that he was “looking for a Human Being.”

Diogenes - was born in Sinope, Turkey (4th Century BCE) but moved to Athens and became the leader of a faction known as The Cynics. Diogenes modeled himself on the example of Hercules, believing that virtue is revealed in action and deeds, not in theory or talk. He lived on the streets and by his wits, without luxuries. Photo of Diogenes statue in Sinope courtesy of Creative Commons.

Diogenes – was born in Sinope, Turkey (4th Century BCE) but moved to Athens and became the leader of a faction known as The Cynics. Diogenes modeled himself on the example of Hercules, believing that virtue is revealed in action and deeds, not in theory or talk. He lived on the streets and by his wits, without luxuries. Photo of Diogenes statue in Sinope courtesy of Creative Commons.

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 Diogenes’ quest for Human Beings struck home with me. His search in classical Greece parallels one of the core ethical considerations in classic Native American wisdom ways. For me, someone who has walked hundreds of miles on Native pathways but only a few steps on the marbled hallways of classical Greece, this point of reckoning seems eminently worthy of consideration.

The various cultures that have come to North America over the last 500 years have not yet completed the process of grafting healthfully with the root native culture that has been on the land for many thousands of years. There is a great need for this interweaving to proceed, and here is a foundational point of union.

Understanding of what it means to be a Human Being — in any era of time and any place in the world — is a fundamental wisdom question contemplated in the Americas for millennia.

stNative orators have often given eloquent expression to the idea. Among the well- spoken tradition keepers, I include the late Leon Shenandoah (1915– 1996), an elder and a statesman for the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) people of The Great Turtle Island (North America).

In the pages of To Become a Human Being, Grandfather Shenandoah says that becoming a Human Being means attaining the highest level in this life, rising above instincts or base emotions to reach a place of equanimity and integrity, recognizing that we are all spiritual beings. A spark of spirit dwells in all life, and a Human Being knows that and acts in the world with that reality held mindfully.

“To become a Human Being is to rise to an expanded level of consciousness by living in physical and spiritual communion with the Earth and the various creatures who share life with us on the land,” Grandfather Shenandoah observed.

Grandfather Shenandoah encouraged everyone to “be the firekeepers that we all are, so that we’re able to instill small fires in each human being and give them hope so that they’ll begin to do good for other human beings.”

Classical Considerations: Musings Prompted by the Late John H. Finley, Jr.My intent as author of the ebook, Classical Considerations, was to strike such sparks by passing on the teachings of some faithful firekeepers, in particular the late Harvard Master and Classicist, John H. Finley, Jr.

“The doctrine of Horatio Alger, of getting ahead in life, continues to be important,” Finley told me during one of our interviews. “Yet the purpose of mind is not chiefly for you to get some place in society. Our gift is mind; we can see things. That’s what it’s all about. It really is.

“In your brief span, to make sense of all the interesting people you’ve known, all the interesting books you’ve read. This panorama…is increasingly your reward in life.

“After all, the self is both the hero and the villain in life. It is the villain insofar as it reduces the great and beautiful world to the idiotic closet of one’s identity. It is the hero insofar as it tries to go to the window, look out, and see how big the world is and how many people there are and how beautiful the sunlight is.

“It seems to me that waking is far more desirable than dreaming.

World Food Production & Local Food Production

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StalkWhen I heard about the historically feeble wheat crop of 2013 I began to look around again in the realm of world food production, and once again to connect dots. The sad state of the wheat crop in America’s Central Plains is happening right in my back yard of Nebraska, so that’s what captured my attention again. But the wheat tribulations of the Heartland are but part of far larger story about world food production with far greater implications for local food production.

Anyone paying attention to news about world food production should have snapped to attention by now, and should be motivated for action to promote, develop and expand local food production systems. That’s just common sense. The pattern of the news about food and farms is a steady concerning drumbeat, a thumping call to attention.

Yet further rigorous international studies released this week declare that the world is lurching towards an agricultural crisis, with crop production falling behind rates needed in coming decades.

stormIn one case, in a follow up to the United Kingdom’s Climate Change Risk Assessment, a just released official report stated that climate change abroad would have a more immediate effect than climate change at home. Taking the most reasonably optimistic view possible, the report states that the UK is likely to be hit by increasingly volatile prices of many food commodities as the climate is disrupted.

Global production of many key foodstuffs is concentrated in a just few countries. Those countries are likely to suffer increasing episodes of extreme weather. As a consequence, the report states, the biggest threats are shortages of particular items, increased volatility in food prices in general, and constricting protectionist measures over food.

Threats from climate change overseas appear an order of magnitude higher than domestic threats, the report’s authors told BBC News.

Those same events would, naturally, also impact the economy, food supply, and the cost of food in North America, and elsewhere. Like it or not, we are all one planet. That’s an inescapable fact of life in 2013.

The paper regards climate change not only as fact, but as a multiplier of other threats. “Already price volatility of resources is the new normal,” the authors told BBC News. “This only looks as though it will get worse.”

Meanwhile, arising from the Southern hemisphere, another report warns that famine and its ancient, aggravating companion, war, are becoming an increasingly likely part of Australia’s future as the world struggles to feed itself.

“Clearly, the world faces a looming agricultural crisis, with yield increases insufficient to keep up with projected demands,” according to authors of the report. ”We have no time to waste.”

Shortages and rising prices are creating a double whammy: families struggling to put food on the table, while at the same time governments in the US, Australia and elsewhere are cutting back on food support and other social welfare programs.

tpIn concert with obvious climate concerns is the political-corporate context. America’s Green Shadow Cabinet has just formally opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as an assault against food sovereignty. According to the Cabinet’s analysis, the trade agreement – now under secret international negotiation — places the profits of multinational companies ahead of the food security needs of individual nations.

One corner of our backyard garden in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Access to food is a basic human right, the Cabinet asserts. The TPP, however, expands the cold, materialistic notion that food is just another commodity subject to financial speculation and exploitation to increase the profits of multinational corporations.

TPP promotes not local, but rather export-oriented food production. In its analysis, the Cabinet found that its passage will increase global hunger and malnutrition, alienate millions from their productive assets and resourcesof land, water, fish, seeds, and technology and, thwart generations of accumulated cultural knowledge.

“Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to control their own food and agriculture…to guarantee the independence and food sovereignty of all of the world’s peoples, it is essential that food is produced though diversified, community based production systems.”

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Open Harvest food coop in Lincoln, Nebraska. In the context of all these dots of information about world food production, and many others, local food production emerges as not just wise and beneficial for a host of reasons, but also imperative.

In my own life I think not just of my backyard vegetable garden as one wee element of local food production, but also of our local food coop, Open Harvest, which now nearing 40 years of operation. Open Harvest is an active market agent buying food from over 110 organic, sustainable farms ranged around Nebraska’s capital city of Lincoln, and then selling that food at reasonable cost. Just participating in a local food coop as one of thousands of member-owner makes a huge difference in the push to develop local production systems.

There are hundreds of other proven pathways open now for the development of our local food systems, ranging from local farms, CSAs, coops, farmers markets, community kitchens, farm-to-school programs and other community agrarian initiatives. If you are paying attention to world food production, you will recognize that it is time now to be active in local food production, something both wise and increasingly imperative.

Big Doings at Big Mountain

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Big Mountain montage by Jetsonorama and the "No Reservations Required" crew.
Big Mountain montage by Jetsonorama & the “No Reservations Required” crew.

For most Americans the Four Corners is just a curiosity on the map where the survey lines that define four states come together and form a classic cross: Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. But for many native peoples, Four Corners is a broad and austerely beautiful region bounded by four sacred mountains.* navmap Four Corners is appreciated as an exquisitely sensitive and foundationally important feminine holy place on the land, a place that serves as an earthly anchoring point for the spiritual heart of North America (Turtle Island).

Today, as has been true for over 50 years, Four Corners is under assault. Today also, as has been true for millennia, Four Corners is under the watch of human beings who have accepted their role as protectors of the land and the life that depends upon the land.

Within the Mountain boundaries of the Four Corners lies the sweeping, majestic prominence of Black Mesa in northeast Arizona. Upon the mesa, in simplicity and humility, stands Big Mountain, a geomantic ground zero. As held in traditional knowings, Four Corners in general and Black Mesa and Big Mountain in particular are understood to represent what we might conceive of as a microcosmic holograph of our entire planet — a subtle, supersensible phenomenon of the region possibly grasped only through legend, direct perception, or quantum mechanics.

What happens in the Four Corners does not stay in the Four Corners, but through the web of life and relationship resonates consequences across and within all of Mother Earth.

coal_plant_on_mesaOver the last decades of our era, traditional native peoples at Black Mesa have lived in resistance. Strip-mines have ripped apart the sacred lands, coal-burning power plants have befouled the desert air to send electricity to the Las Vegas Strip, and elsewhere, and mining corporations have dug up the toxic ‘cledge’ (uranium). According to various Creation stories, native peoples were explicitly warned to leave the cledge unmolested; digging yellowcake up, the traditions related, would cause it to arise in the world as nayee, a monster.

