Be a Good Ancestor Now

I’ve been doing my own genealogy for years, and recently I have begun to help others search for their ancestors. I have literally seen the lines, uninterrupted, of parents and children, and parents and children, stretching out and down from the past into our waking present. I cannot see that without also being able to envision my parents’ names at the top of that tree, with the unknown generations who will stretch out past us. But what world are we leaving to those who will come after?

I can no longer think of the future without wondering which generation of my family’s children will run out of fresh water. Do I care? Should you care? After all, I won’t be here. Yes. Yes I should. Yes you should. Anything else is selfish and human selfishness is killing the planet.

Human selfishness is killing the planet. Which means it’s also killing us. We need to cultivate the mindfulness that the planet we walk on is part of us. Our blood, bone, and tissue evolved from the life that crept out of the oceans. We carry the earth within us. We are not separate from it.

The way Western culture lives is not sustainable. Most of the people I know work hard and get little in return for it. I know they often decide not to care, because they don’t think they can make a difference, and if no one else is sacrificing, why should they?

Big Corporation wants us to think that. They want us to feel like we can’t make change. That’s part of the problem. We all need to make hard choices or the places we love, that feed us, will keep disappearing.

Make choices like your decisions will decide the fate of the next seven generations of your descendants. Because they will. This week I am sharing some photos of my favorite places in nature, places I hope those who come after me will be able to experience for themselves. Included among the photos are quotes on sustainability

The supreme reality of our time is ...the vulnerability of our planet.

- John F. Kennedy

One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?"

- Rachel Carson

Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

- Henry David Thoreau

We are living on this planet as if we had another one to go to.

- Terri Swearingen

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something.

- Carl Sagan

One planet, one experiment.

- Edward O. Wilson

There is a great need for the introduction of new values in our society, where bigger is not necessarily better, where slower can be faster, and where less can be more.

- Gaylord Nelson

Reducing our levels of consumption will not be a sacrifice but a bonus if we simply redefine the meaning of the word 'success.'

- David Wann

Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.

- Cree Indian Proverb

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

- Albert Einstein 

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

- Native American Proverb

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.  

- John Muir

I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.  

- Edward Everett Hale

The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.  

- Archibald MacLeish

Again and again

Some people in the crowd wake up.

They have no ground in the crowd

And they emerge according to broader laws.

They carry strange customs with them,

And demand room for bold gestures.

The future speaks ruthlessly through them.  

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Quotes Contributed to:

John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) was the 35^th President of the United States of America. Rachel Carson (1907-1964) was an American marine biologist. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. Terri Swearingen, a nurse from Ohio, was the 1997 Goldman Prize winner. Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, and author. Edward O. Wilson (b.1929) is an American biologist, researcher, theorist, naturalist, and author. Gaylord Nelson (1916-2005) was an American Democratic Senator and Governor from Wisconsin. David Wann is an author/speaker of sustainability. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) was an American writer. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. John Muir (1838-1914) was a Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher. Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909) was an American author, historian and Unitarian minister. Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was an Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist.

Imminent Death

I wasn’t sure what to call this article. That sounded so urgent, but it’s what I want to talk about. I want to talk about those times in your life when death knocks. When you know to expect it… soon, and you have a little push time until it arrives. Where “soon” is the closest you can get to any certainty.

I’m packing for an annual retreat in the mountains, away from technology, away from traffic, and away from my senile, dying 20 year-old cat. It’s not that a vet has told us she’s dying. She’s 20 years old. That’s like, 96 in human years. She’s looking tired and worn. She sleeps twenty hours a day and walks stiffly through the house. We don’t know when, but we know it’s coming, likely sooner, rather than later.

I have a ritual now, before I leave overnight to go anywhere. I snuggle my cat, now affectionately called Grams, in a blanket and I cradle her in my lap. I listen to the familiar heavy-motor purr, the only thing that hasn’t faded. From just one touch of my finger she could run for hours, without breaking. I often woke in the night, distressed that something was different- only to discover that my kitty sound-machine had finally stopped purring.

And in my ritual, I listen to her purr. I tell her how much I love her. I tell her how lucky we were that she picked us in that winter storm in Fredonia. I tell her how happy she has made us. I listen as her purr turns to chirp as she headbutts my elbow crook. I listen to her chirp turn to chirrup turn to coo as she goes limp with bliss in my lap.

