Sacred Fire Magazine Issue 1 by Sacred Fire Foundation

The

Spirit of Place

Autumn 2005

Number One

$7.95 U.S. | $9.75 Canada

Do you smell something burning?

Contents 3

Editor’s Note

Contributors

Number 1 Autumn 2005 www.sacredﬁremagazine.com Publisher Sacred Fire Community

Teeth

a short but delightful story LOUISE BERLINER

40 Leon and Maria in the Altai a meeting of shamans BILL PFEIFFER

43 Pistachios 5

Nothing is Ever Lost

a spiritual journey STEPHANIE THOMAS BERRY

a poem

Appletalk

a poem EMMANUEL WILLIAMS

NORA HARMS

44 46

10 Divine Right Order

opportunities for learning JENNIE MARLOW

Beyond Wild on poetry

JUDYTH HILL

Beaver

observations in an urban wild space PAUL BERGNER

Here is the Story

a photo experience JIM METZNER

Deeper Ecology

right relationships, right actions RUTH ROSENHEK

50 Spirit of a City Park a photo portfolio

a visual poem JENNY LAWTON GRASSL

No Garbage Karma Here where does it go?

DR. JAMES S. REILEY

MELODY FARRIN

56 Getting Right with Money

It’s a Question of Balance MARK BLESSINGTON

Divine Nourishment Your Hands a poem

BARBARA MILES

Living the Heart Life

Reconnecting with the Earth The Salmon of Shannon

PATRICIA MONAGHAN

The Fiesta

Gone. Just Like That

MARY LANE

listening JOHN WALDEN

17 OK

Laurel Hill

AMY KOBER

Looking Out from the Mesa at San Andres a poem

JONATHAN MERRITT

a personal essay

STACY CLAMAGE

30 Quilt a manifesto of art KATE RANSOHOFF Cover photo: Marshall Carbee Cover art: Helen Granger Inside cover photo: Melanie Hedlund

Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Merritt Associate Editor Louise “Troublemaker” Berliner Column Editors Mark Blessington, Rita Kesler, Mary Lane Art Director Helen Granger Artist Provocateur Marshall Carbee Managing Editor Sherry Morgan Director of Sales and Marketing Sharon Brown Advertising Sales Manager Kateri McCue Advertising Sales Representative Gary Weidner Advertising Production Maxima Kahn Subscription Sales Manager Jill Jacobs Subscription List Manager Andye Murphy Distribution Manager Beth Savino Webmaster Kirk Peterson Sacred Fire is published seasonally by the Sacred Fire Community. The purpose of the Sacred Fire Community is to foster a global community that rekindles our relationship to each other and the world through the universal and sacred spirit of Fire. www.sacredfirecommunity.org. Where to write: feedback@sacredfiremagazine.com, or Sacred Fire 10720 NW Lost Park Dr., Portland, OR 97229. For submission guidelines: www.sacredfiremagazine.com. We welcome unsolicited submissions. Subscriptions: One year, $27.80. Single issue, $7.95 (U.S. dollars). Change of address: Postmaster: Please send address changes to Sacred Fire, P.O. Box 30645, Albuquerque, NM 87190-0645 Subscribers: Please notify us of your new address at least six weeks before you move (the post office does not typically forward magazines), and be sure to include your old address. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the written consent of The Sacred Fire Community. Any requests to reprint material appearing in Sacred Fire must be made in writing and sent to feedback@sacredfiremagazine.com. The opinions expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect those of The Sacred Fire Community.

Our heartfelt thanks to all of the people who gave so freely of their time and energy, especially Gail Byrnes, Larry Messerman, Susan Skinner, Annie Eagan, Erin Everett, Tess Mikilitus, John Walden, Karen Smith Fernandez, Kathy Aftab, Michael White, Lori VonColln, Jane Jackson, Sage Keaton, Skyfox, Anna Carter, Mary Ellen Darcy, David Wiley, our suffering families, the lovers we have no time for, and, of course, Grandfather Fire. Printed on 50% recycled and 15% post-consumer waste, acid and elemental chlorine free paper, by FSCcertiﬁed Warren’s Waterless Printing, Toronto, Canada. Copyright ©2005 by the Sacred Fire Community. All rights reserved.

Sacred Fire

Autumn 2005

Editor’s Note Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

he gods are alive and dancing in the world, pushing up mountains and inhabiting them, rolling wave upon wave on every shore, massing in great schools beneath the water, blowing through the forests, listening in the trees, ambling with bear, ruminating among cattle, soaring and singing, buzzing as mosquitoes, eating. The divine presence is alive in our own lives. Everything we do—whether we judge it as good or evil, (creation or destruction,) proﬁt or loss, or just a pure waste of time—is an activity of the divine. We knew this, as many peoples, through our many millennia of conscious existence. Of course, all the human foibles—mendacity, greed, violence, the list goes on and on—have always been aspects of our lives. But in our tribal communities we lived in connection with each other. We had relations with the animals and plants. We knew the land that grew our bones and held them. We knew the gods that manifested everywhere. In our tribal wisdom we knew their names. We honored them and brought our offerings. We conversed with them and received their blessings. We’ve been on a ﬁve hundred year diversion during which many of us have left our ancestral lands. Most of our ancient wisdom has been lost. Most of us live in isolation, even from our own families. Our relations with plants and animals have become fraught with ignorance and domination. Any communication with the divine has become permissible only within a few narrow frameworks. And if anyone professes her own divinity or confesses to hearing the voices of the gods, she is quickly consigned to the loony bin. Of course, this too has been the activity of the gods. Through this dispersion and separation the world

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has been utterly transformed. We have created an astonishing technology that allows us to sow the deserts with orchards and grains, make six-month journeys in under six hours, have every entertainment beamed into our homes. For instance, it has allowed us, scattered across the continent and from other lands, to bring forth this work. But technology has also become part of the problem. As we teeter on the precipice of environmental and social collapse, the gods are calling us to remember our ancient traditions, to reconnect with each other and our own divine spirits, reconcile our relationships with plants and animals, the ocean and the land, to renew our conversations with them. In most traditional cultures fire, in its sacred aspect, is the element of connection and transformation. When offerings are given to the fire, it carries them to the gods. Fire is heart energy and it burns in all of us. Whether we sit before a candle in meditation, or lie before the hearth with our beloved, or sing together around a campfire, or drink whiskey and tell lies, our hearts are strangely opened. We feel our connection to each other. We feel at home in the world. If we are listening, we may hear the divine voices that speak through our hearts. So, from this place, this gathering around many fires, we bring you Sacred Fire, a magazine of connection and transformation. In this first issue, gathered loosely around the theme, “The Spirit of Place,” we hope to entertain you with the proposition that all divinity is local. We hope that it encourages you to seek out the spirit of your own place and recognize the divine manifestations in you own life. —Jonathan Merritt

Contributors Kate Baldwin (photograph: “What if”) has been studying the healing arts for the better part of a decade, but photography is her passion as well as her profession. www.katebaldwinphotography.com

Sacred Fire’s Art Director, Helen Granger

Louise Berliner is Sacred Fire’s

Jenny Lawton Grassl (“OK”) is a visual

troublemaker and basketweaver. “Teeth” was written in Ojo Caliente during a workshop with the incomparable Martin Prechtel to whom the writer extends her greatest gratitude.

poet and word artist living and working in the Boston area.

(illustration: “Living the Heart Life”), is an artist, designer and bon vivant. Her artwork expresses her deep spirituality and ﬁne breeding. www.hgranger.com.

Nora Harms (“Pistachios”) lives in the

An artist, writer, and mother of ﬁve,

high red desert of western Colorado where she minds her own business but the words come anyway.

Stephanie Thomas Berry (“Nothing

Melanie Hedlund (photograph: inside

is Ever Lost”) juggles the sacred ﬁres of hearth and creativity. She lives happily in the mountains of North Carolina, cooling herself off in the Toe River as needed.

front cover) cultivates the practice of improvisation through the exploration of many forms. This photograph comes from her current collaboration with Louise Berliner and Jen Grassl.

Marshall Carbee (photographs: cover, frontispiece, “Divine Right Order,” “Laurel Hill;” illustration: “Nothing is Ever Lost”), who likes to play with lit matches, has exhibited his work in oneman shows in cities around the world. See his work at www.marshallcarbee.com.

Judyth Hill (“Beyond Wild”), a stand-

Stacy Clamage (“Living the Heart Life”), a freelance writer who lives in Northern California, is currently at work on a collection of essays about the California Missions.

More of Jane Karchmar’s (illustration: “Teeth”) work can be seen at www. janekarchmar.com.

Melody Farrin (photographs: “Spirit

of a City Park”) is a professional photographer based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her nature and landscape photographs appear regularly in galleries throughout the United States. See more of her work at www.melodyfarrin.com. Mark Gilliland (illustration: “Deeper

Ecology”), a visual artist and landscape designer living in a small village along the Hudson River, integrates Tibetan and Native American symbolic traditions into his Sacred Art. www.image-maya.org

up poet and teacher living in Northern New Mexico, has published six books of poetry and is the author of the internationally acclaimed poem, “Wage Peace.” She has been described by the St. Helena Examiner as, “Energy with skin.”

Jeff Magidson (photographs: “Quilt”) is a Boston-based photographer, art lover and proprietor of Artslides photography studio. He photographs artwork for individual artists, galleries, publishers and collectors.

The editor of Sacred Fire, Jonathan Merritt (“Looking Out from the Mesa in San Andres”) keeps a ﬁre in Portland, Oregon. Jim Metzner (“Here’s the Story; Spirit of

Place”) produces the radio series “Pulse of the Planet.” Barbara Miles (“Your Hands”) works with deaf-blind children and adults as well as their families and teachers. She also walks, reads, writes, dances and makes all sorts of things with her hands. Kate Ransohoff (“Quilt”), an artist

and educator for over 30 years, has founded and co-directed two innovative educational organizations, taught artmaking workshops and has been a consultant to a variety of corporate and non-proﬁt organizations. Ruth Rosenhek (“Deeper Ecology”) is an international environmental justice activist, educator and co-director of the Rainforest Information Centre in Australia. Ruth campaigns on behalf of forest protection, land rights and global justice.