In resistance of this ongoing exploitation, there will be a gathering on Black Mesa the week of June 3-9, 2013. The gathering will include workshops and conversations among the Big Mountain/Black Mesa community and other frontline resistance communities from around North America. They will participate in a native youth caucus, cultural sharing, work parties, an elders’ circle, community meals, and concerts with hip hop artists.

This June gathering is being organized by Black Mesa Indigenous Support (BMIS), an all-volunteer, non-native collective committed to long-term, relationship-based, request-based solidarity with the native communities of Black Mesa.

This is not the first such gathering in support of Black Mesa/Big Mountain and surely will not be the last. Thousands of people have learned of Big Mountain over the last 40 years, and hundreds of gatherings have been held in support. This particular gathering is a “big doing” not so much in the sense of size, but rather in the overall context of extreme planetary imbalance or earth changes, and overall patterns of spiritual awakening.

Sovereignty Summer

The Black Mesa gathering in early June happens toward the beginnings of Sovereignty Summer, and thus can be appreciated as a node in a network of awakenings now underway onward through 2013. What is “big” in the ultimate realm of possibilities, is the potential for good that may come from Big Mountain, from Ottawa, and from hundreds of other gatherings and non-violent actions across Turtle Island (North America).

nativeart041What unfolds on Black Mesa is part of a social movement, a people-powered uprising for a healthy planet liberated from fossil fuel extraction, exploitative economies, racism, and oppression.

The BMIS collective sets out their ideal by echoing a statement from Honor the Earth: “We believe a sustainable world is predicated on transforming economic, social, and political relationships that have been based on systems of conquest toward systems based on just relationships with each other and with the natural world. We are committed to restoring a paradigm that recognizes our collective humanity and our joint dependence on the Earth.”

General Geomantics

Occupying a spiritual axis for North America, Black Mesa is home to one of the world’s largest and richest coal mines. A site long considered sacred by traditional Hopi and Dine’ (Navajo), the mesa is also home to profitable deposits of gas, petroleum, and uranium.

As understood for millennia, Black Mesa and Big Mountain are inherently, energetically feminine. Yang, masculine digging and drilling for monetary profit and environmental ruin constitute a direct assault on this yin feminine holy center of the land we live on, North America.

In that sense Black Mesa/Big Mountain represent a microcosmic mirror of the deranged yang-masculine dominance, and the ongoing determined debasement of feminine, life-sustaining peoples, persons, substances and ways — as is evidenced all over the planet.

The native elders and the traditional families of Black Mesa appreciate coal as a substance that serves as the liver of the Sacred Female Mountain. When coal is taken from the ground, it no longer can absorb and neutralize impurities in the air and water, the arising thoughts and feelings that circulate in the atmosphere of our planet home.

Even in the face of genocide and ongoing persecution, native peoples have faithfully perpetuated ceremonies intended to give back appreciation and the primal energies of thought, song and dance to help maintain the balance of natural forces of sunlight, rain and winds, and further to reaffirm respect for all life and trust in the Great Spirit. This is how they express it. This is what they do. This is the nature of the call they are sounding, the support they seek.

Igniting a Spiritual Fire

Sovereignty Summer is a term that originated in Canada, arising through the indigenous movement Idle No More.  The movement demands sustainable development as well restoration of integrity to sworn treaties. “We believe in healthy, just, equitable and sustainable communities,” the movement reasons, “and (we) have a vision and plan of how to build them. Please join us in creating this vision.”

idleIdle No More has ignited a spiritual fire in the hearts of thousands of human beings to address a range of core matters, including the fundamental issue of protecting the earth that sustains us so life may endure and we may all go forward. They intend to keep striking sparks.

The human beings who sparked Idle No More have networked with Defenders of the Land to make a declaration: “We are in a critical time,” they write, “where lives, lands, waters and Creation are at-risk and they must be protected.” They call the attention of people to the potential of Sovereignty Summer. Meanwhile, in Alberta earlier this month, many native peoples gathered to create and then to sign a historic document, the Turtle Lodge Treaty. Of this treaty we are likely to hear more in the years to come.

Big Medicine is afoot. There is a spiritual energy stirring and a larger awakening is on the horizon as we transition to Sovereignty Summer. The gathering at Big Mountain is one facet or node of this ongoing awakening.

The gathering space at Black Mesa is already full this year. Organizers cannot accommodate anyone else coming. But there are other ways to support the effort to maintain Big Mountain, Black Mesa and the Four Corners, and to support the whole of the earth in a sacred manner. That is the idea animating Sovereignty Summer: to come together not in one particular place, but to establish a spiritually respectful stance where you are called upon the land.

* The four sacred mountains: Mount Blanca in Colorado, Mount Taylor in New Mexico, San Francisco Peaks in Arizona, and Mount Hesperus in Utah.

rsz_blan

The Mounting Imperatives of 21st Century Agrarianism: Farms & Food Face Fundamental Forces

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co2The elemental wherewithal of our farms and our food is in motion. Whirlwinds of change bear upon our land, air, water and climate. Fundamental forces have shouldered their way front and center. The land calls urgently.

As reported worldwide this month, scientific evidence shows that the level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide (CO2), has mounted far beyond the danger zone. Heat is rising. Consequences are evident.

CO2 has now reached an average daily level above 400 parts per million, a level the Earth has not experienced for three million years. That was during an epoch called the Pliocene.

The overwhelming majority of scientists understand that this current rise in CO2 portends epic changes.

“Our food systems, our cities, our people and our very way of life developed within a stable range of climatic conditions on Earth,” former Vice President Al Gore observed in the wake of the CO2 report. “Without immediate and decisive action, these favorable conditions on Earth could become a memory.”

Following the front-page news about the rapid deterioration of the earth’s climate, came two other hard news stories that underscore the matter of food vulnerability: news of the disease-driven collapse of the staple food crop for more than 500 million human beings in Africa, and news of grave troubles for citrus fruits in America and around the world.

Climate change and crop disease are serious business. Here the land is not just calling, it’s shrieking.

Cassava root

In Africa the cassava plant – which produces a large, edible root – is succumbing to brown streak disease. Africa already suffers debilitating food shortages. Because casava is the staple food for the continent, this plant disease is calamitous.

Meanwhile, the citrus industry is grappling with an infernal bacterial disease that has now killed millions of plants in the southeastern United States and is threatening to spread across the entire country. The disease has also been found in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Citrus Greening, also called Yellow Dragon Disease (Huanglongbing), is fatal. The bacteria devastate trees, rendering bitter, misshapen oranges, then death for the entire organism. There is no known cure.

“This year (2012-13) was a real kick in the gut,” Florida’s agriculture commissioner told The New York Times. “It is now everywhere, and it’s just as bad as the doomsayers said it would be.”

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When I absorb this short stack of climate and food news — just a fraction of the farm and food factors in flux — I realize that we must dig in now more resolutely to build a clean, respectful, sacred and sustainable foundation for civilization. That’s the direction forward.

Many thousands of local, organic agrarian farm-and-food initiatives have arisen across the Americas in the last 25 years. They offer a wide array of working models. Those models can and should be replicated and emulated far and wide. They represent intelligent and promising responses to the imperative call of the land.

buccolicOrganic farms and the cooperative food systems they are entwined with (the whole, broad range of 21st century agrarian initiatives) have manifold positive responses to the central issues, and a track record of evidence. They sequester carbon in the land and thereby mitigate CO2, helping stabilize climate. They offer clean, fresh food directly to people who live near the source. They provide dignified work in nature. They knit together healthy webs of relationship, both personal and digital, around concerns of a foundational nature to every human being. They teach essential ethical values. They establish oases of radiant environmental health. And they bring large numbers of people into a more direct and equitable relationship with the human beings who grow their food, and the land it is grown upon.

21st century agrarian initiatives also provide wholesome anchoring points (network nodes) for the brittle high-tech, digital-wave culture emerging so dynamically in our world. We are just at the beginning of that, really.

This 21st century agrarian initiatives – the many thousands of urban farms, CSAs, co-ops, community kitchens, church farms, and city gardens of all sizes shapes and descriptions – constitute core elements of a more wise and respectful human response to the imperative call of the land.

The cooperative development of clean local food systems is in no way a boutique idea or a passing fad. It is a key element of modern food security, and it is emerging not just as prudent but also as essential. It is also about the renewal of our overall human relationship with the earth that sustains us.

Ceremonial Protocol

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Protocol for
The Reunion of Mother Earth with Her Children
at Turquoise Mountain on May 8, 2004

Turquoise Mountain (Mount Taylor) — the South Mountain on the Medicine Wheel — has already committed to ceremony under the guidance of Grandfather Martin Martinez and Grandmother Janíce, and many other elders and Medicine People from nearby Pueblos. With Grandfather Leon Secatero, the elders established a Protocol for the Turquoise Mountain Ceremony and made the Protocol available for others to consider.