I use the special singsong voice she loves most. And then I sing to her, “Songbird” by Fleetwood Mac. My cat trills a special note she only uses when I sing. And I sit with my beloved friend, who has been in my life for seventeen years. The things she has seen no one else knows. The ways we have changed, only she has witnessed.

I know this. I hold her. I feel sorrow for what is coming. And I feed that sorrow my love. In that last moment, whether I am with her or whether I am away on retreat somewhere, I know I will not have regret, because I told her how I felt and I showed her what she meant. She will know how much I loved her, she will feel how grateful I was for her, and she will remember the vibrations of my chest on her muscles as I sang sweet words to her:

“For you, there will be no crying.

For you, the sun will be shining.

And I feel that when I’m with you, it’s all right.

I know it’s all right…”

I could talk about my uncle, the first of my father’s siblings to be gravely ill. I could talk about his fight that he’s winning and losing. I could say that I am afraid I won’t see him again, and I know that’s why we had the conversation we had at Christmas. Because he might not see me again, and he didn’t want to leave things unsaid.

In that moment, it broke my heart. I wanted to push him away. I didn’t want him to say the words because to me words are magic. But this is my work. This is what I do. So I stood and I listened, overwhelmed with gratitude to be witness to his life, to stories he’d never told anyone else. To be gifted a shared intimacy that will last longer than this flesh.

I would talk about it more but I am sensitive to those loved ones who may not want to hear the words, he is dying. He is, right now. But he could get better. But right now, he’s not. But I get it. Words are magic. To act as if he is dying, to acknowledge it so that loved ones can prepare for its arrival, is as if to invite it in sooner. As if you are lighting a beacon. As if saying you acknowledge you will die, sooner than later, is the same thing as saying “I’m ready.”

But what walled city saw the fleet of ships arriving with weapons drawn and said, “I’m ready to fall?”

Are we ever ready? I snuggle my cat close to me. I tell her it’s all right. It’s all right if she hangs out with her moments of dementia for more years. It’s all right if I wake up tomorrow and she’s gone. It’s all right if she passes while we’re away. As long as she knows we love her and what an important part of our family she is, will always be.

I think of my uncle, the funny one, and I feel bad saying he’s sick. As if somehow I am unweaving any healing work he is undergoing to get better. I pray to my Grandpa Mark and Grandma Ruth and ask them to watch over my uncle every morning, to give him as much life as he has in him. I ask them to watch over their other children as they deal with their varying levels of grief over the idea that, eventually, one of them will be the first to die.

I pray to my cats that have crossed over, Luna and Bella, and ask them to watch over Zami, and to welcome her across when she is ready to take that journey.

May we live each day with our eyes open.

May we know the light and the darkness,

and may we fear neither.

May we learn to feed the shadow with light.

May we know joy and sadness.

May we feed our sorrow with love.

May we live without regret.

May those we love know our hearts.

May our last moments be good moments.

May our last words be words of love.

Malidoma Patrice Somé, Supernatural is Natural

“Earth is where we belong. She is our home. She gives us sustenance unconditionally and makes it possible for us to feel connected. Earth is where we go to and where we come from. The nourishment and support of the Earth Mother grants us the feeling of belonging that allows us to expand and grow because we feel strong.”

Western civilization superimposes us onto the natural world, as if we are above it, and it is below us. As if it is nothing more than a storage shed for resources at our disposal, and not a living, breathing world we are a part of. We see this viewpoint in the entitled way we dam rivers and when we clear-cut forest dwellers of their habitat, of their trees. We even blow holes in hills and mountainsides to make a way for ourselves and we call it progress.

Along the way, we stopped living with the earth and began to try to tame it to suit our needs and comforts. It is saddening. Yet there are people who walk with feet in both worlds, that of our constructed culture and that of the world we wandered far from as generations of nomads settled into cities. And these people are using their gifts to serve as guides, and awaken our perception to the larger truth.

“Human beings are most of the time unaware of the extent and intimacy of their connection with nature, especially the world of plants and animals. We act as if we are the proud and dominant other and thus can and should manifest our superiority in ways that are rather careless and devastating to nature. Indeed, trees live in harmony, and we create dissonance. Yet we want to live in a world where everyone and everything is harmoniously linked to everyone and everything.”

Malidoma Patrice Somé is one of these remarkable people, straddling both worlds and successfully acting as a mediator and translator between them. He was born to the Dagara people of Burkina Faso in West Africa. Malidoma was kidnapped from his village at the age of four by a Jesuit Missionary who had befriended his father. He was placed in a boarding school, on path to become a priest, to be used as a tool to convert the African people to the white man’s God.