“I have been making pictures ever since I can remember,” writes Susan St Clair Bennett (illustration: “Beaver”). She also repairs and conserves ancient Tibetan tangka paintings and has been a longtime meditation practitioner in the Kashmir Shaivite tradition thanks to Swami Chetananda. Her paintings can be viewed at www.purelandart.com. John Walden (“Laurel Hill”) writes,

“What can I say in 25 words which can’t be said in less? I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My life is not a mess.” Emmanuel Williams (“Appletalk”) is an Englishman living in coastal California. He is a performance poet, writer, voiceover artist, and teaches poetry in the schools. He has recently published two books of original riddles.

Sacred Fire

Autumn 2005

Nothing is Ever Lost W

e are driving down the road and my four year old is peppering me with questions. My grandfather, whom Denali never met, has passed away, and he wants to plumb this mystery of death. I answer every question carefully, wanting my answers to deepen and enliven the mystery. “Where is your Grandpa, Mommy?” “He’s gone to the Spirit World, Denali.” “Was he crying when he died?” “No, I think he was laughing.” “If he was laughing then he couldn’t die!” he counters, somewhat incredulous that I would dare suggest that anyone would be laughing when they died. Obviously dying is something you don’t want to do. “I think he was very glad to be in the Spirit World, Denali.” “Why?” “Well, he was very old, and very tired. And the Spirit World is a place of perfect peace. Sometimes, when you are old and tired you long for perfect peace.” “Where is the Spirit World, Mommy? Is it over that mountain?” He points out the car window to the long body of mountain that rises up from the valley ﬂoor where we make our home. “Hmm, let me think on that one, honey,” I reply, wondering how to answer this question. Denali waits by moving on to other topics, now directed at his father, the other available processor of questions.

STEPHANIE THOMAS BERRY Illustrations by Marshall Carbee

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Sacred Fire

The answer that comes is a gift, something he might be able to grasp, even if it doesn’t cage the mystery for his probing mind. “You know, Denali, that when you dream, your dreams don’t happen in this world. They happen in the dreamworld, right? And the only way you can get to the dreamworld is from inside yourself. Well, the Spirit World is like that. You

Nothing is Ever Lost

can only get to it from inside yourself. It’s not a place you can get to from here.” Denali considers this—there is quiet for a moment—and then he replies that he wants to meet his great-grandfather in a dream. It occurs to me that where one world touches another, an immense amount of energy is released. And I wonder what worlds might be touched from inside my own self, what inner skills await discovery, or what Denali, in his pure child wisdom, might show me.

e live in the Southern Appalachians, a place of remarkable beauty. The mountain that looms up from behind our home is Mount Mitchell, the highest mountain in the Eastern U.S. Visiting Mount Mitchell can sometimes seem like a bad dream. The winding road that takes you there is breathtaking, the forest quilting the mountainsides in fine-stitched shades of green. The slow pace of the drive mingled with the luminous beauty of the landscape induces a sense of euphoria. But the higher you go, the more you see the skeletons of trees, balsam firs to be exact, until soon it’s all you see. Dead trees, everywhere, etched into your memory. Ghosts of a fabled past. The falling beauty of this place leaves you with a dull ache. Between the balsam woolly adelgid, an exotic insect, and acid fog, snow, rain and cloud, this mountain forest, a treasure left by the last Ice Age, is disintegrating. As if that weren’t enough, the balsam woolly adelgid’s more voracious cousin, the hemlock woolly adelgid, has already left a wide swath of hemlock skeletons as it makes its way from the northeastern U.S. to the Southern Appalachians. Even as I write this, the telltale cotton egg sacs of the adelgids grow in number, nestled in the needles of the hemlocks around my home. My personal relationship with the hemlock began at the age of twenty-three, during one of my camping trips into the Pisgah National Forest. It was mid-summer, peak camping season, and I, as usual, was running late. By the time my companion and I arrived at our chosen destination along a forest road, all the allotted camping spaces were taken and it was getting dark. Back and forth we drove, searching for a place to camp and finding nothing. Night had fallen when we finally settled for a little spot off the road where

we hoped to remain undetected, since we would be camping in an unmarked and unauthorized spot. Indeed, it could hardly be called a camping spot, just a bare spot of forest ﬂoor underneath a very large hemlock tree. We made a discreet ﬁre, after which I slid into my bag and into sleep. Then, as now, I was deeply troubled by the extinction of plant and animal beings. Far from being something that happened outside myself, I could feel extinction, like light leaving my body. But that night, under the cascading arms of a hemlock tree, I had a spectacular dream:

I am in the forest only now it is November. The light is muted, the sky overcast, and the forest is empty—only the gray of tree trunks and the ground covered in the rust of fallen leaves can be seen. Far off to the South there comes a strange and large animal. It makes a tremendous amount of noise as it moves toward me along the slope of the mountain. A procession unto itself, it is like no other animal I have seen before. It is a relative of the elephant, only smaller, and it is covered in fur the same color as the forest floor. Its trunk is shorter than the elephant’s, and it stands on three toes. It marches fast and furious up to me, and then trumpets through its trunk. It is tremendous in its power, awesome in its size, and its presence charges the air with an electric holiness.Towering above me, it looks me in the eye, and I understand what it is saying to me: “Follow me. I have a sacred knowledge to give to you.” The creature then whirls around, trumpeting still, and goes back the way it came. I, thunderstruck and trembling, resolve to follow it and in that instant I receive its gift—a knowing, a secret unfolding, a dream seed planted in my heart. Words cannot hold such wildness; nevertheless I will attempt to convey it: “Nothing is ever lost. There is no extinction. There is nothing to fear.” The creature moves quickly back into the forest, and I follow in search of it, but do not see it again. The rest of the night was filled with more dreaming and the calls of the pileated woodpecker. I awoke without memory of the gift of the night, but when a pileated woodpecker called out in the afternoon forest, I turned to my companion and said, “I heard pileated woodpeckers last night,” which immediately made no sense to me—woodpeckers are diurnal. In a breath the dreamgate opened and flooded my consciousness with its memory. The energy of this dream fueled my faith for many years. My despair, worn like a heavy and burdensome coat, slipped from my shoulders. I followed the call of the forest mammoth and began the search within myself for what seemed lost

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Nothing is Ever Lost

outside myself. An invisible hand passed on to me books, conversations, and ideas that nurtured the dream seed in my heart. Countless times, the pileated woodpecker crossed my path just as an epiphany ﬂew into my consciousness. For ﬂeeting moments I became aware of the body of the Earth as one of energy, with invisible realms that held many secrets. Everywhere I found evidence that humankind is the unconscious creator of everything we experience, individually and collectively. The call of the forest mammoth was to live that holy verb: to create consciously and to restore wholeness to Earth and Self. Then the hemlock woolly adelgid enters the forest, and the prospect of loss faces me at every turn. The obvious possibility of a hemlock cemetery encircling my home becomes a hard reality I cannot seem to bear. Struggling with the need to do something, I paint a portrait of a hemlock that touches others deeply. I write poetry that calls others to make a deeper connection with the hemlock and the spirit waters within each of us. Still the adelgids grow in number. Feeling overcome with ineptitude I trudge through the forest with a deep heaviness. I sit at the feet of a hemlock and weep. Doubt rises ugly to the holy throne of mind. My world pales with loss and powerlessness.

n my journal I’ve drawn a pie graph, large and round. From this pie I’ve cut the thinnest slice possible and labeled it “human consciousness.” This is our common dream, the “real world,” a meager sampling of Self and Universe. But that thin slice of pie is not who we are. We are the whole pie. Because I am aware of only the tiniest slice of myself, I am reciprocally aware of only the tiniest slice of everything else: the hemlock, the river, my children, the Earth. A vast and invisible Universe is waiting for us to discover, experience, and develop a relationship with Itself. That discovery begins within: as we become conscious of our wholeness, as we become holy and healed, so does our world. My vision of the world determines my level of connection. By seeing the hemlock as the victim and the adelgid as the perpetrator, I have excluded a vision of wholeness. I am seeing quite the small slice of pie. But there are other days when I

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see something else, something inside myself flowing through and around me that is beyond words and beyond objective experience. It just is. It’s what I call the Love-Creation. If I were deaf, I would liken it to the first whispers of sound-song that came from a miraculous, albeit gradual, healing. I can’t tell you what this Love-Creation is or what it does, but I know I can consciously choose to experience a sip of its vast ocean, just a sip, and I feel a wild love flowing through everything. I can tune my heart like a radio to this love song and I become smitten with joy and thankfulness. Fear becomes a static that I can simply tune out and the Earth is luminous. Flowers impart wise delight. Hemlocks shimmer. Adelgids are teachers. And the body of the Earth radiates such love for me I can hardly bear it. In this state I can see past the duality of victim and aggressor. From a heart level I know that all is flux, a river of creation. I can sense this deep and living mystery and my need to cage it for my probing mind is released. I surrender my judgments to this river washing over me. Enveloped in the Love-Creation, I want to ground it, explore it and celebrate it. I want to bring it to the table with the rest of my slice of pie.

go into the forest. The light of day is sharp. I have climbed the ridge behind my home. Before me is a hemlock tree, small, but stationed high above many waving hemlock groves. I press my back against the tree. I breathe deeply, slowly, and resolve to openness. Knowing the power of the voice, I begin to pray. “I call upon the wise ones, the invisible ones. I call upon the guardian of the forest, and the spirit of the hemlock. I call upon my soul. Be with me now. Lay your invisible hands of light upon me. Beautiful One of We, I say, make me a conduit for the Light of Creation. Make the hemlock a conduit for the Light of Creation. Beautiful One of We, I say, bring me awareness of my wholeness. Bring me awareness of the hemlock’s wholeness. Bring me awareness of the adelgid’s wholeness.” I concentrate on the invisible parts of myself that I know exist. The energy of the Earth rises up through the balls of my feet, and I soak it up, becoming drenched with it. I breathe deep