Leon Secatero

Leon Secatero

The Indigenous Elders are asking us to stop and think with them, wherever you are, whatever you are doing, to reconnect with our Mother Earth as her children. These unified ceremonies are to awaken everyone, to be done by everyone at the beginning of every season in their own traditional protocol.This is only the beginning of the reorientation and reconnection for Mother Earth and her children.

What follows is the traditional protocol for the ceremony on Turquoise Mountain (Mt. Taylor) on May 8th, 2004 as set by Grandfather and Grandmother Martinez, and Leon Secatero, Spiritual Messenger.

Grandfather Martin Martinez’s vision came to him in the spring of 2002 when he and other medicine people visited the sacred spring on Turquoise Mountain to offer gifts to the mountain and its holy ones as they have always done.

The warriors on horses of long ago appeared. They were carrying a staff with eagle feathers from many nations. The Thunder called to them, “Why aren’t you doing the ceremony?” Next, they saw rainbow houses and many people camping in the clearing with their drums in a circle to reset the sky roads of the holy ones. The time had come.

When Grandfather came down from the mountain he called all his children (The Five Finger Ones) to tell them that a spiritual gathering is to happen at the sacred site on Turquoise Mountain. In the vision, the ancestors came to tell him that it is time to journey to this mountain for the sacred purpose of reconnecting Mother Earth with her children. Since then, many traditional planning meetings have taken place.

However, there was a question in regards to the participation of many nations and how they are to connect. This connection came together when an Eastern Shoshone Spiritual leader came with a message: Mother Earth is calling all cultures to come together in Sacred Ceremonies now to restore balance and harmony. To help alleviate worldwide concerns about past, present, and future earthquakes and volcanic activities within Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, the elders have envisioned a unified ceremony to include the western territory of North America.

All people from all nations are welcome to participate.

TRADITIONAL PROTOCOL
ojikiwanWhen our Star appears in the East (about 4:00 AM), the mounds for 12 staffs will be marked and put in a circle with an opening to the East. All nations represented with a staff will circle around the center fire for the entrance of the sacred pipes, to be placed in the Four Directions with prayer and song.

After the sacred pipes are in place, cleansing with sage and prayer will begin for the staffs. Once the staffs are placed in the mounds, the cleansing for the people and their medicine bundles will begin.

Morning Songs will be sung until dawn. Everyone will come together with their prayer offerings as traditional flute music is played to welcome the Sun as it appears through the aspen forest.

Breakfast will be on your own. A prayer offering of food will be given to Turquoise Mountain.

Midmorning (10:00 AM) the participating groups will bring their prayer sticks, with their own designs and colors, to the center west of the central fire. The prayer sticks will be placed in a line representing the participating groups. When the time comes, the south prayer stick will begin their song. When they complete their song, the next prayer stick will start and so forth, until the last one in the north is completed.

With with the singing and prayer, two bows -– one a 740-year-old bow representing the ancestors, and a new one representing the Five Finger Ones –- will be used to connect the vibration south to north, and east to west.

Placing of Crystals (11:30 AM) with the prayer sticks will be done before noon. Everyone is invited to place their crystal around the mound of the prayer sticks as the Honoring Song is sung. When the time is right, the Connecting Song will be sung, starting very softly and increasing as more lift the song. All drums, flutes, eagle-bone whistles, and voices will begin with the rhythm of the Medicine Rattle to open up the vibration.

The Sky Path of the Holy Ones is connected at Noon, when the energy is most direct and powerful. The group with the South prayer stick will lead off with their song. They may ask others to join them.

After the last prayer stick at the north has sung their song, the singing is open and all the people will join in the healing dance. This is for Mother Earth to acknowledge you, and for you to acknowledge Mother Earth in renewing your sacred relationship with her. The dance will end in the afternoon to prepare for the next ceremony.

Honoring Mother Earth (2:00 PM), after the sacred water is brought in, a tobacco/pipe ceremony will begin. Mother Earth Song will be sung and offerings will be prepared for the water to be placed near the sacred spring, so her seeds will carry the sacred message to the universe when the plants arrive.

aspathHonoring the Sacred Path for the Five Finger Ones will be done with a Mountain Song, ending with the Blessing Way. The prayer sticks will be taken to the mountain spirits for their guidance and wisdom, as our journey begins here.

Our first responsibility is to clean up the area before leaving for home to share our experiences with our loved ones. Grandfather and Grandmother Martinez have given their permission for a certain portion of this event to be videotaped, recorded and distributed for the Martinez family and the building of the Red Mountain Healing Center.

– Leon Secatero, Spiritual Messenger, 3/27/2004

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

Copyright 2002 – by Steven McFadden

hiroshima1The 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.

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

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

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.

bmeldersThe 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

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.

flamrThe 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

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

 

 

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

Copyright 2002 – by Steven McFadden

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.

lanternThe 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.

hoopIn 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.

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-BombThe 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.

atomicBombThe 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.

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.

avanyulosalamosThe 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

prayerWFrom 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

HomageWindThe 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.

doomsdayclockAlso 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

=======

Massive Majestic Medicine Wheel Ceremony to Help Heal Our Earth

Copyright 2004 – by Steven McFadden

turtle2While dwelling amid the high mountains along the North American Continental Divide, Bennie LeBeau of the Eastern Shoshone tribe experienced a torrent of dreams and visions, especially in 1999. The visions directed him to set in motion the plans for a massive Medicine Wheel Ceremony.

Over the last year Bennie has become aware of many sharply distressing changes in both land and animals at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. These changes are becoming even more ominous right now, he says, and they have prodded him into direct action to bring his visions alive.

The huge Medicine Wheel Ceremony that Bennie envisions is intended to be a mass spiritual event. The ceremony is set to take place at High Noon on Saturday, May 8, 2004 at more than 20 sacred sites in the American West, and at many other sacred sites elsewhere around the world, including Australia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Ireland, Germany, and the Middle East.

The Grand Teton peaks in Wyoming –The Four Grandmothers Standing Tall – will serve as the center of this Medicine Wheel. The long spine of the Rocky Mountains runs roughly North and South in the Wheel; and the circumference reaches from California deep into America’s heartland. Simultaneous prayer ceremonies at other sacred sites around world will help to re-attune the web of subtle energy pathways that envelop planet earth.

“All nations, all peoples are invited to participate,” Bennie said, adding, “all nations, all peoples are needed to work together on this — the black, white, yellow, and red nations of Mother Earth.”

map-redA Medicine Wheel is an ancient spiritual tool with a history of widespread use all over Turtle Island (North America). Stones are set to mark the Four Directions of North, South, East and West, and also of other major points. In this manner, if done with knowledge and respect, a sacred space is defined. Within that space, the people can direct thoughts, feelings and actions toward a unified idea.

The Medicine Wheel also helps people to be grounded physically, to properly orient to the Four Directions, and thus to have a clear sense of where they are. That foundation of stability gives a reliable base for high spiritual work.“The Earth is drastically out of balance now,” Bennie LeBeau says. “This Medicine Wheel ceremony will strive to re-set the basic tone — or vibrational pattern — of the West, and by extension help to re-attune the whole of the earth.

Message for Peacekeepers

I met Bennie LeBeau in Placitas, New Mexico on February 9, 2004. He had driven down from Wyoming to meet with some members of a group called the Spiritual Elders of Mother Earth, a network of indigenous people from 21 different tribes in North, Central, and South America.

The elders began coming together as a group in 1999 in response to the global crises of environment and culture. Their traditional teachings have long warned that such crises would arise.

The elders say they understand from their traditions that part of their original instructions as human beings was to serve as keepers of the Earth. They were also told that one day they would have to step forward in a time of extreme crisis and lead — to educate people about how to restore balance — for the survival of life on earth would depend upon them remembering and acting in a sacred manner.

Bennie LeBeau

Bennie LeBeau

Bennie LeBeau was born on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming in 1950, and is an enrolled member of the Eastern Shoshone tribe. He served in the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam in the early 1970s. In the years after his military service, he supported himself mainly through outfitting, taking people out fishing and hunting in the mountains.

Bennie told me that he began to have visions when he was in his late 20s, while guiding hunters along the Continental Divide. He went to the local Medicine People to ask for help in understanding, but they were unable to offer interpretations. So Bennie lived with the visions.

Bennie said he eventually came to understand on his own what his dreams and visions meant: “The land is out of balance. The bio-electric energy of the earth is being profoundly scrambled and disturbed by mines, electric transmission lines, railroads, highways, damming of the rivers, and also from development of factories, trucks, cars and so forth. War is adding to this.”

“It’s time to do something important, to reconnect the energy. So many sacred sites are not kept, not tended. But this is what is needed, for things are out of balance, out of harmony. It’s extreme now, and it’s time to come together around this, the old ways and the new ways. Every human being has a stake in this, no matter their color or their spiritual tradition.”