When he was twenty he managed to run away and walked the entire distance back to his village, where he found himself home once more, and yet a stranger among strangers. He had been gone for fifteen years and could not even recall enough of the Dagara language to communicate with his mother and sister.

His Western world upbringing left him inadequately prepared for his return. He and his people did not understand each other. Well past the age of manhood in his village, Malidoma was required to undergo a month-long rite of passage before he could fully become a member of his community.

He had to first unlearn what he had learned.

His trials are compellingly written in his book Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman. In its pages he describes one of his first breakthroughs, where he was bidden to sit and watch a tree. He was aware of his own head processing through wondering what the purpose was, of wondering what the correct thing to do was. There had to be more to it than staring at a tree, right? Then he became angry and felt like he was being made to go through a public humiliation, as he was sat in the center of the village. Passed that anger, he broke open and began to speak to the tree. It became a sort of confessional where he poured his feelings of frustration out and apologized to the tree.

What he experienced next was a transformation of the tree into what he calls the green lady- a green human form spirit who felt like love and home. He ran sobbing to the spirit and she held him in her arms. When he came out of the moment and was hugging the tree he immediately tried to blame the vision on the heat and lack of food- which is the Western way of thought- except that the elders of his tribe who were watching had seen the same green lady in the moment he did. How could he explain that?  

“My experience with the green lady raises an important issue, namely, the true identity of the elements of nature. What if they are not inanimate objects, as people in the West have been taught to believe, but rather living presences? How would we need to change if we granted to a tree the kind of life that we usually reserve for so-called intelligent beings? If you peek long enough into the natural world - the trees, the hills, the rivers, and all natural things - you start to realize that their spirit is much bigger than what can be seen, that the visible part of nature is only a small portion of what nature is.”

            What we would call the supernatural, his people call the natural world. They have no word for supernatural. The closest word they have is Yielbongura, “the thing that knowledge can’t eat.” Western thought may have decided that it is separate but that doesn’t make it a truth for the larger world.

In fact, that way of thinking will only serve to separate us more from that which we all want most- to rediscover the sensation of wholeness. Spirit is real. What is spiritual can be explained by science, but not explained away. After all, you can put blinders on a horse so that he cannot see the distractions around him, but the distractions around him are still occurring. He does not see, yet they happen.

That’s true of the fullness of the world around us. Either we are open to it or we are closed to it, but it does not stop existing if we do not believe in it. If we choose to, we can do work to open ourselves up to the spirit world, the larger world, the greater web around us. We can see and hear with more senses than we use. People who have had these experiences, as Malidoma had, often decide in the aftermath that they must have hallucinated. So much of the spirit world is ephemeral that it takes a certain amount of faith and openness to make the connection.

"You can acquire what is usually seen as magical. When in fact the more you dwell in this kind of world, the less you see it as magical because it is the familiar, it is the kind of thing that every human being is entitled to and it is the kind of thing that is at the core of human nature, the search, the intense search for the magical." 

            I can’t recommend Somé’s writings enough. He has two other books The Healing Wisdom of Africa, which chronicles his life after the awakening, and Ritual: Power, Healing and Community. The story of his life’s journey and the purpose his Ancestors gifted him with is laced and woven with a breathtaking, wondrous, and seemingly simplistic awareness of the larger world that stretches beyond our everyday perception. Malidoma’s words act as a gateway, a doorway that the reader can grasp, an opening they can step through.

“Indigenous people see the physical world as a reflection of a more complex, subtler, and more lasting yet invisible entity called energy. It is as if we are the shadows of a vibrant and endlessly resourceful intelligence dynamically involved in a process of continuous self-creation. Nothing happens here that did not begin in that unseen world. If something in the physical world is experiencing instability, it is because its energetic correspondent has been experiencing instability. The indigenous understanding is that the material and physical problems that a person encounters are important only because they are an energetic message sent to the visible world. ... Ritual is the principal tool used to approach that unseen world in a way that will rearrange the structure of the physical world and bring about material transformation.”

            [This article was originally published July 20, 2011.]

Perspective, or If the World Were 100 People

In 1994, the world population was at 5,606,000,000 people. In 2004, it rose to 6,387,000,000 people. It’s 2014 and the world population is now 7,141,000,000. It’s only going to keep rising. It’s a scary thought, knowing our resources are finite. But that’s another post for another time. This post is about perspective.