Nothing is Ever Lost

and, in a long fulfilling outbreath, I give it all to the tree, feel it rushing from my body and charging the tree, an energy of overflowing love, sap rising thick with life for the hemlock, for me, for the adelgids. I feel my energy becoming part of the hemlocks, and the hemlock becoming part of me. The tree, whose needles really do look like fine and sophisticated television antennae, sends the honey sweet light out to all the other hemlocks. In my mind’s eye I see this light spreading down the hillside to the river, and up and out, from tree to tree, like a telecast of the Love-Creation. It is Heaven on Earth. Nothing is ever lost. This is not something to prove. It is a mystery to which we can be open, a reality to explore within our consciousness. The Love-Creation is all around us. Its ethereal harmony of everywhere holiness is often lost in the loud noise of our own fear-creation. It is this noise and our focus upon it that wreaks havoc upon our conscious world. It is time for us to bring into our awareness the creative power of our bodies, our breath and our Being—not just within the realm of our own individual life, but also within the realm of the Mother whose body we are one with. We can become as gods, empowered and luminous. We can become as children, playful and free. Tonight Denali is writing “MOM” in his wobbly four-year-old script. He delights in this practice. Perhaps, by some innate understanding of what “MOM” really means, he begins with the O. “You draw the ball first,” he tenderly explains to Zoë, his three-year-old sister, as he holds the pen by its middle and pulls it over the paper in a loose circle, “and then you put the M on either side.” He finishes, and then looks to me with a gleam in his eye. He had this same sprightly gleam the other day when he announced to me, “Mom. This is how it works. God makes us, and then we make her.” I wholeheartedly concur.

Appletalk (for my daughter)

She holds an apple to her tiny ear and listens her gaze abstracted as when a bubble pops between her ﬁngers and mystery again beguiles her. Perhaps she listens beyond the red hard skin into the whispering of apple-ﬂesh cells all cracklesnap like cider trickle of juice sibilant as drizzle. Maybe she hears the inside of her hearing blood-creeks pulsing through capillaries like sap. If she could tell me maybe she would say they sound the same the sounds that life makes sweet and tangy berrygreen apple and red humming and chuckling running and tumbling rushing and splashing and tingling under the skin. — Emmanuel Williams

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Autumn 2005

A lot of people in western cultures see nature as something separate from them though some westerners seem to have “evolved” and now see nature as something they are a part of, for what it’s worth. What would happen if you let go of the “part” entirely? Not just in relationship to what you call “nature” but to plastic bottles, sunscreen, pastrami and sparkplugs. What would happen to you if you let go of the ways you differentiate yourself, let go of your attachment to personality? Where would you be? What would you point at? That body that you prance about in was once a little smear of semen and sperm that your dad made out of a ham sandwich and a glass of milk. What if you no longer saw yourself as different from a glass of milk?

Divine Right Order JENNIE MARLOW

t is a curious business, this divinity at work in all things. I am avoiding any glance in the direction of my sink which is full of dirty dishes. The dinner hour is approaching, and there is nothing in the fridge that I feel like cooking. The message light on my answering machine is blinking in an accusatory fashion. It signals a call from my mother who asks the machine repeatedly if I am there before she hangs up without saying goodbye. I have left the message there to remind me to call her back when I am in a more charitable mood. The mind would like to know, just what is so divine about all this? My awareness of Universal Perfection, I have noticed, seems to occur in inverse proportion to my proximity to whatever it is I am observing. Take all those fabulous Hubble photos, for example. What could be more astonishing, more beautiful or more sublime than an exploding star or two galaxies in collision? I have to admit, if these events were happening in my neighborhood, it would be more difficult to see them for what they are: spectacular works of cosmic art. Okay, so the scientists tell me that I am made of stardust, that many of the elements that got thrown in the hopper to make up me were created in massive explosions and brought here by intergalactic gas clouds and interstellar rubble. This sounds great, and it’s not that I don’t believe it. In fact, it’s all too striking a metaphor for life. Still, the explosion of my daughter’s temper, or the collision of differing ways my husband and I have of getting things done seem rarely to have much to do with divinity, except in hindsight. Looking back, after the crisis is past, I can bend my memories of the experience into something useful, like opportunities for learning (OFLs, as I have come to call them), or those none-too-welcome growth periods that feel like I’m going to grow right out of skin. My mother once wondered aloud why the wild oats look so serene and lovely when seen on a distant hillside, but why those selfsame oats look like a mess of weeds when they occupy her back yard. I confess that I, who have a ready answer for most everything, could not come up with a reason except to say that close-up, things do not always have the grace and dignity they appear to have from a distance. I believe the physicists who tell me that, at the sub-atomic level, matter is in a constant state of creation, transformation, and annihilation. When my life tends to imitate this theory, I find myself incapable of mustering the attitude I have when observing the effects of this process in the forest where leaves, once green, are now brown and broken on the ground, following their natural transformation into the soft, sweet-smelling stuff of the forest floor. This poetic sense of universal perfection, however, seems invariably to suffer the intrusion of my mundane reality, the one it is said that I am creating. My husband likes to point out that he would happily create his own reality of no dirty dishes through the liberal use of paper plates. Living requires consumption, he says, so pick your lesser of evils. If I wish to argue that the use of water to wash the things is less of a sin than a plate made from post-consumer waste, that is my opinion, and I am entitled to it. Despite the handful of folks who claim to live on air alone, it is clear to my husband that the earth is in crisis, that there are too damned many of us, and that there is nothing perfect about that! The point is difficult to argue.

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Autumn 2005

Photo: Marshall Carbee

The mind would like to know, just what is so divine about all this?

But with a simple shift in my perspective, there is a miracle I can witness in this and any moment. It is not one of the miracles that is easy to recognize, like the ﬁeld of wild oats, or a forest, or even a cosmic cataclysm. It is, in fact, a most peculiar miracle, and perhaps the most difﬁcult to fathom– that the Universe has managed to order itself right down to me, my sink full of dirty dishes, and a mother who will no doubt remain befuddled by the telephone answering machine. Jennie Marlow is a channel for her spirit guides, Spotted Eagle, Grandfather White Elk, and White Buffalo. She is the author of Personal Magic, Creating Life, Love, and Work That Resonate with Your Soul. For more information about readings, recordings, and classes, visit www.jenniemarlow.com or call 866-270-3783.

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Sacred Fire

RUTH ROSENHEK

Deeper Ecology

For many, matters of the spirit and the soul are separate from action. But certainly this separation is illusory, much like the separation we feel between ourselves and the Earth, or ourselves and each other.

Illustrations by Mark Gilliland

recently gave a talk in Hobart at The Wilderness Society and immediately after I was done, an older woman said grufﬂy, “I like to win!” “Good on ya.” I said. “I’m serious, I want to WIN!” she growled. “Win what and at what cost?” I asked. Of course, she is talking from the heart about the forests of Tasmania. Anybody with a love of nature who has stepped into the Styx or the Tarkine would also boldly state that they want to protect these forests. To step into these ancient unique forests is to love them, to yearn for them to continue to be. I understand all too well the deep yearning to protect beautiful places. Years ago, when the deer came running into my yard as the private contractors put roads and houses into a previously pristine area, it was my desire to protect that forest that lead me to become an environmental activist. But I ask myself, how do we balance our desire to protect a place with the deeper understanding that, in the long run, a greater shift in consciousness is needed? How do we work from a genuinely peaceful place when we are ﬁlled with grief or anger, with frustration over the callous disregard for billions of years of evolution?

Deep Ecology is all about remembering that we are from the Earth, of the Earth and nothing separate

I’ve found the nature philosophy of Deep Ecology to be extremely useful in providing some perspective on the world environmental crisis. Deep Ecology states that all life forms have intrinsic value. The philosophy strongly critiques human-centeredness or anthropocentrism and asserts that we’ve forgotten who we truly are. We think we can extract, exploit, manipulate and control the natural world without any consequence to ourselves. We’ve forgotten that, when we stretch the strands of the web of life to the point of breaking, we are threatening the very life forces that we depend on: air, water, earth.

In a nutshell, Deep Ecology is all about remembering that we are from the Earth, of the Earth and nothing separate. It’s a way for westerners to begin to understand about deep connection, to experience, a little, the intimate relationship that many intact indigenous groups have with the natural world. To Deep Ecology, none of our good efforts in the world will be binding without a radical shift in consciousness, a transformation in which we see, know, and understand who we truly are. “Plain and simple members of the biota,” as naturalist Aldo Leopold so aptly put it, although I prefer to say, “Beautiful Earthlings!” As an activist, I also rely heavily on “Despair and Empowerment” work that clearly addresses the emotional challenges that are intertwined with social and environmental justice work. For years, when I lived in the U.S., I was overwhelmed with grief about the state of the world. I felt isolated in these strong feelings as if I were the only one who felt this way. I was relieved when I discovered a theory by deep ecologist Joanna Macy that explains that our feelings of anger, grief, fear, despair (any of these so-called “bad feelings”) are the healthy normal reactions to much of what’s happening in the world today. When we wage war on each other, it is the normal reaction of a human to feel great distress about the cold-blooded killing. If someone threatens a forest that you have a deep connection to, it is natural and healthy to feel grief when it is hastily felled.

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deeper ecology

Instead we are shamed for having such feelings from a very young age: “Oh, you’re so sensitive! What a little cry baby!” By the time we’re adults we may discover that we are living a life where a large part of our intelligence has been suppressed, and our energy bound up in keeping these feelings down.

tinged with self-deprecation and ﬂagellation and, at times, we speak most harshly to our dear loved ones. The Great Work reminds us to bring loving kindness into our daily lives. This is the inner revolution that must take place if any of our good efforts are to be binding.