Talking with the Elders
To bring this massive, multi-tradition Medicine Wheel ceremony about, Bennie was inspired to travel and talk with representatives of the indigenous Nations near the waters and mountains of his vision, and also with other cultures. He began his journey in January, 2004. “I am to ask for assistance in re-activating these sacred sites,” Bennie explained. “We must all do our parts as humans to bring about harmony.”

On February 10, 2004 — the day after I met with him — Bennie journeyed west from Placitas to the Turquoise Mountain (Mount Taylor near Grants, New Mexico). This is one of the sacred mountains that mark the Four Corners area of Turtle Island (North America). Turquoise Mountain is a massive dormant volcano, towering more than a mile above a vast desert plateau.

Turquoise Mountain (Tsoodzil) Mount Taylor, New Mexico

Turquoise Mountain (Tsoodzil) Mount Taylor, New Mexico

With Leon Secatero of the Canoncito Navajo, a Grand Elder for the Spiritual Elders of Mother Earth, and Red Eagle of the Cherokee Nation, Bennie visited with the traditional keepers of Turquoise Mountain: Navajo Grandfather Martin Martinez and his wife, Grandmother Janíce.

Bennie told them of his dreams and visions, and also of his plan. Grandfather Martin, who is in his 90s, was pleased to hear it. He told Bennie that his visions were in harmony with the Navajo teachings and prophecies that he keeps. He also mentioned that with his wife, Janíce, he had a vision of a multi-tradition ceremony to be held near a holy spring on Turquoise Mountain. They wanted to realize their vision.

As it happens, in the context of the 600-mile radius of the Medicine Wheel of Bennie LeBeau’s vision, the Turquoise Mountain of New Mexico is in the South position — the South Mountain.

m-mushikaIn the Medicine Wheel teachings of Turtle Island the South is a direction sometimes represented by Mouse. Mouse is so small and defenseless against the rest of the world that he must rely on trust and instinct to live. Much larger forces of Spirit are at work in the world, and Mouse understands how humble a creature he is in relation to all this. But good and surprising things can happen when trust leads Mouse to make a bold move for survival, guided by Spirit.

“This was prophesied a long time ago,” Grandfather Martinez told Bennie and the other elders. “I am glad you have come and taken responsibility to be a messenger.”

“The mountain is the pillar, our helper,” Grandfather Martinez said. “It listens to us when we are in harmony with the stones, trees, clouds, waters, and stars. This is the wholeness that keeps life together. We will communicate with the mountain.”

Grandfather Martin gave Bennie his blessings to go forward and make his Medicine Wheel Ceremony a reality. He said it was a good mission and that now is the time.

All the elders traveled up onto the flank of Turquoise Mountain after their meeting. There by a sacred spring they made ceremony together to prepare for May 8. Grandfather Martinez also initiated the drum that Bennie had made for himself, a drum laced with symbols representing the Medicine Wheel ceremony.

Grandfather Martinez shared with his guests some Navajo lore about Turquoise Mountain — the South Mountain of the four sacred mountains of the Navajo, known to them as Tsoodzil, the Blue Bead Mountain. (Turquoise Mountain is sacred to several other native groups as well; all have been invited to the May 8 ceremony).

Grandfather Martinez said there were giants on the mountains in the old days, and they were the guardians. Some were good, and some were not. The giants have gone, but their energies are still around, and a lot of it is negative energy. The negative energies and entities are coming back strong now, and it is affecting the people.

mine-arialIn the context of Grandfather’s words, the ravaged land all around Turquoise Mountain bespeaks an ugly story. Over many years large-scale mining has dug up and released uranium for the sake of eternally toxic nuclear energy.

“We need to do ceremonies continually to strengthen and cleanse and empower,” Grandfather Martinez said. “It is very important to do this now. The ceremonies help to keep the negative forces at bay.

Grandmother Janíce told the circle of elders that the ceremony would put in place another set of vibrations. “The ceremony will happen at a time in the spring when all the plants are surging with new life,” she said. “If we come together in respect with the plants, she said, we can use this energy to help bring about the intention of the ceremony.”

Grandfather Martinez spoke of the Medicine Wheel ceremony as a universal wake up call. The mountain ranges have sovereignty over lines of energy that radiate around the entire earth. Thus, he said, the ceremonies we do encircling the Rocky Mountains will radiate out to other points.

Grandfather noted that many people and groups do things individually, their rituals or ceremonies. “That’s okay,” he said, “but right now Mother Earth and all the living things upon her have need of something more — something where all the people are together and of one heart, one mind.”

The May 8 ceremony that the elders have envisioned for the South Mountain, Turquoise Mountain, is to be a Blessing Way. That is how it will happen. Drums and singers from many nations will pass the song from sunrise on May 8 until sunset, and some may choose to sing in the night. “We will also be calling all our ancestors to be with us in this ceremony,” Leon Secatero said, “that we may all reconnect with our ancestors.”

There will be a particular emphasis when High Noon comes to the Four Grandmothers Standing Tall (Grand Tetons in Wyoming). That is when ceremonies in the entire Medicine Wheel will also be putting a focus on being of one mind and heart, expressing their gratitude for Creation by raising the vibration to its highest level.

For the elders of Turquoise Mountain in the South, the ceremony will also mark the starting time of an effort to establish a permanent public park on part of thier ancestral lands, so that people can go there to pray and make ceremony when they feel called. They also envision a healing center.

While Bennie initially saw the massive Medicine Wheel ceremony-taking place over a 600-mile radius, reaching out from the center point of the Four Grandmothers, Grandfather Martinez saw it more globally. They came to agree that everyone who chooses to participate, at whatever holy sites are accessible to them anywhere in the world, would be invited and welcomed.

One Heart, One Mind, One Circle
medicine_k-The call for people of all nations, races, and traditions to participate in this massive Medicine Wheel ceremony comes at a time of widespread military conflict, and of profound environmental damage to the earth, the wind, the fire and the water. It is also a time of intense culture war.

The same kinds of passionate forces that bitterly pit religion against religion, race against race, and political party against political party, are also at work in Indian Country. There are many factions.

Not everyone endorses the idea of White, Red, Black, Brown, Yellow and Rainbow peoples coming to participate together in ceremony.

But the intention of the Medicine Wheel Ceremony on May 8, 2004 is for something all people can hold in common without dispute: the realization that a healthy earth is necessary to our survival, and to the survival of our children and grandchildren.

In responding to his visions and by calling for this ceremony, Bennie LeBeau is forcing the issue. Will Native peoples open their ceremonies and share their teachings? There are lots of strong viewpoints on whether this is a good thing.

Bennie says the indigenous tribes will have to open up and teach. He is well aware that not all tribal groups will welcome this.

“Some tribes will open, some will not,” he told me. “Each will make their own decision. This is going out to the world. There is no set ceremony. People may follow their own hearts and traditions. They know their holy places and their Medicines. But we must all do it together. There is no one person who is in charge. It is up to the people.”

“The old traditions alone will not work to meet this current challenge,” Bennie said. “Things have changed. We need to take the best of the old and add it to what is emerging. This is the medicine that we — and our Mother Earth — need now.”

Bennie says that the big mess the world is in now is the very reason why the ceremonies were preserved for so many generations, against such overwhelming persecution. “This is why the ancestors suffered and sacrificed, to save the songs and dances that set a tone of harmony in the relationship between the human beings and the earth, for the universe which provides our essential sustenance of food, water, and shelter.”

The May 8 Medicine Wheel ceremony is intended to bring the people together through a unified vision on one day and to be guided by Native American neighbors and relatives, who have a millennia-old tradition of ceremonies to respect and maintain the balance of life on Earth.

About this diversity of viewpoints, Grandfather Martinez said, “Our gratitude will answer all the questions. We will be energized by this ceremony, making connections with all our relatives, all our cultures. All cultures must be valued and welcomed, not one left out.”

The Massive Scope of the Medicine Wheel
The boundaries of the May 8, 2004 Medicine Wheel Ceremony that Bennie LeBeau has envisioned reach in a huge circle, touching on major sacred mountain peaks and bodies of water. He has interpreted his vision as “The Magnificent 19 + 1 = 20.”

The planned Medicine Wheel ceremony covers an area with a radius of some 600 miles. The Grand Tetons in Wyoming – The Four Grandmothers Standing Tall — are at the center of the wheel, and 19 major mountains and waterways mark the perimeter of the wheel. The idea is to have ceremonies happen simultaneously around the whole wheel while centered on the Four Grandmothers Standing Tall, and stabilized in space and upon the Earth by the traditional Four Directions.

Center of the Wheel - The Grand Tetons.

Center of the Wheel – The Grand Tetons.