We’re at a cultural crossroads and we have two choices. Either we decide that there are too many people in the world and we care only about ourselves and we could give a crap about our neighbors. On that path we take what we need, whether or not we’re taking from someone else. Or we understand that there are so many people in the world, we are not and cannot be more important than another. On that path we understand that we should be working towards making sure what we have is shared as equally as possible.

We should be taking care of each other. It’s hard to do when money is the bottom line and big business seems to have more legal protections than people do. How can we fight that? What is required is perspective on a smaller scale. It’s really hard to imagine 7.1 billion people, and harder still to care about that many people when, in our lives, we juggle maintaining relationships with and caring for less than a hundred people.

But what if the world was only 100 people? There is a list of statistics that has been going around since 1990, and is often updated. Unsurprisingly, the numbers in it change constantly. For instance, in 1990 only 1 out of 100 people had a college education. In fourteen years, that number has risen to 7. I found this to be an interesting exercise in where I fall in the larger, yet more simplified, statistical world.

Disclaimer: The actual statistics may vary slightly from what I have. I tried to find the most current numbers for each category but they are not all from the same year. For my purposes, this post is about creating perspective, not accuracy.

If the world were a village of 100 people…

• There are 50 women and 50 men.
• There are 66 adults aged 15-64, 26 children 14 and under, and 8 adults 65 and older.
• Only 30 are white; 70 are not.
• 89 people are heterosexual; 11 are homosexual.
• The continental breakdown is: 60 people live in Asia, 15 in Africa, 11 in Europe, 9 in South America and the Caribbean, and 5 in North America.
• 12 people speak Chinese, 5 Spanish, 5 English, 3 Arabic, 3 Hindi, 3 Bengali, 3 Portuguese, 2 Russian, 2 Japanese. 62 people, more than half of our village, speak other languages than these.
• 33 people are Christian, 22 are Muslim, 14 are Hindu, 7 Buddhism; 5 people find their spirituality in nature; 7 people practice other religions and 12 more do not align themselves with a religion.
• 48 people can’t speak or act on their faith because of fear of harassment, imprisonment, torture, or death; 52 people can.
• 77 people have shelter from the elements; 23 do not.
• 51 people live in urban areas; 49 people live in rural ones.
• 63 people are adequately nourished, or better; 21 people are overweight, 15 people are undernourished and 1 person is dying of starvation.
• 87 people have access to safe drinking water; 13 do not.
• 68 people breathe clean air; 32 people do not.
• 48 people live on less than $2 US dollars a day.
• 12 of our 26 children live in poverty.
• 30 people are unemployed.
• 9 people are disabled.
• 78 people have electricity; 22 do not.
• 65 people have improved sanitation conditions; 19 people have unimproved toilets (which basically means they at least have a poo pit somewhere away from the room they live in); 16 people do not have toilets.
• 83 people can read and write; 17 cannot.
• 7 people have a college degree; (93 people do not, less 26 children means…) 67 adults without one.
• 22 people share or own a computer while 78 people do not have access to their own computer.
• Only 30 people are active internet users.
• 75 out of 100 people are cell phone users.
• 40 people have no shoes.
• Less than 1% of people have HIV/AIDS.
• 6 people own 59% of the wealth.

Out of 100 people:

I am one of the 50 women in the village and one of the 30 white people. I am one of the 66 adults under the age of sixty-five. I am one of 11 queer folk. I am one of the 5 people from North America and one of the 5 people, out of 100, who speak English. I am one of 5 people who find my spirituality in nature, and am one of 52 people who can practice my faith freely.

I am one of 77 people who have shelter I rent and one of 78 people with electricity. I am one of 51 people living in an urban area, though it blends its edges with the rural farms that feed us. I am one of 21 overweight people and technically one of the 48 people living on less than $2 a day. I am one of the 30 unemployed. I am one of 87 people with access to safe drinking water, one of 68 people breathing clean air, and one of 65 with a flush toilet in my bathroom.

I am one of the 83 people who can read and write and one of 7 people who got a college degree. I am one of 22 people with a computer and one of the 30 active internet users. I am one of the 60 people who owns shoes (I have four pairs), and, I am one of the 25 people who do not own a cell phone.

I am unique. I am one of a kind, among many who are one of a kind. I am special, but not more than another. May we all find our way to peace, tolerance, and coexistence.

If you are interested in learning more about the sources for the statistics, go here.