Despair and Empowerment work is all about affirming that feelings matter and allow our natural intelligence to flow. We then remember that intuitive feelings have been around a lot longer than the cognitive thinking typified by strategic planning. Intuition and feelings allowed our ancestors to survive for millions of years. If we acknowledge our intuition and feelings, we are better able to find solutions and act in positive ways.

For many, matters of the spirit and the soul are separate from action. But certainly this separation is illusory much like the separation we feel between ourselves and the Earth, or ourselves and each other. Rather than sitting in a meditation room to ﬁnd enlightenment, we can go like the Buddha, sit under a tree and touch the earth as we reach towards selfrealization. We have the opportunity to make every act a beautiful prayer—this is always within our means. So if a campaign or a project is not going well as far as the ﬁnal goal is concerned, we still have the choice to act from the heart, to continue to care for ourselves and each other and to set the intention that these beautiful efforts will ripple outwards across the globe.

I also ﬁnd it extremely valuable to weave spiritual beliefs into environmental and social change work in what is called “Spiritual Engagement” or “Conscious Activism.” Spiritual Engagement shifts us out of the dominant goal-oriented way of looking at our work in the world. It is about compassionate action, acting from a place of peace and love within us. This means that we choose to engage not from a place of shame and guilt, a place of “shoulds,” but rather because we feel strongly moved, because the work brings us joy and deep satisfaction. Geologian Thomas Berry calls our work towards a harmonious earth community, “The Great Work.” I believe that The Great Work starts with healing the relationships we have to ourselves and with each other. Our relationships to ourselves are often

After speaking for a number of years about the need for compassionate action on all fronts, I found myself very concerned that there might not be a truly peaceful action that we can take. Near where I live we engaged in a Gandhi-style fast for a forest. Yet, I noticed that even these actions caused vexation to others. When we went into the State Forest office in Coffs Harbour and sat in a circle praying and meditating for Pine Creek State Forest and the koalas that live there, the office workers were clearly distressed by our presence. Even the most peaceful walk may cause distress to those with whom we publicly disagree. By merely saying “no” when they say “yes,” we create waves of disharmony. Yet, if each of us waited until we were fully peaceful inside, would we have a peace movement, let alone an environmental or human rights movement? After much reflection, I realized that we can first do our utmost to resolve feelings of anger and frustration and then, with clear intentions, we can design actions that are as peaceful as possible. As the Thai Buddhist activist Sulak Sivaraksa said a number of years ago, “If you’ve worked on loving the World Bank and extended this compassion to the Bank and yet still they continue to do their destruction unabatedly, then you agitate.” I call this “Compassionate Agitation.” I reckon it’s a fine line to walk, but it is certainly worthwhile to put our prayers into action. It’s not always obvious what Compassionate Agitation looks like. In 1979, a peaceful “hippy” protest to protect the precious rainforests occurred at Terania Creek in northern New South Wales. An

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deeper ecology

amazing protest it was, as protesters sang their way through very tense situations while ancient trees were felled. In the fourth week of the protest, a few people besought with frustration took matters into their own hands. They sawed up some of the logs due to be trucked out the next day. Many of their fellow protesters were very disappointed and claimed that this action was violent. The police chimed in saying that it was unacceptable. Yet, after this, the logging stopped at Terania Creek. These forests are now in the Nightcap National Park. I don’t think that it is always violent to do economic harm to another. Sometimes when our words are not listened to, we might have to take stronger action. Much as we would remove a child’s hand from a stovetop, we might find a way to peacefully move the State aside from destroying the environment, local community, etc. The action at Terania Creek arose out of anger directed at the loggers and the government who took what they claimed as their property. Yet the forests were here long before the economic and political system that sold them to pulp and paper mills. Likewise, the Aboriginal people were here long, long before the white men arrived or set down their laws. Perhaps an action like this could have been done with great peace in the peoples’ hearts, as a group ritual with a prayer for the forests. Perhaps it could have been made into a conscious act of beauty. It’s not always easy to decide on what Buddhism calls “right action,” especially when we’re listening and watching while something beautiful is being systematically pulled apart. During the first blockade that I participated in, a state forest was recklessly logged. As the trees groaned under the weight of the chainsaws and the birds shrieked above me, I could not in any way determine what “right action” would protect the koalas and others that lived there. I still struggle with this issue all the time as places I love are being ruthlessly destroyed. There are different lenses that we can look through to evaluate our actions. Through the lens of the current political and social systems, the laws and social mores, things are certainly messed up. Everywhere around us nature, basic human rights and social justice are critically threatened. From this point of view, we do political lobbying and letter writing. We show awareness-raising videos and run media campaigns. Then there is the wider lens of “deep time,” the 13.7 billionyear spiraling flow of evolution from the Big Bang to current time. Planet Earth, 4.5 billion years old, is undergoing what some scientists are now calling a mass extinction spasm, unleashed by human intervention. In previous upheavals on the planet, a high percentage of species has been eliminated.

Yet, after 5-10 million years, all the biological niches were once again filled up with new and extravagant forms of life. Finally there is the “Unity” spiritual framework that states that we are all One. Everything is Consciousness or Self or God or, as quantum physics has discovered, all is sound and light waves. From this viewpoint, what we call reality is dualistic illusion. There is literally no difference between me and a tree and a logger and a star. From this viewpoint, there isn’t a problem here on the Earth per se. Being in the midst of a mass extinction spasm, violent wars and global climate change isn’t problematic, it’s just the way it is. While there is certainly truth to this perspective, there is an unfortunate way that this understanding is being misused to discourage people from taking action in the world. A woman attending one of my workshops recently confided to me that she is confused because her friends tell her she shouldn’t bother to work toward change. Action is inferior, less enlightened than the more superior “everything-is-as-it’smeant-to-be” attitude. Understanding the interdependence of all phenomena is certainly part of the journey to self-realization. However, regardless of our perspective, the times we live in call upon us to nurture fierce compassion. This is as much a part of the “enlightened self.” Through compassion, we are moved to engage in acts that ease suffering on the planet. Even if we find ourselves in the fortunate position of living in nirvanalike bliss, why not share it around a bit and help ease another being’s suffering? Since we’ve incarnated for such a brief notch in eternity, why not engage in acts of beauty and joy? We can certainly make a difference to the lives of other beings. In Loren Eisler’s story, “The Star Thrower,” a young man throws stranded starfish back to the sea even though another man confronts him by saying it is utterly pointless since so many starfish are destined to die when the tide goes out. The young man says, with deep satisfaction in his voice, “It matters to this one.” So I try to throw a starfish back into the ocean whenever I can. It matters. At the end of the day, this is what feels good. Money won’t bring happiness in the last moments. It will be love, deep satisfaction, and friendships. If we don’t know which particular starfish to throw, we can commit to keeping our eyes and ears open, to witness what is happening on the Earth. We can make ourselves available and send it out to the Cosmos that we’re ready. We can be on call for when we’re needed. The rest will fall easily into place. Page13, Hawk Medicine Wheel; page 15, Green Tara; Mark Gilliland, 2005.

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JENNY LAWTON GRASSL

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No Garbage Karma Here B

ob and I were knee-deep in a software design effort for tomorrow’s presentations. This was clearly going to take all evening to complete. At about six o’clock, he invited me to his place for dinner so that we could ﬁnish our palaver thereafter. I was surprisingly at ease with the hippy-like environment at Bob’s house and seemed to blend in okay. By my near normal garb I was easily spotted as an outsider, though everyone was nice enough to overlook it. One of the most telling differences, however, between his house and mine, was a lack of garbage facilities. At some point I had a bit of debris to dispose of and I asked about a trashcan. He cocked his head and looked at me in a sort of quizzical way, then said very succinctly, “We don’t make garbage here.” I gave him a kind of odd look in response and he walked toward the kitchen and a small closet/room that connected it to the outside. There we saw bins containing all kinds of stuff. There was a covered compost bucket for food leftovers and scraps—Bob and his group were fairly strict vegetarians—a large bin for paper, several bins of varying sizes for different colors of glass, a big box for styrofoam, a bin for cans and on and on. There was even a small bucket for the lead foil from the tops of wine bottles. This was the most serious recycling arrangement I had ever seen before or since. I asked him if someone came to pick this stuff up on a regular basis. He said, “No, we collect it until the bins get full and then put them in the car and drive to various recycling places that will reuse such material. Except for the compost—we put that in the compost pile outside to feed next year’s garden soil.” I said something pithy like, “Gee, that seems like a lot of work.” Again with the look he asked, “What do you think happens to garbage? Where does it go?” I thought for a minute and responded, “I suppose it gets hauled off to the dump, thrown in a pit and ultimately covered over.” Bob said, “And then what?” I said I didn’t know and hadn’t thought about it. He then looked sad for one of the few times over the years we’ve known each other. He said, “The land containing the garbage becomes unusable and poisonous. It leaches an unredeemable mix of toxic chemicals into the ground water below and exudes methane and other noxious gasses that make it unhealthy to live above such a place. It’s as if we as a group have rejected this piece of God’s space permanently in favor of marginal convenience. It makes my heart hurt.”

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Dr. James S. Reiley

He hesitated a second and then said the next thing that really stuck with me: “You can’t throw things away, because there’s no such place as ‘away.’” I answered, with as much serious-sounding facetiousness as I could muster, “But where would we be if we couldn’t make disposable things to sell to each other? I mean, most people think this is what separates us from the great unwashed.” He smiled and replied, “Yeah, these are the same people who eat Twinkies, watch daytime TV and voted Richard Nixon into ofﬁce.”

At this point, I felt more or less dumb as a box of rocks.

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no garbage karma here

This interaction with Bob seemed to turn on a switch of sorts. I started looking at my relationship to the planet a little differently after that. My farm and the immediate surroundings were never the same. We, mostly I, instituted a few changes.

decomposition repository. Sean kept using it as a chicken, dog or cat jail until we gradually collected enough miscellaneous compostables to completely cover the bottom of the thing. When this ﬁnally occurred, we received a nice thank you note signed by several of the chickens.