The ceremonial points around the perimeter of the Medicine Wheel are located in close proximity to these sacred sites:

. Lake Sullivan, North
· Saskatchewan River
· Qu’appelle River
· Souris River
· James River
· Missouri River
· Platte River
· Arkansas River
· Cimarron River
· Colorado River or (Lake Mead)
· Lake Tahoe
· Okanagan Lake
· Turquoise Mountain (Mt. Taylor, NM)
· Mt. Humphrey (Flagstaff, AZ)
· Mt. Whitney
· Mt. Shasta
· Three Sisters
· Mt. Rainier
· Lake Louise

The vast scope of the Medicine Wheel.

The vast scope of the Medicine Wheel.

As Bennie LeBeau explains it, “the intent of the ceremony is to place back into balance those lands, mountains and bodies of water that are now out-of-balance due to reckless development. We will use our drums, songs and dances to re-vitalize these sacred sites. Working together as the ancestors once did, we will re-attune these sacred sites. Our ceremony will become an important tool to teach all people the importance of our Mother Earth.”

Bad Vibes

Yellowstone geyser

Yellowstone geyser

According to Bennie, it is important to understand the relationship of the energy lines that link place to place on earth, and also the earth with the heavens. These energy pathways are like the nervous system of the human body and its wiring system, he said. The lines (ley lines) make up a matrix, or a network of energy for the body of the earth, and they can be adjusted the way a human body can be adjusted with acupuncture.

Bennie said that right now bad vibrations have built up to massive levels, and are stressing out the Earth Mother as well as many of her people. One clear evidence of this distress that is of particular concern to him is seismic activity in and around Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, near the homeland of his Eastern Shoshone tribe.

Geologists call Yellowstone a super volcano, because of the massive caldera of molten fire beneath the park. Over 10,000 geysers — including “Old Faithful” — rise from the depths of the earth. Yellowstone has more geothermal activity in one concentrated region than all the other sites on the planet put together.

Bennie LeBeau says that recent eruptions, 200-degree ground temperatures, bulging magma, 84-degree water temperatures in the lake, and a massive, unexplained die off of elk tell him that something big is happening at Yellowstone right now. The earth is profoundly disturbed.

He notes the following: in July, 2003 Yellowstone Park rangers closed the entire Norris Geyser Basin because of bulges in the land and excessively high temperatures. Ground temperatures on that bulge reached 200 degrees. It became a dead zone for fish, trees, flowers, and grasses.

Some geologists have speculated that if the massive caldera we know as Yellowstone were to erupt, every living thing within six hundred miles could be affected with devastating consequences.

The long-term effects of such an eruption would also be severe. Thousands of cubic kilometers of ash would shoot into the atmosphere, blocking light from the sun and dropping global temperatures, just as in the case of a nuclear winter.

Park officials disagree with this assessment of the situation. Franklin C. Walker, Assistant Superintendent of the National Park Service, addressed these concerns in a Dec. 12, 2003 letter to the chairperson of Eastern Shoshone Tribe “From the perspective of geologists, the Yellowstone volcano is not preparing to catastrophically erupt. No indication of increased volcanic activity is evident.”

Yet since then three earthquakes have rattled the ground at Yellowstone: A 5.3 mg quake was reported on Feb. 6, 2004, a 3.5 mg. quake hit a week later on Sunday, Feb. 15, and then Saturday Feb. 21 a 3.2 mg. quake struck.

Further, as reported by the Associated Press on March 12, 2004 the elk herds in Yellowstone Park are suffering a massive and mysterious die off. Since Feb. 22, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department has discovered over 300 dead and dying elk. This mass die off is unprecedented and unexplained

20120725_buffalo_560x375Of note, Yellowstone Park is also the site of a legal, on-going Buffalo slaughter. The Buffalo are killed to prevent them from becoming “too numerous.” In native understandings, Buffalo are widely considered to be healers of the earth. The places where their hooves touch the soil are especially fertile.

Now — early in our new milennium — at Yellowstone the joined rhythm of buffalo hooves is being replaced by the throb of snowmobile engines, and also by the sharp, invisible, unceasing waves from a 100-foot high cell-phone tower that has just been erected. The new tower overshadows Old Faithful and the entire Yellowstone historic district.

Bennie sees all of this as distinctly ominous. He is determined to do something about it. He says one important, helpful, and peaceful way to respond to the whole mess — Yellowstone and the global megacrisis — is with ceremony. He says his visions have shown him that ceremonies can serve the earth in a way similar to the way acupuncture serves the human body.

If the abuse of the earth continues, Bennie believes, things may get so far out of balance that Yellowstone will roar loud enough for everyone on the planet to hear the cry of pain.

The collective songs, dances, meditations and prayers of the Medicine Wheel ceremony set for May 8 will be directed to the Earth with the intention of respect, gratitude, and healing.

Protocol of the Medicine Wheel
As Bennie envisions the Medicine Wheel ceremony, the Eastern Shoshone from the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming, and others from the area who choose to participate, will gather at the center of the wheel, in Grand Teton National Park on May 8. They will combine their songs, chants and drums.

At the same time other tribal nations, groups, and cultures near the other 19 sacred sites around the perimeter of the Medicine Wheel will use their songs, chants and drumming to vibrate and bless those areas.

This vast Medicine Wheel around the Rocky Mountains of North America will be in relation to, and supported by other ceremonies at sacred sites in North America and around the world — wherever people choose to gather together in respectful ceremony. The whole of the Medicine Wheel will come to its highest expression in the hour when High Noon comes to the Four Grandmothers Standing Tall.

Turquoise Mountain — the South Mountain on the Medicine Wheel — has already committed to ceremony under the guidance of Grandfather Martin Martinez and Grandmother Janíce, and many other elders and Medicine People from nearby Pueblos. With Grandfather Secatero, the elders established a Protocol for the Turquoise Mountain Ceremony and made the Protocol available for others to consider.

Many other points on the Medicine Wheel are set, while some are yet to be organized for ceremony on May 8.

Lake Sullivan in the North direction.

Lake Sullivan with tall pine trees in the North direction.

“This is to be a joint effort,” Bennie said. “I call to all my relatives to come forward now, and help to make this Medicine Wheel Ceremony happen in a good way using their own protocols, and joining together in one mind, one heart at High Noon on May 8, and to remember the Four Grandmothers Standing Tall and Yellowstone in the center. We must be in the highest form of sacred thought while in prayer. We must work in a straightforward manner. There should be no disagreements as to who is right and who is wrong, for the mountains and rivers of this Medicine Wheel have already had enough of this.”

“The vision showed that this undertaking would be a joint effort working together in peace. We shall bring back peace of mind to our hearts, to our spirits, and to our homelands. We will release the bondage of negative thoughts and prejudice for the betterment of all living things.”

In a Beautiful Manner
“We need to do this dance,” Bennie said. “We need to fulfill this vision, and I cannot do it alone. It needs to be done by all the people, all colors, all faiths. They will come together from all directions.”

No one need change any religious or spiritual beliefs to participate, Bennie said. There is only one central, non-controversial thought form that participants will be activating with their meditations, songs and dances: respect and gratitude for Creation.

From his many dreams and visions, Bennie has developed a sense of what kind of impact the Medicine Wheel ceremony can have: “When the sacred mountains and waterways have been set back into good order and harmony, Mother Nature will be re-orchestrated in beauty. We will see a significant change in the attitudes of all those living inside and outside the wheel.”

“After the ceremony the Indigenous Nations, groups and cultures that have participated in the manifesting of this vision will work together. This will awaken and re-integrate the ancient teachings of the Indigenous Nations as brothers and sisters.”

“Together we can do this in a beautiful manner. Together, we can bring balance and harmony back to the land. It needs to happen now. So be it.”

In closing, Bennie articulated a point that he, Grandfather Martinez, Grandmother Janíce, and the Spiritual Elders of Mother Earth agree upon: “The human race is depending on us for we are the keepers of the earth and its sacred wisdom. As the Hopi teaching instructs us, ‘We are the ones we have been waiting for.’”

RESOURCES

sodizinFilm about the ceremony – The Sodizin Ceremony: the Reunion of Mother Earth with Her Children

Turquoise Mountain Protocol

Bennie LeBeau’s Home Page
http://www.shrinesandsacredsites.com
Spiritual Elders of Mother Earth
http://www.spiritualelders.org

 

Tools for Becoming a Sage: Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi

©- 1993 by Steven McFadden

“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom.” – Psalms 90:12

Even among the avant-garde who are exploring the spiritual dimensions of aging, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi has been a trailblazer and a catalyst. Eventually many others will follow, he suggests, and the kinds of ideas he has been advocating — which are now seen as provocative — will become part of an established way.

Zalman Schacter-Shalomi

Zalman Schacter-Shalomi

“I’m just helping to get the conversation started,” he says with intimations of both hope and certainty. “It’s just a matter of time.”

A survivor of the Holocaust, Zalman has maintained a foundational confidence in Spirit and progress. “I do believe there is more good in the world than evil,” he says, “but not by much. The task of each person is to help tip the scale. Every life matters immensely, and every well-lived and completed life helps with tikkun olam (healing the world).