The ﬁrst thing we did was to impose a similar no-garbage policy. In the garage, we created a bevy of bins, buckets and other containers for about ﬁfteen different kinds of re-usables. Everything had to be placed in a recycle container unless the Imperial Detritus Council (IDC) approved it as an actual throwaway item. To designate an item as such entailed a family IDC meeting in which the thing under consideration had to be examined from all sides and, if possible, disassembled to potentially recyclable components. There weren’t many items that made it to the dreaded Evil Trash Bin after such scrutiny—about a quarter of one 55-gallon drum every year for the entire family.

Another piece of the no-garbage campaign had to do with packaging. Anything that was purchased, from french fries to footballs, came in a package and the packaging was not exempt from the recycling rules. The word was clear: “You bought it, you own it—including what it came wrapped in.” This idea caused a few changes in our buying patterns or at least made for some analysis of what kind of package disposal problem would exist later—minimal garbage karma here, boss.

There were only a few troop-level grumblings, because it was a new concept and we more or less approached it as a game with a hint of fabulous prizes to be awarded later. My son Matt, age 10, was really into it—he seemed to get off on his new title of Secretary of the Trash. He was the one that was responsible for all ﬁnal deposits into said Evil Trash Bin. We were considering making this a lifetime appointment. Sean, age 7, was okay about the idea but pretty detached from it all as he was from most things. Samantha, age 2, was too young to know what was happening yet. My wife, Belinda, peacefully coexisted with the new policies, but was clearly not a religious convert.

I suppose for me and my children, this brief visit to the home of my friend, Bob, had more of a behavioral impact on our lives over the years than any other event that comes to mind. Each time I come across something to be discarded and make as aware a response as circumstances allow, I mentally send back a small blessing to Bob for his kind training. I also don’t feel quite so dumb as a box of rocks. Excerpted from the forthcoming novel, Not Walking on Water.

Dr. James S. Reiley practices naturopathic medicine, tends a back porch herb garden and feeds a friendly chipmunk in Southbury, Connecticut.

Matt’s enthusiasm for this process was probably best demonstrated by his innovative handling of dead light bulbs. Usually, when light bulbs give up and die, most folks just pitch them since they contain both glass and metal. Matt invented a seriously low-tech process for safely separating the glass from the metal parts using one of Belinda’s on-theverge-of-being-discarded leather purses and a hammer. For his splendid efforts in this area, Matt was awarded The Recycling Hero Award, Second Class. One other project included a wooden compost pile about the size of New Jersey. Perhaps our zeal here exceeded our needs just a tad, but we had lots of old 2”x 6” lumber, so what the hell. Anyway, it was a thing of beauty, with removable front slats to allow for the ceremonial turning of the compost with a pitchfork. Matt and Sean, as chief engineers, thought this might have been our ﬁnest hour. The fact that the only way we could move the structure was with the help of the tractor seemed not to bother anyone. Once positioned in its permanent home, however, it seemed for a long time more like a corral than a vegetative

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Divine Nourishment

Mary Lane

�iesta �he

Each door that I walked through took me closer to an intimate relationship with nature, eventually revealing the source of nourishment that would feed the deep longing that fueled my passion.

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was born with a birth defect that put me into a body cast at the age of four months. Nobody touched, held, or fed me. I lay motionless, trapped in a cast from my neck to my ankles in a sterile hospital for an entire month. The only nourishment I received dripped through a tube inserted into my ankle while my mother sat empathetically helpless by my side. So naturally, as a result of this initial experience I became passionate about nourishment. This passion took me through a series of doorways, pulling me toward the nourishment that I longed for. I became a professional chef, created fabulous dinner parties, opened my own restaurant, studied Western and Five Element nutrition, integrated the medicine of herbs into my food, and gathered wild food and herbs. After meeting and studying with Eliot Cowan, the author of Plant Spirit Medicine, I became skilled at communicating with the spirit of these plants. Each door that I walked through took me closer to an intimate relationship with nature, eventually revealing the source of nourishment that would feed the deep longing that fueled my passion. Eliot invited me to attend a sacred “Fiesta” that marked his completion of an arduous twelve-year shamanic apprenticeship in the Huichol tradition. Six of his own apprentices joined him, crossing a pivotal sixyear threshold. The rigorous apprenticeship dictated 21

Divine Nourishment

by the deep traditions of this ancient culture consisted of many sacrifices—fasting, periods of celibacy, and pilgrimages, just to name a few—and Eliot would be the first to be “fully cooked” once he completed his initiation at this Fiesta. “Bad timing,” I thought to myself when the invitation arrived. “How can I afford to fly all the way to Guadalajara Mexico when I don’t even know if I’m going to have rent money for the next month?” The airfare was quite expensive from Maui, where I live. Yet, I felt that familiar tug pulling me through another doorway. My desire to honor my friend and teacher—the man who had selflessly guided me to a deeper connection with the natural world—was reason enough to go, and before I knew it I found myself landing at the Guadalajara airport after two long days of travel. I had never been to Guadalajara. I braced myself to navigate through chaos, poverty, and filth upon landing in this third world country. My expectations were immediately shattered upon deplaning. I entered an airport with sparkling clean floors, moved efficiently through the arrival line, and within a few minutes I joined other members of a worldwide community arriving to honor and celebrate the apprentices at this sacred event. We all felt like family coming together for a reunion, even those who had never met before. We introduced ourselves, exchanged money, bought snacks for the road, and boarded four Mexican buses. For the next four hours we wound our way through colorful villages, miles of agave fields, and winding mountain terrain on narrow roads going ever deeper into the home of a culture I knew very little about. My body felt exhausted from the long journey, yet I could not close my eyes for a much-needed nap. I settled into my seat, visited with my fellow passengers, eating very questionable Mexican snacks, and visually devouring the scenery. The bus crept through the last village. The narrow road through Santa Maria del Oro barely accommodated this oversized visitor. On the far side of this village we crested a hill that exposed our home for the next four days, and descended into a crater surrounding a beautiful oval lake. The inner walls appeared as forested lush mountain slopes, and the shore of the lake was dotted with tiny local restaurants, each one blasting its

own music, entertaining us as we wound our way down the narrow road. We arrived at the Santa Maria del Oro Resort, perched alongside the lake, where we joined the rest of the guests and participants. The beauty of the whole scene caught me by surprise. I united with old friends and colleagues as I squealed, laughed, hugged and remembered old times. I surrendered to embracing the entire experience that would engulf me over the next four days with the other 130 people who had the honor of attending. Some of the men had arrived a couple days early and had constructed a large fire circle at the center of a makeshift open tent with 130 chairs surrounding it. This sacred fire held the heart and focus for the entire event. Once the fire was lit and everyone had made offerings to Grandfather Fire in strict accordance to Huichol tradition, the Fiesta had officially began. I felt honored to be chosen as one of the fire keepers responsible for feeding the fire around the clock. The men had also erected a traditional tuki next to the open tent above the sacred fire. A tuki—a tent with one side open and a pointed roof—houses the sacred altar where many of the rituals were performed with the initiated shamans and apprentices. Several women devoted hours setting up the elaborate altar. Before certain meals a procession of women brought out our food and placed it in the tuki. The Huichol marakame (shaman) from the ceremonial center of San Andreas, who presided over the entire initiation, would then bless the food before we could partake. I dove in deeper and volunteered to perform a primal ritual dance with about ten other dancers and several drummers. I didn’t fully understand the significance of the dance when I volunteered, but I decided to embrace all that I possibly could. By the time we performed this ritual depicting the life of a bull, ending by offering the bull to the marakame, I felt deeply moved. I could have gone home at that point with a tremendous gift. But that was just the beginning. The sacred rituals continued, escalating my realization that I had entered an ancient culture, another time, and another reality that showed no resemblance to my everyday life back on the island of Maui. After three days of ritual—interspersed with a few margaritas, afternoon swims in the lake, and a deepened

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heart connection within the entire group—the time arrived for the climax of the initiation. That night I stayed by the fire very late attending my shift as the fire keeper. The presiding marakame, dressed in his colorful traditional shamans’ attire, sang ceremonially with his sacred feathers the entire night. The apprentices prepared themselves around the fire for the next step of their initiation. Before dawn the following morning several of us silently filed out of our cabins and gathered around the fire. The marakame was still singing. He was singing on behalf of the six bulls tied to trees in the field just a few yards away. It was dark, except for the light of the fire. The group of 100 people present was silent, waiting for instruction. The apprentices checked to make sure their machetes and knives were well sharpened. It was time for the sacrifice.

In my attempt to not witness more than I could handle, I stood back. This did me no good. I watched a surreal scene of a circle of six throats being slit highlighted by the small headlamps against the dark background of the open ﬁeld. I focused on the woman apprentice closest to me, who happened to be older, meeker, and smaller, as she struggled to sever her bull’s carotid arteries. Astonished, I witnessed the swishing of his tail, the ebb and ﬂow of his lungs, and the releasing of his blood through the huge gaping wound in his neck as he let out his last cry. One by one the bulls went silent. These proud and powerful creatures surrendered their lives with grace and dignity.

Stunned, I walked back to the fire shortly before the rest of the group. The apprentices and helpers returned and sat down, staring into the fire, covered with the bulls’ blood. There was silence as the group of 100 people sat reflecting on what had just happened, some with tears streaming down their faces, others with compassionate acceptance of what is.

They walked out to the field where the bulls stood, tied to a circle of scrub trees. Eliot approached each bull, stood for a moment, and called each apprentice over to his or her bull. He then kneeled down next to his own. The rest of us walked single file out to the field to perform our job as witnesses. I heard a snort that drew my attention toward the Mexican wrangler as he lassoed the back legs of one of the bulls, dragging it down to the ground. My heart leaped, and my eyes began to release the flow of tears, yet we still had not even entered the field. I held myself together so I could continue. The graduates and their handful of helpers kneeled down, surrounding each bull. They quietly, and gently stroked, soothed, and conveyed their love and gratitude to the bulls whose lives they were about to take as they lay on their sides with their feet tied. None of the bulls struggled. I walked into the field with the other witnesses. The air had a pre-dawn crispness to it. The only light was the glow from small spelunker lamps on the heads of the apprentices and their helpers. A woman next to me commented, “They better hurry, because they have to be done before the sun comes up.”

Grief ﬂooded through me. My entire body wept with the recognition of how many animals I had cooked and served without honoring. The blood of the bulls ﬂowing out of their bodies and into the ground had no resemblance to the neatly packaged items in plastic wrap presented in my culture. I could no longer deny the reality of what occurs to provide this nourishment.

The six bulls lay there in a circle surrounded by the apprentices and their helpers. Eliot gave the signal to begin. All six bulls started to moan as if crying out to one another as the apprentices began the task of slitting their throats all at the same time. Not a word was spoken among the witnesses as we all stood solemnly watching.

After the apprentices and marakame had completed their necessary work, we were called to join them at the tuki. A procession of women carrying bowls and baskets of food ﬁled out of the kitchen and placed our feast on the tables next to the altar. In the center was the sacred meat of the bulls. The elaborate ritual honoring

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and blessing this feast lasted a long time. Eventually, we passed by in single file to receive this food while the apprentices and marakame sat facing the altar dressed in full Huichol shaman attire. I approached the platter of meat with tears welling and a lump in my throat and stomach. I took a small portion, asking myself if I deserved this. I ate the meat and food plants slowly, with reverence, gratitude, and a pierced heart. We drummed and danced around the fire all night celebrating life as the incredible gift it is. The fresh memory and our pierced hearts reminded us of what love and sacrifice occurs so that we can have the experience of life. Our grief turned into ecstatic joy and laughter which filled us with a passionate superabundance of life-force energy. Our hearts and bodies opened to the whole picture of the life and death cycle and the incredible sacredness of it all as one flows into the other. Honoring these bulls created a moment in time when all was balanced. The first opportunity I had after returning home, I asked Eliot about the deeper significance of the sacrifice for the apprentices. With slow, deliberate words he shared with me that in the Huichol tradition, the bull volunteers his life so people may live, so balance of life and death is continually restored and held sacred. In the beginning, all the beings saw that people need lots of help and blessings from the gods so they can live in a better way. The animals agreed to give their lives so that a proper exchange could take place with the gods. The people are indebted to the animals for this very noble act. Before the initiation ritual the apprentices are merely human and unable to take sacred offerings to the gods. So the bulls volunteer to offer their lives to provide this exchange. They take with them the sacred offerings from the apprentices to the gods. The apprentices then become shamans and are able to be a bridge between the people and gods. They then can offer guidance from the gods to their communities. This is a huge gift to the communities. The people are greatly indebted to the bulls for this sacrifice and have a responsibility to the animals. When asked what they would like in exchange for giving their lives for the community the bulls responded with, “Respect and gratitude. Sing to us, thank us, and have rituals honoring the animals.” The rituals keep things in balance with 24

the animals. After asking Eliot if he was OK after the sacrifice, I now know what he meant when he replied, “Better than OK.” I no longer think of myself as just a chef. I am an alchemist given the sacred task of transforming the sacrificed life of one being, whether it is plant or animal, dead, or alive, into life-giving nourishment for another. I create opportunities for a sacred exchange of love, gratitude and celebration of the gift of life on Earth, just as anyone who cooks with love and care. I realize now that when I cook, in right relationship, I open the door for the love of the Great Mother to flow through the love and sacrifice of her creatures, filling us with Divine Nourishment. This is the nourishment I had always longed for. Her nourishment creates oneness right here on Earth as one becomes food for another, dispelling the illusion of feeling separate, and trapped in a body, as I was trapped in a cast as a young baby. Mary Lane lives on Maui where she teaches cooking classes, and hosts sacred vacations for women, reconnecting them to the sensual embrace of the natural world.

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Your Hands With gratitude to Martin Prechtel

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Do you remember, sometimes, that each of your hands contains an entire intelligent landscape? The plains of your palms stretch outward, criss-crossed by intricate roads that were laid down generations ago and continue far into tomorrow. Your fingers, as they hold the bone handle of a honed knife, know something of the deer whose thigh cradles the hammered steel. Your fingerprints feel the subtle curve that once propelled the lithe body across bright fields. And your thumbs! What your thumbs know! How to strum, weave, tie, carve and sculpt; how to grip a pen as it moves across a page, unrolling magical curves of words; how to rub a memory to life from the smooth gnarl of an oaken cane left leaning against an empty doorway; how to steady a blade as it slices a peeled potato, releasing bright moons into a simmering stew. Do you remember, sometimes, that your hands – yes, yours! – are cousins of White Tara’s? She has eyes in the center of her palms. She knows the language of wave-tossed stones and ancient maple bark. She sees with her hands the textures of the thirty-seven million things. She reads the Braille of the weeping world. Remembering this, rest your hands gently on whatever is near to you. See this substantial thing with your awakened fingers and palms. Then speak back to it, whatever it is, with a fine, thumb-formed gift of praise. — Barbara Miles

Living In undertaking a spiritual life, what matters is simple: We must make certain that our path is connected to our heart. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Jack KornďŹ eld

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the Heart Life STACY CLAMAGE

Illustrations by Helen Granger

here are places where the presence of God is unmistakable, the sacredness palpable, and when you go there you move slowly, drinking it in, letting the holiness ﬁll you. The Mission San Juan Bautista is one of those places, and it is also the kind of place you go when you’re grappling with questions and need divine guidance. Today I’m here because I want to make a huge change: I want to live a life that is connected to my heart. I don’t know exactly what that life will look like, but I know it doesn’t involve spending eight hours a day in a cubicle, self-medicating with food and depending on anti-anxiety pills to function properly. Now that I’ve been laid off from my corporate job, the slate is clean and I can start anew—theoretically, at least. When this type of opportunity has presented itself in the past, I’ve never had the courage to ignore the voices in my head that warn of dire consequences if I listen to my heart. What makes the mission so special? It’s situated almost on top of the San Andreas Fault— responsible for many a major earthquake—on land that overlooks a slice of the original El Camino Real, the “King’s Road,” that connected all twenty-one of the California missions centuries ago, as well as the rolling hills and farmland of the San Benito River Valley. You can wander through a roseand-cactus garden with hidden altars and a wishing well, visit the massive adobe church or browse in a gift store that holds more Jesus and Mary kitsch than you could ever want.

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Sacred Fire

Living the Heart Life

Having been raised in a Jewish household where the word Jesus was as offensive as any expletive, I’m baffled by the mission’s effect on me. Further troubling is the thought of thousands of Ohlone Indians “saved” by Christianity who are buried there. I am very much against inflicting ones cultural and religious beliefs on others, yet I come to this place where it is said that the indigenous people were baptized and then jailed, stripped of their property and forbidden to speak their native language or engage in their spirituality, and I feel the presence of God like nowhere else. I like to think that I am connecting to something greater than the horrific crimes that occurred here, or that the powerful presence of Spirit is due to the Native Americans who lived here for thousands of years before the missionaries came, but it could be that I am just very dim.

Today I am greeted by a rooster strutting along the garden wall. Inside the gift shop I search through tiny plastic drawers, closely examining each saint medallion, trying to decide which one will provide comfort and protection. I finally settle on Maria Rosa Mystica, Mother Mary of Miracles. As I pay for the medallion at the counter I worry that someone will point to me and shout, “Fraud, she’s Jewish!” and the woman at the cash register will demand an explanation. But it doesn’t happen. Last November, I came to the gift shop and bought a gold crucifix that I secretly wore under my shirt for weeks. The crucifix was part of an unexpected and short-lived desire to become Catholic. In recent years I had turned to the nondualistic Eastern traditions of Zen and Advaita Vedanta to fulfill my spiritual longings, and the sudden yearning for Jesus and Mary was a weird twist in my journey. I began hanging out at Our Lady of Peace Church, learned to genuflect and make the sign of the cross, and attended the Wednesday night Our Lady of Perpetual Help Novena. I spent my lunch hour at the base of the thirty-two foot stainless steel statue of Mary, the “awesome Madonna” as the statue is sometimes called, watching a steady stream of people kneel on the concrete before her, bow their heads and pray. I went to the library and checked out the video, Sister Wendy in Conversation with Bill Moyer, and longed to shave my head and live in a hermitage like Sister Wendy and, although I probably wouldn’t have admitted it, be famous like her, too.

The only people I told were my therapist and dear friend Carrie, who I knew wouldn’t laugh at me for secretly participating in a faith I knew almost nothing about. My therapist raised her eyebrows when I confessed to wanting to be baptized, but she allowed my new-found interest in Catholicism to play out on its own. Eventually, I figured out I wasn’t longing to convert. I was longing for what the rituals and symbols of the church represent universally: a willingness to be transformed, to let go of attachment and be filled with Christ, to directly know the heart of the Mother, the female embodiment of the divine. By Christmas, the crucifix was tucked away in my jewelry box, but those longings are still present today. Inside the mission church, there are six saint statues behind the main altar: Dominic de Guzman, Isadore of Madrid, Francis of Assisi, John the Baptist, Pascal Baylon and Anthony of Padua. Every time I come here I expect that at any moment they will turn their heads and talk like the characters in Disneyland’s Country Bear Jamboree, except their stories will be about dark nights of the soul and wanting to be instruments of peace. The church is empty except for me and the saints, and the familiar voices in my head are laughing at me for wanting to live authentically. I try to drown them out with thoughts of what I will do now that I am unemployed and have free time on my hands—go to Paris, rent a summer beach house, volunteer at an animal shelter, all things I will never do—and beneath it all, a whisper comes from my heart: I want to go to a quiet place and be with God. The voices in my head laugh louder; they say my heart is ridiculous. Thomas Merton wrote, “The deepest spiritual instinct in man is that urge of inner truth which demands that he be faithful to himself: to his deepest and most original potentialities.” He is talking about knowing your true nature, about allowing everything that is false to slip away. But how do you live in the world as your deepest self? I suppose there isn’t one answer, that when a life based on fear and the desire for security is no longer enough, you let go of what doesn’t work and create the space for truth to arise, even if the voices in your head disapprove. You let go of needing to know exactly what the future holds and allow your heart to lead you, moment by moment, day by day. Pages 26 and 27, Taking a Walk in the Woods, Helen Granger, 2005.