Zaida (grandfather) Zalman was 65 years old when he started the Spiritual Eldering Project in 1989 to meet the needs of the current generation of elders. He was well trained for this pioneering task, not just by virtue of his studies, but also via the course of his life.

Born in Poland two days after a lunar eclipse, on August 19, 1924, his family soon moved to Vienna where he spent his childhood. When World War II broke out he was imprisoned for a time by the Vichy-French government. He fled Europe in 1941 to the United States, where he entered the Lubavitch Yeshiva in New York, and was ordained as a Rabbi in 1947. Later he earned a Master of Arts in Psychology of Religion from Boston University, and a Doctor of Letters from Hebrew Union College (1969).

In his long and varied career, Zaida Zalman has been a congregational Rabbi, a Hebrew school principal, a Hillel Foundation director, a resource consultant, and a spiritual guide. For 20 years he worked as professor of religion and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at the University of Manitoba. Later he served as Professor of Jewish Mysticism and the Psychology of Religion at Temple University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. An iconoclast and somewhat of a rebel, he is the founder of P’Nai Or Fellowship, an international Jewish renewal movement.

Every institutionalized religion could benefit from periodic review and renewal, he says; otherwise they become rigid, calcified, unable to respond to the demands of the present. The same need for review and revitalization, he argues, is also true for individuals — especially as one becomes older.

The Purpose of a Long Life

“What is the purpose of a long life, or an extended life span?” Zaida Zalman has wrestled with this question for a long time. Before founding the Spiritual Eldering Project he invited several distinguished elders, including Betty Friedan, author of The Fountain of Age to join him on retreat so they could concentrate on this and related questions. As a consequence, he has a ready answer. “Creator must have had a purpose in mind. After all, the human animal has two legs: a physical leg and a spiritual leg. We have been walking around on one leg, the physical leg, for a long time, so now we are looking to walk on the spiritual leg.

“A very important attribute of growing older is the wisdom a person gathers. Sharing that wisdom can help elders enjoy their remaining years, and much of that sharing can be done on an intergenerational level. What I’m trying to do with my work is bring back the vitamin of grandparents. By creating intergenerational possibilities, both people gain. The old ones gain vitality from the contact; the young ones gain wisdom and perspective on life.

“We must all pass through a gate of transformation to move from aging to sage-ing. This enables us to use our life experience to enrich our elders years, face mortality, repair relationships, develop a regenerative spirit and transmit wisdom to future generations.

“People need a time to harvest their life,” he says. “If you have plowed, sown the seed, and worked a lifetime, you’d be well advised to bring in the harvest. In some way every elder is looking for completion, being pulled toward it, but we rarely talk about it in spiritual terms.

“Most models of elders today are either of people who are in decrepitude, or people who died in the saddle — people who worked until their dying day without harvesting the experience of a lifetime, without taking the enjoyment of solitude — an opportunity to talk with the self — without harvesting the work and experience of their lifetime. You do not need to die in the saddle. You can harvest your life, spend some time on completion. Then, if you’ve done that work, you’ll be in a position to upload the wisdom of your life to the global brain.

“What blocks the path to the future is often an internal thing. People are often freaked out about death, because they can see, if they choose to look, that the Angel of Death always lies ahead at the end of the tunnel. So many people avert their eyes. They don’t wish to confront the reality, the inevitability of death. Who can you talk to about these things? We need to let the conversation about death out of the closet.

“The internal program we are born with says ‘save life and avoid death at all costs.’ Nine times out of ten this program is absolutely correct. The harvest of life cannot come to people unless they set time aside for it. Most people are afraid to look to the future because they see the Angel of Death lurking there. So, instead, they back into the future. When this happens there really is no past, no future. Only a shriveled present. We need to get out of the box, to reclaim the past and the present, and confront the unlived life — by this I mean the great pains, the failures, the disappointments, the betrayals. Most of the time we don’t want to hear the inner voices that say ‘when are you going to…?’ But it’s important to hear those voices. And it’s important to answer those questions.

“When that instinct is frustrated, you become depressed. It’s kind of an involutionary melancholy — the pain of the unlived life. Examining your failures can lead you to real successes. Look at the old files of your life, the failures, and re-examine them. This can give you energy for the present. I believe that part of the reason that we are given the time of eldering is to open the file drawers and go into the past to correct, to heal, and to harvest.

debri_garbage“A lot of the spiritual work people do is just putting whipped cream on top of a bowl of garbage. You’ve got to clean up the garbage first before you add the whipped cream.

“When you begin to think about how you want to harvest your life, you can at first be paralyzed by the choices. Which is the least troublesome path to take? But as an elder the horizon of choices opens up even wider. When are you going to do something for yourself?”

How to Become a Sage

Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi is a man of abundant talent: linguist, storyteller, computer wizard, singer, and penetrating social analyst. As Director of the Spiritual Eldering Project, he has been a pioneer in developing dynamic models to explore the processes of aging and wisdom cultivation. He has studied his own Jewish heritage thoroughly, and also explored spiritual teachings with Sufi-Masters, Buddhist teachers, Native American elders, Catholic monks, Tibet’s Dalai Lama, and humanistic and transpersonal psychologists.

The Rabbi travels nationally and internationally, to work with elders, and with people who work with elders. He has earned wide respect as an advocate for new ways of understanding what it means to grow old, and for synthesizing a body of teachings that is both ancient and modern. As a consequence of his broad experience and studies, in his public classes and seminars, he ranges far and wide, quoting from scholars and mystics the world over.

n3hzesC“What happens when you grow old and no longer wish to compete with younger people? Who do you look toward for models? Someone who is old, or someone who is an elder? And what is the difference? How do you become a sage? It’s not necessarily the result of book learning.

“Elders right now are often seen as a drain. They are a problem. They are going to use up scarce resources, like Social Security and Medicare. But there are other possibilities. When Social Security was first designed they thought people had a life span of 67 or 69 years. But now the reality is an expanded life span. We need also to expand our consciousness and awareness too, or it will lead to depression.

“When the mind is kept open, then the older you get the more settled and clarified you become. With the extended life span it is also possible to extend awareness. But we have to work on it. We don’t have a great number of models. The term we have for ourselves is ‘Homo Sapiens,’ the wise people? But how does Homo Sapiens behave? We have no models and no code for this. The model does not exist. We need to create models, a new template — to reformat the disk of life.”

“No one else can ‘elder’ you. It’s an intransitive verb. You must do it yourself. So what are the tools for becoming a sage? Contemplative practices: recollection, reflection, meditation, and envisioning — see your life as a landscape, a panorama. Have conversations with your own soul. Get to a witness place, and witness your own life. And as you witness, learn to forgive, yourself and others, otherwise you are robbed of energy. You are handcuffed to the person you have not forgiven and you drag them everywhere with you.

“We have to blaze a trail for eldering. There is a small window of opportunity right now. Are elders just ready for the junk heap? Or do they have something to contribute?”

Some Tools of Eldering

From time to time through his life Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi has found himself sitting in the bathtub gazing into a hand-held mirror to see who he is and who he is becoming. In theological circles such a practice might well be called ‘discursive meditation,’ but he says he is just talking things over with himself.

“You have to meet yourself at some point. That’s really important. I’ve learned that. It’s different from the kind of meditation where you still the mind, which is also important. It’s taking the time to have a deliberate inner dialogue, to ruminate, to ‘chew the cud’ of your life.

“The soul teaches us throughout life, but the lessons are fleeting, ephemeral. That’s why it’s important to take time and look at the panorama of your life, to see the extension and the scope of it — the development of your life’s course. What have you distilled from life? What will become of your experience. When you record them in a journal, you have a way to reconnect.”

“You can become a mentor, and pass on your knowledge to a younger person. I don’t mean passing on information, but something else. Mentoring is sharing wisdom, healthy interchange. When this happens it rouses vitality in an older person, and brings a great joy. When you decide that you want to do this, you will attract people. When the flower is ready, the bee appears. You can also make a tape recording, tell your life story and what you have learned. Make copies and give them to your relatives. Pass on your heritage.

“Or, anther way to do it is to write an ethical will: a written, or recorded testament of your values and the learnings of your life. Mine your memories. Describe what you have learned from life, the epitome of your experience and wisdom. Write it first for yourself, but you can also give it to your children. Don’t just reap the harvest of a long life, but also share the harvest. At holidays, thanksgiving, Christmas, whatever, reconstruct the past to make it accessible to the present. People need the affect, the emotion, the impressions. If you are not an elder, then ask the elders to tell their stories.”

A Lifetime is Not Infinite

“People want to deny their mortality, they don’t want to come to terms with their mortality. There is a great delusion that ‘I will live forever.’ Most people deny their mortality. They don’t want to look down to the end of the road. In this, though, there are consequences for a person’s life and for the society.