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I was raised to believe that the sexual and spiritual are one. But probably I was taking that too literally when, as a teenager, I had the job of Sunday janitor at the family church. My job was to open the many doors, grant access to the supply rooms, make sure the restrooms were stocked, and sit in the office to direct late arrivals and answer the phone during the service. Usually my girlfriend, a lovely and delightful young woman three years older than I, would arrive shortly after the service began. While the hymns and Lord’s Prayer and prayers of confession played on the office loudspeaker, we would kiss and caress in the pastor’s over-stuffed chair. When the sermon began, we would go to the elevator (also wired with sound), take it to the top floor, and turn it off. While the pastor proclaimed, we would throw ourselves at each other with all the heat and energy our young bodies could muster. Then, as the offering plate was being passed, we’d smooth out our clothes and make our way down to my station, vibrating with the electricity of our loving. But more than once we lost track of the service and didn’t pull apart until we heard the recessional being played. The elevator would descend and the doors would open to the surprised faces of some older members. We’d emerge, impossibly rumpled, the smell of our sex rising around us like a halo.

Kate Ransohoff

Quilt This is as plain as I can make it: The Planet is in great trouble. Peoples of the Earth are in great trouble with themselves and each other. Now is the time for new actions, drawn from radically new perceptions. Only thus will the Peoples of the Earth be able to heal themselves and the Planet on which our human life depends. No one is exempt from this task.

verything in this article is commentary to this text, which first saw light as prologue to the premiere of Quilt at Turtle Studios, Watertown, Mass. on April 29, 2005. Quilt is a work that honors all makers of art equally, that sews together a worldview of art without a hierarchy of artists; where fine art, craft, traditional art and all other arts are seen to be equally necessary and useful. Turtle Studios is a democratically-run, not-for-profit studio of 40 artists and writers founded on the beliefs that art comes from spirit, has meaning, and can be made by any person. I am an artist and a writer who has been around and involved with the arts since childhood. I am a studio artist, not a public speaker. It’s not natural for me to organize material, particularly verbal material, in a linear, sequential way. And while I have always enjoyed books—to read and to make—I have never been comfortable in our rectilinear world of letters.

Photos by Jeff Magidson 30

With my peculiarities of processing, I have spent my happiest time with language when studying Biblical

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Hebrew, which reads right to left. This seems backwards to the English-speaker, although many languages are read this way: Arabic, Japanese and Chinese among them. The Talmud is a Jewish work of many volumes. In that tradition it is considered an authoritative record consisting of rabbinic discussions on Jewish law, ethics, customs, legends and stories compiled over several centuries. One of the Talmud’s most unique features is the layout of its pages. Each page carries a text in the center, surrounded by the commentaries of

different rabbis gathered over a period of many years. The reader engages with this multiplicity of author and text at the same time. Quilt is organized in a similar way. You are invited to enjoy, participate and engage with the ideas of Quilt in your own style and fashion. Quilt has evolved to be more than my work although that is still growing. Called “The Quilt Project,” it has become an activity of Turtle Studios as an expanding group effort to make its basic premise concretely available to more people.

There are three fundamental corollaries to our worldview of art:

People from every country make art, and have since humans arrived on the planet; Geography matters; Art existed before money.

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Schottenstein Edition of the Talmud. Courtesy of ArtScroll/Mesorah Publications.

Art is fundamental and its production has been ceaseless for thousands and thousands of years. People all over the world have made art according to their own needs and standards. There is no end to the creativity of vessels, baskets, tools, textiles, painting, sculpture and video, in making scratches on all manner of available surfaces. A balanced worldview of art honors all these forms equally. It does not allow dominance of one perspective, medium or modality over another. Traditional and modern, signed and unsigned, ceremonial, secular, religious, male and female are considered of equal merit. This necessitates a reconsideration of how the world really looks. For many of us in the U. S. this is a big stretch.

How we see the world determines in large part how we understand it. We need to understand that the geography of our planet is a construct, just like other forms of human creativity. There is no up or down to a ball of rock whirling through space. Even the magnetic poles tell us North and South move constantlyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and even switch ends across the eons. Modern mapmakers are revisiting geography and offering new, more precise and factual ways to imagine the realities of the Earth. When I look at the equalarea projection maps drawn by Peters, Dyer and others, I know these are not the maps I grew up with and from which my understanding of the shape of the world was formed. Looking at these new maps it seems ludicrous to think that Europe, America, or the two together should have such dominance over other perspectives. Suddenly it seems clear that we have as much or more to learn as to teach.

2nd panel break--map

Optional panel split here or at the bottom of next paragraph

Hobo-Dyer Equal Area Projection Map. South Up/Australia centered. For maps and other related teaching materials contact: ODT, Inc., PO Box 134, Amherst MA 01004 USA; (800-736-1293; Fax: 413-549-3503; E-mail: odtstore@odt.org. Web: www.odt.org. ÂŠ2004 www.odt.org.

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Quilt For most of human history the arts have been seamlessly integrated into a community’s way of life. In relatively recent history, for its own unique reasons, the Western world, in particular, has split art off from everyday life. We now tend to call art “ﬁne art” and consider what is not “ﬁne art” lesser or other. Many people and their arts have not been included equally in the pantheon of Art, especially the arts from what are called “developing” nations or indigenous peoples. Remember: art pre-existed money. There are other uses of art, which must not be lost in the push to turn everything into a saleable commodity.

Geography matters. Where people live and the conditions in which they live determine to a large extent what they see and hear, as well as how they may respond. Geography limits naturally available materials and contributes in large measure to how arts have been made and for what purposes. Different parts of the world have their own historical, religious, political, and physical features as well. The arts deal with all facets of human life. This includes all the ways by which people have learned to understand and make sense of the world and to ﬁnd their place in the scheme of life. There is no area of human interaction— whether with animals, plants or spirits, with other humans, or with human constructs such as math and science—that is beyond the scope of art-making.

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While we are well aware of the environmental challenges that threaten so many plants and animals, we forget that our human resources are also delicate, also endangered. According to the chair of the U. S. National Endowment for the Humanities, of the 7,000 languages now spoken on the planet, “half of them will probably be lost in the next century.” With those languages will disappear the traditions, economies, intellectual content and rational capacities used by human beings for survival through the millennia.

UNESCO also makes an urgent priority of the preservation of what it calls “the intangible cultural heritage.” They include oral traditions and expressions, performing arts, social practices, rituals and festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe, and traditional craftsmanship. These problems of ecology, lifestyle, culture and understanding are matters of life and death for our children and us. As artists we tend to think we have little direct authority to improve them. Although we may not be politicians, bankers, technologists or other “Masters of the Universe,” as Tom Wolfe teased, we have more power and authority than we often remember. We have responsibility as citizens, consumers, parents and survivors—and as artists who cherish the ultimate resource of our creativity. When we make, appreciate and value the works that have the inherent capability to hold the “worldview of art where all artists everywhere in the world are considered equal,” we actively contribute to a world that will protect and love all its resources and peoples.

Panel Break For me, the traditional quilt provides a metaphor for the work at hand. It is a natural form for adding and shaping in pieces. Quilts have been made in places of comfort and discomfort, wealth and poverty. They have been given for warmth, beauty, to celebrate and remember. Writing, commentary and symbols are natural components of traditional quilts. These many levels of possibility for creating meaning and nuance seem admirably suited to a work that intends to shift the perception of viewers and participants. So the work is named Quilt.

The arts, we know, are not merely decorative, but essential and primary. They make culture, whether or not their forms fit easily into modern western definitions. A quilt is a coverlet, a protective covering, in this instance, for all artists everywhere. A quilt is not, nor can it be hierarchical. It is made of many pieces that are sewed, stitched or somehow put together to make a whole. The whole is made of all the parts. If you take any part away you have a “hole” that is no longer “whole”. Of course, that hole can be patched or filled so the “whole” again appears. Quilts are two-sided: there can thus be more than one point of view at the same time in the same place. Explicit and implicit, word and image, literate and non-literate can co-

exist equally. They can be made by anyone, almost anywhere. There is no need for special education or training. They can be made from whatever is at hand. The used scrap of cloth can be employed in a given pattern or in the most creative, individualistic way. As the quilters of Gee’s Bend, Alabama have shown, these quilts can also be seen as objects of enormous beauty and power. A quilt can be signed or unsigned, can be made by or represent an individual or a group. Quilts legitimize the anonymous, the unknown and the unrecognized. The stories of quilters at their craft, re-afﬁrming and instructing, keeping human memory and language alive, are an integral process in the creation of a quilt. A quilt can travel easily to other places, in whole or in segments as well as be gathered together in one place to expand as needed. A good example of this is the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which is billed as the world’s largest on-going community art project. Since 1987 it has grown to more than 44,000 panels, traveled the world and been shown both indoors and out. A quilt, like other textiles including African kente cloth and the quipos of the Incas, can use patterns, shapes and numberings for messages, both hidden and overt. In Chile under the military dictatorship of Gen. Pinochet (1973-89), women used scraps of cloth to create arpilleras that documented their lives and memorialized loved ones who were “disappeared.” Scholars hotly debate whether slave quilts in the U. S. were used to “map” the way north to freedom and the location of safe haven on the “Underground Railroad.” I like to work by “rules” that enhance and reﬂect the meaning of the whole work. Thus Quilt is made from recycled brown paper pages, 5 x 7 or 7 x 10-inch, which are “sewn”

together as hanging panels or folded together as small books. Both sides are worked. One, the front, carries words, scraps of cloth, buttons, paper, that are glued or stitched together. This side holds the artist’s individual commentary and reveals as much or as little as may feel safe or is desired. The other side, the back, is completely visual and expresses the spiritual, historical or other community meaning. While this project began as one artist’s response to the proposition set out in the opening text, many artists and non-artists alike have contributed their unique perspectives by creating individual panels. Perhaps you are ready to learn more about or join “The Quilt Project” and become a participant in this world endeavor of human creativity and begin the healing. “The Quilt Project” can be reached at Turtle Studios, (617) 9236233 or Kate Ransohoff via e-mail at krartist@rcn.com.