“Life has to be harvested in some way, to be completed. People who deny their mortality get caught by it nevertheless, but they live unaware of it the last part of their lives. The Hindus called it Avidya, not wanting to know, closing down of consciousness.

“If someone in the October, November, or December of their life span closes down their consciousness, that means that towards the end of their life they have been sleeping through it. So all the opportunities that are there, to harvest your lifetime, to reconstellate one’s past or be able to see it now with a different perspective, to upload the wisdom the of a lifetime, to reconcile with the people whom one needs to be reconciled with, to clean up karmic pollution — all these things do not get done when a person denies their mortality.

“People pretend a great deal that mortality isn’t there. It’s all hidden away; its all made pretty. The mortician will do cosmetics on people and they don’t look like they looked when they died. They make it all like it’s not the way that it’s happening, so the impact isn’t there. The impact of knowing that one is coming to the end of the course of one’s life, that’s what gives a sense of the preciousness of time. I think that when people get older and they are aware of their mortality, then time is very precious. Many wish to continue to deny death, or to play in their later years. They do not want to develop wisdom. Sometimes it’s just not possible to wake someone up.

“Coming to terms with your mortality means to make peace that physical death will happen. I don’t want at this point to hold out for people the carrot of the afterlife as a way of having a life-jacket against the anxiety that comes from having to come to terms with mortality. I don’t want to talk about afterlife and all the things that I believe that psychic research and near-death experiences and all these other things are beginning to verify. I want to leave that for after people have come to grips with the terror about dying. Otherwise they won’t encounter what they need to encounter. That’s the reason why I want to hold off on putting it in. When I use the word death, I mean just physical death.

“People who don’t want to look ahead as they grow older back into the future, rather than walking into it face forward. Only by making peace with the inevitability of mortality can we make peace with ourselves.”

What is Wisdom?

Zaida Zalman is a compelling speaker: focused, coherent, aware of the shifting mood of the audience, and also observant of the passage of time. Warm and expansive, he supports the spoken word with gentle gestures of arm and hand, often coaxing differences of opinion and debate.

A vigorous singer, he can be prompted to launch his rumbling but melodious voice at the turn of a phrase that puts him in mind of a favorite tune.

Since it’s rarely a topic of social conversation, most people are brought up short when they are asked about wisdom. This is treacherous territory, and without care a respondent runs the risk of revealing puzzlement or ignorance rather than insight. It needs to be approached carefully. Zaida Zalman has been hanging out with the question for a lifetime, but still he eases into the subject with an anecdote.

“I heard this story from an old-timer in California. It was so good that I keep repeating it. I wish I could remember his name and give him credit for it.

wisSo the story is: a person comes to the wise man and says, ‘how do you get wisdom.’ He says, ‘wisdom comes from good judgment.’ And how do you have good judgment? So the wise one says, ‘from experience.’ And where do you get experience? ‘From bad judgment.’

“So, I like that progression: from bad judgment to experience to good judgment to wisdom. So what you see is, wisdom is a generalization of everything one has learned from life, it’s a distillate of that. If you say, ‘hey, Zalman, make with some wisdom, you know.’ Then I’m supposed to do applied wisdom, wisdom in order to get me XYZ, whatever the thing is that I want to get; then that which may pretend to be wisdom becomes very manipulative, street wise. It’s clever, but not wise.

“There is a whole tradition of wisdom that sees wisdom as a woman. That comes from the Greek Sophia. The Hebrew word for wisdom is also a feminine word. These words have a sense of, like Pallas Athena jumping out of Zeus’ head. Wisdom comes with God, prior to the world. So, if I were to say, ‘wisdom is that which jumps out of the head of the Ancient of Days,’ that would be a way of expressing it.

“I think a lot now about feminism. I have a feeling that in the next 50 years there is going to be a switch, where more and more of the people who have life experience, who have learned something, are going to be true spiritual elders, and that’s going to have its impact on people. Women after menopause will be in positions of being counselors, and that will bring social equality to wisdom.

“At this point, we don’t see it yet. If somebody were to go to Washington and say, “in the cabinet, could we have a wisdom seeker? Could we have some wise elder just be there and speak of wisdom whenever something comes up that needs that kind of consideration? That’s what the Senate was supposed to be able to do in the first place, to be able to take life’s wisdom and apply it to government, to advise and consent.

The Real World

Stories are stock-in-trade for Zaida Zalman. He has hundreds at the ready. As with many spiritual teachers throughout the ages, he has come to realize that insight is often conveyed — and retained — far more effectively through a parable. His deep olive-colored eyes twinkle when he sees an opportunity to launch into one, and he has the capacity to tell them at majestic length and with effusive detail, or to compress them to an essential outline to fit a small window of opportunity — when the attention span of listeners appears to be strained.

“There was a man by the name of Rabbi Ramour Yenischlayzal and his son Rabitizikel,” he begins.

hh“Rabitizikel is a teenager, and the father is the venerable head of a Hassidic group. Suddenly there appears before them a person who says, ‘Rabbi, I need some help, I’m about to get married and I need some money badly.’ The Rabbi looks at him and says, ‘don’t you know you’re dead, you’ve died already.’ The man says, ‘what are you talking about? They are waiting for me. I need the money, please help me.’ The Rabbi lifts up the man’s coat and shows him that underneath his coat he has shrouds, the shrouds with which he was buried. Suddenly, it dawns on the man what has really happened and he disappears.

“The Rabbi’s son is upset by this and says, ‘Poppa, what was that?’ And the father says to him, ‘there are some souls that live in the world of confusion. This one couldn’t reconcile himself yet with being dead so he’s inventing a whole life story so that he can continue to deny that he is dead. By showing him these things I brought him up short, and he had to pay attention. He disappeared because he no longer had to be in the world of confusion where he appears as if he were living on this plane.’

“The son thinks for a moment, and then asks, ‘Poppa, for him he was pretty real for himself. How do we know that we aren’t in the world of confusion? We appear pretty real to ourselves?’ And the father says, ‘my dear child, the world in which you ask the question is the real world.’

” That story that is similar to the old Chinese story from the sage Lao Tzu about the emperor who dreams that he is a butterfly, and then asks himself, ‘am I a butterfly dreaming that I am an emperor, or am I an emperor dreaming that I am a butterfly?’

“The question is not resolved for the emperor, which one is who. But for the Rabbi and his son the question becomes resolved by saying, the place where you question, where you are asking ‘is this for real?’ that’s the real world. Because in the world of your illusions you don’t ask the question. You don’t question your illusions.”

The Pearl Beyond Price

Zaida Zalman’s is fond of hats, and wears them indoors and out — berets, fur caps, yarmulkes, whatever. His head is usually covered, whether cooking, taking his daily two-mile walk, or praying. When he considers a question, his eyes roll heavenward for an instant only.

If he had just one opportunity, a single thing he could say to a group of young people, what story would he tell? “That’s a good one,” he says. “I’d like to think about that one a little while,” he adds, but then he pauses not at all.

“The story that comes to mind now, first, is about the Pearl Beyond Price.” His eyes brighten. He fixes his gaze upon the listeners and begins.

“There was a king and a queen and they had a son who was very bright and good, and they wanted him to be king when his time came to be king, but he needed to do something really heroic first.

ppearl“There was a pearl beyond any price and he had to go find that pearl. The pearl was in Egypt. It was guarded by a dragon, a very fierce dragon. The king called his son and told him that he must do this, and don’t you want to some day assume the role of being a person of majesty? The son said ‘yes, I want to do it.’ The whole dream, the whole notion excited him a great deal — yes, he wants to do the heroic thing.

“The father says, ‘go and get the pearl but you’ve got to be very careful. You are going to come to that place and you’ll start eating their food and wearing their clothes and before long you will forget what your mission is and that is not going to be so good.’ The son says, ‘no, I won’t forget, I won’t forget.’

“So he went down to Egypt and went around with his royal robes and pretty soon people snatched them all away from him, and he got involved and in order not to attract attention and get into trouble, he started to wear what everybody else was wearing, and eat what everybody else was eating, and pretty soon he forgot that he was on a mission from his father, the king, to bring the pearl beyond any price.

“Some time went by, and there was a friend of the king who had compassion for the son. So he said, ‘I’m going to go down. I’ll bring some food from the palace and I’ll bring him a change of clothes, which on the outside are going to look like the clothes that everybody else is wearing, but on the inside are going to be the real royal robes.’ He comes and at first the son doesn’t want to hear of it, but then after a while he begins to share with him.

“They walk together, and the friend gives him some of the food and the son begins to remember. After a while, he just breaks down and feels ‘I’ve lost it, I’ve muffed it.’ And the friend says, ‘no you haven’t, there still is time — this is why I came to help.’ Together the two of them went, and they outwitted the dragon and took the pearl beyond any price. When he came home the father rejoiced over him and that was how he made him finally king.

“Now, I would tell kids, ‘imagine for a moment that this is your story: how would you interpret that story for yourself?’ And then I’d just leave it at that.

“That story is like a worm that keeps on agitating and agitating until the person will finally get what’s its all about — that we come from another place, from a place beyond. We are here. We have to do a job. Then we forget that we have to do a job. Then comes a good friend who still remembers what it’s all about, and tells you and feeds you the decent food. After a while you get back on the job ask the big question ‘where’s the pearl and how do I deal with the dragon?’ And then it happens.

“This story is a very rich story because it talks about the descent of the soul and its purpose in life, and I think that’s a good story to tell. There may be some others, too, but that is the one that comes first.

“I would tell elders the same story, only I would talk to them more about the pearl. How did the pearl get formed? From the irritation that the oyster had — all the pains that you went through in life and all the troubles you’ve had. When you say, ‘nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen,’ those troubles made that pearl happen. What a pity it would be if you only had the troubles and you didn’t find the pearl.”

What Have You Learned?

elder.bookThe father of nine children, and a grandfather 21 times over, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi is prolific in other ways as well. He is the author of Fragments of a Future Scroll; The First Step; and Sparks of Light. He has also written books on Jewish renewal, and most recently a book entitled The Spiritual Elder: How to Enjoy the Harvest of a Lifetime. In this book, as in his public talks, he is firm on the opportunities and responsibilities of older citizens. He says elders must learn to use their life experience to enrich their later years, to face their mortality, and to serve as models for younger people.

“Every so often we need to change the pickle juice of the mind. If you hang onto disappointments and resentments, and stew in them, then every thought and feeling you have is going to have some of that flavor. It’s nobody else’s responsibility to do anything about that, though you can certainly ask for help. But, ultimately, you’ve got to change your own pickle juice.

“One thing I’ve learned is that learning is inevitable. If you are open to life you always keep on learning, and good learning is like white-water rafting. Most people think that events happen to them beyond their control, like they’re drifting down the river and they’ll bump against a rock, and they will be flooded and be overturned, and all the calamities that happen. That is also learning but that is not participating in the process of learning.

“If you participate in the process of learning, you get a chance to look a little bit ahead to read the water. Then you paddle very strongly in the direction where it is going to be better for you to be. So if you feel a hunger for a particular kind of learning, you can really satisfy that hunger. Usually, we don’t know why we have that hunger until later on when we get there we see that this hunger was a perfect preparation.

“I’d like to go back to a story in The Bible. Moses comes to Pharaoh and Pharaoh says to him, ‘I’m not going to let you guys go.’ But then they get to dickering back and forth about what they can take along if he goes into the desert and Moses says, we have to take everything. Pharaoh says, why? Moses says, because we do not know how we are to serve the Lord our God until we get there.

“That has been a very important part of my learning: to recognize that the goals I set for myself are the carrots I hold out for myself, but they are not necessarily what I am going to achieve. Often the things that I set out to myself as goals that I want to have are bound to fail. From the fallout of my failures I am going to have my successes. So if life serves you lemons, made lemonade of that. That is the notion of being able to say of the difficulties of a lifetime, ‘I can learn from them, to extract from them the things that are the successes, but I don’t know what the successes are, only in retrospect.’ That is what is so amazing about that, because, how do I know what I have to prepare myself for when I haven’t seen the future yet?

“Nobody can see around the corner of time. We understand trends, but trends are not around the corner of time. If I see someone tacking with a sailboat, they seem to be going in a direction that never looks like the direction where they really want to go, but you have to go that way because that is how the wind and the current is, you can’t move otherwise. I have a feeling that we know the trend to which we are going, but we don’t know beyond the trend. Because every once in a while something comes up and we have to steer in one direction, then the other direction. We always see a different goal in front of us than the real goal which is in the other direction to which we are being moved. So, the sense that there is a destiny which I don’t know yet but with which I can cooperate is something that I have found out.”


Coming to Peace

“If you ask me how I’ve come to this point, come to peace in my life, and I claim I that know, then I am a liar. I really don’t know… I can’t…if what I said before makes real sense, then I couldn’t have steered in this direction by myself. I find this out afterwards.

“So the peace that comes from saying that my destiny in the hand of G*d, that’s one form of saying it. Another way of saying it is like it is as it is put in the Desiderata: ‘No doubt the universe is unfolding as it should…’ In either case, it talks about the same process of a certain kind of rightness. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t tragedy. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t pain. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t real upset and breakdown, and shattering, and all that kind of stuff. Yet, at the same time there is a serenity that comes from saying something, like the prayer that they talk about in the 12-step programs, ‘G*d give me the wisdom to know the difference between what I can change and what I can’t change, and accept what I cannot change.’

“I cook soups very well, but if you ask me, ‘what are the ingredients,’ I give up. Because I see what’s in the refrigerator, and I start putting it together. And somehow a little of this and a little of that and it comes all together. I don’t feel that it is planned that way. Now I know that when I have to talk to some people, I have to talk to them about planning, about preparing, about nose-to-the-grindstone, shoulder-to-the-wheel, all this kind of attitude. But in reflection, it doesn’t look to me like that is really the way that it goes.”


What the Rabbi Sees Ahead

For many people age has the effect of freeing them from heavy demands and petty ambitions. This can liberate time and energy for considering the long view, and for taking steps to ensure that the future has the potential to be better for the generations coming behind them.

Rear_ViewMirror_“I start looking ahead,” Zaida Zalman says, “and suddenly I find I am looking through the rearview mirror. When you ask, ‘what would the future look like,’ I then go into a nostalgic past, a romanticized past, and then go into a tribal thing, and think for a moment, it would look like that. But it’s not going to look like that.

“We are on the verge of breakthroughs that are so immense that we can hardly imagine them. But it pays to imagine them, and it pays to spend time to figure that one out. There is going to be a communication super-highway. We’re going to all go with fiber optics.

“The speed with which calculations are being made and things are being sent, and communications are happening is increasing. Money has become less and less something that has to do with paper or with coins and there’s more and more blips, electronic blips. So the whole thing, when the planet is trying to organize itself again so that it’s one world, one planet. We can’t go back to a pre-planetary understanding, because once the creatures of Earth have been seen from outer space, there’s such a shift that has happened that it can’t be reversed. So, with that we have to be thinking globally.

“If you start thinking globally then you start saying, of course complexities are going to increase, and what’s going to happen when complexities increase? There’s bound to be breakdown of the current structures. And, unless there is a breakdown of the current structures — which is like the good-judgment, bad-judgment, good-judgment experience, you know, that chain — we can’t put in new structures that will be able to handle all the complexity.

“The rate of change is accelerating at a more than geometric scale. What do you call that? Logarithmic? It’s going to change according to a logarithmic scale, so that the amount of change that’s going to occur between now, let’s say, and the year 2025, I can’t even imagine what that’s going to be like. But, I can also say that from where I am in my understanding of life right now, I know that an essential ingredient of that is going to be elder power, or elder mind — not elder power, that’s not the right word — elder mind is going to be very important.

“We are learning the heavy ecological lessons that result from thinking in short segments of time. The quarterly report has to be replaced by ‘Seventh Generation’ thinking (from the Iroquois Great Law of Peace: “In our every deliberation and action, we will consider the welfare of the seventh generation of children to come.”)

For that to happen, we have to deploy people with longer life span, with greater consciousness, and also to enter into the world, not to leave it behind — not to become anachronisms and say, ‘well, you know, I went to graduate school in the 1950s and so I’m arrested there [in my development].’ But rather to able to say, ‘No. I’m right now on the edge of my learning, and I have a notion of the direction, the trend, of where it’s going to go, and so what do I have to put into place so that the world will be ready to be more in balance?’ That’s the kind of preparation that you can do in order to make an elder mind.”

Elders Have to Hold the Field

“At this point we are in a very primitive place where peace is concerned, peace and justice. We are, in destruction, very sophisticated. So we can now have a Star Wars, and you can just imagine the billions of money and the kind of minds that go in to doing that. It’s amazing. At the same time, when you start figuring that we don’t know how to deal with a David Koresh without violence, that shows how primitive we are, how psychologically primitive, sociologically primitive, we are.

“It will take elders to sit with the younger generation, the people who are just opening up, and to talk with each other. I see that the complexity of things is going to increase. I see that the current matrix cannot hold the complexity, the current matrix will have to shatter, and when it shatters there will be a great panic.

“In order not to have the panic, elders will have to hold the field. At that point, it is going to be really important to have those kinds of intergenerational conversations that will bring the same amount of sophistication that we have now in war, and in terrorism, and in violence, into peace and goodness, healthy social interaction. So, that’s what I see as a task.”

– End –


Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, author of The Spiritual Elder: How to Enjoy the Harvest of a Lifetime, holds the World Wisdom Chair at the Naropa Institute, an accredited, nonsectarian private institution of higher education that offers contemplative education combining Eastern and Western educational traditions, in Boulder, Colorado.

For more information:  The Sage-ing Guild

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