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(Teeth) Louise Berliner

remember her teeth as she bit into an apple. It wasn’t so much the sound, the great tearing of apple, nor the juice escaping around the corners of her mouth, but the gigantic incisors making the kill. They seemed alive and enormous, larger than the apple or even her mouth, nose, eyes— weapons that Baba Yaga herself would be proud to own. It wasn’t as if they glistened with an unnatural glow, no, and they weren’t terribly white, though she brushed after every meal. They were actually on their way to yellow, and flashed gold and silver when she yelled at me, which was often, and they were sharp and looked extra long in front where her gums had receded. When she closed her mouth, they vanished, and she was Mommy again. But anytime she opened them wide enough to take a bite, they ate my world. Maybe she wasn’t really my mother. Maybe I was a changeling, found in the woods, left there in exchange for her real child, a baby ogre. It seemed plausible. Her hair was black and straight, while mine was brown and curly. She had huge teeth, while I was missing several right in front. She had this way of absentmindedly picking around and scratching the surface of her teeth with her pinky nail. She often had bits of green stuck up by her gums, and I still cringe at the memory of her sliding her pinky—in public, no less—past the corner of her lips, to dislodge some errant piece of her lunch. Then there were the hours she spent flossing. She’d lean over her sink to get closer to the mirror, grimace and begin methodically moving the white string back and forth with great concentration. It was an art form with her. I can still hear the pop as she forced the floss down between her molars. This was almost as gruesome as the apple, yet riveting, as if this ritual might hold some special meaning that I was not yet able to decipher. Lipstick caught on her teeth, too. I found this truly amazing. Those carnivorous teeth liked pink! I wondered if they liked little girls. Perhaps they wore the pink as a disguise, the better to eat me with.

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Now don’t get me wrong, I loved my mother, but I was prone to look for magic wherever I could ﬁnd it. If her teeth belonged in fairytale, I was thrilled to fear them, because everything else about her, about my whole family, seemed terribly ordinary, and I refused to be ordinary. Better a changeling than a second grader at Woodside Elementary. Early on, my mother had made the mistake of reading me fairytales at bedtime. She couldn’t have known that I considered them fact. Nor could she have imagined the terrors and delights I put myself through after she’d kissed me good night. She must have seen the act of reading bedtime stories as a necessary evil that would soon pass once I could read myself, for she never gave me more than one tale a night, though I often begged for more. Little did she know, I was determined to make her read to me every night of my life. I imagined us both old women, with Mom in the rocking chair, still plumbing the depths of The Red Book of Fairytales, or perhaps the olive one. Meanwhile I raced to learn how to read so I could have all those lovely princesses and fearsome dragons to myself. But I didn’t let on I knew how. My parents worried about this. As it was, I spent too much time by myself. What was I doing all day in my room? I’d overhear them whispering. Should they take me to a therapist? It was about at this time, of mastering the reading and still having my ears fed with story, that I grew more superstitious and observant of the magic around me. I was not really certain if my mother was my mother. Rather, I knew she was, but I could convince myself, terrifyingly, that she was not. And at those times I would ﬁxate on her teeth. The problem was, that once I focused on her teeth, I began to look at teeth

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everywhere, and truly it was frightening. Teeth looked at too closely no longer resemble teeth. They become the stuff of legend. My imagination had my poor little Nana nibbling on orphans’ knuckles in the privacy of her rented apartment, and strangers on the street were relatives of pirates and piranhas and worse. Meanwhile, my own front teeth stubbornly refused to grow, and I developed a lisp. I was teased by my classmates, even the girls I counted as friends, and I found myself more and more reluctant to talk. I remembered some tale my mother had read of a mermaid who traded her voice for a pair of legs. I decided to pretend I couldn’t talk. I was the only one who knew I’d traded my voice (and my two front teeth) for the ability to dance. I’d picked dancing because, although I lacked a mermaid’s tail, I was at that time enrolled in a dance class in which it was becoming apparent I had two left feet. I earnestly believed that if I did not speak for a day or three, I might improve and grow up to be a prima ballerina like Patricia McBride or that Russian woman, whatever her name was.

second grade teacher, was fond of what she called “little experiments.” “Let’s just do a little experiment,” she’d say, then have us do something ridiculous like try to spell “pear” differently than p-e-a-r. I would tell my parents that we were doing an experiment at school and that I was to see how long I could go without speaking. I wasn’t sure if they were dumb enough to fall for this, but it was the best I could do. Besides, I was looking forward to pantomiming for my supper. Telling my parents and getting no reaction from them was one of the worst moments of my life. Now I was sure they didn’t love me. Okay for you. Once I was famous it wouldn’t matter and anyway, they weren’t my real parents. The next day at school I had the same experience. When Mrs. Neale called my name, I pointed to my throat and mouthed “laryngitis.” I wasn’t sure if mouthing was cheating or not, I just didn’t know how to spell that long word. Mrs. Neale made a quack of sympathy and gave me a lozenge for my throat. I felt a knife’s moment of guilt, or perhaps it was terror. If grownups were so easily fooled, who was really

I worked it all out during recess. While my ex-friends played house in the corner of the yard, I climbed to the top of the monkey bars and sat there like a mad scientist thinking and plotting, plotting and thinking. What could I tell my parents? I couldn’t just come home from school and casually announce I was never talking again. Nor could I say, “Well see here guys, I’ve got to spin some nettles and make magical shirts for some swans I know, who used to be princes, so I’ll talk to you in seven years or so.” I didn’t even know what a nettle looked like. I ﬁnally struck upon a plan, that, although not foolproof, might work. Mrs. Neale, my

(Teeth)

running the place? But then I thought of Peter Pan. I began to feel powerful.

voice of the hand said, “That’ll be quite enough young lady.” My understanding of English ﬂed. What was she saying?

I couldn’t wait for dance class. I was going to amaze them all. My teacher, Madame, would grovel before me and apologize for all the times she’d humiliated me in front of the class. My ex-friends would be astounded by my grace and beauty, and Ellen Finney would immediately become my best friend. I hadn’t counted on the piano player.

I stood there slowly awakening. I was conscious of how dirty the studio ﬂoor looked, and how the walls needed painting. It was better to look at the walls than the smirking faces of my classmates. Had I not been beautiful and tremendous out there? Had I not soared? Or was the magical trade a scam and my day of silence wasted? I decided the mermaid story must’ve been just that—a lousy story. As for believing in magic, that was for babies. Never again would I be betrayed into thinking I could have magic. And yet—

The piano player, Mrs. Block, was a middle-aged Amazon of large proportions. When she played a march By God it was a march. It was a miracle that she didn’t pound her way through several pianos. As it was, the one at the dance studio was chronically out of tune and once in while would actually move as she played. Did I mention she wore dentures? If teeth were scary, Mrs. Block’s were beyond scary. I had the sense that if I ever got too close to her while she was pounding away, they might actually jump out and bite me! So I was always careful not to be last in line, because Last-in-line inevitably stood by the piano bench waiting her turn. You can imagine, then, my chagrin to be placed last in line just as I was about to prove myself. Still, I threw back my shoulders, avoided looking at both Mrs. Block and the piano full of extra-strength tooth-like keys, and tried to find the rhythm as my turn approached. We were supposed to be butterflies. Mrs. Block was attempting to play a butterfly-like song, but it sounded to me like a march. It was hard to feel like flitting when the music demanded stomping. Could I have misheard Madame’s instructions? I had imagined myself, winged and a smidgen wistful, hopping from flower to flower in search of a best butterfly friend. My dancing had to have a story or I couldn’t do it. Of course that was the problem with dance class to begin with—most of the time there was no story in it.

That evening I surprised my mother by telling her I didn’t want any bedtime stories. “What, speaking again?” she asked. I nodded. When she asked why I didn’t want a story, I said stories were babyish and besides I could read for myself anyway. She looked a little taken aback. As she bent down to kiss me goodnight, she lingered there, smelling me. As she pulled away, I asked her to open her mouth. Gingerly, I put my middle three fingers on her bottom teeth and moved them slowly across the ragged peaks. Teeth, after all. Mom was by this time getting worried. Did I feel okay? Did I want to talk about it? Out flew my butterfly and my disappointments, the tears. I heard the relief in her voice as she cradled me in her arms and smoothed my hair whispering,” My baby, my baby.” Later she read me “Beauty and the Beast,” and as I fell asleep I thought, “I flew for a while, I really think I flew.”

And then it was my turn. I tried to move to the music, but found my inner rhythms much more compelling. In my mind I was hearing some half-remembered song from The Nutcracker, and I was imagining my gloriously costumed wings sweeping this way and that. I was magnificent! I was princess—no queen—of the butterflies. I twirled and floated, leaped and flew and was all that was Butterfly. For a brief moment I thought I’d actually effected a magical transformation. Somewhere back on earth I heard a voice saying,” No no no that’s all wrong, you’ve got the rhythm all wrong.” Then some loud marching clapping of hands and the words, “One, two, three. One, two, three.” I was in the middle of a fantastic twizzle. I continued, trying to ignore the voice, until I felt a strong hand come and take me by the arm, pulling me completely off balance. The Page 36, The House of Cards: Illusion; page 37, Whirling: At Home in the Void; this page, Surrender, Jane Karchmar. www.janekarchmar.com. 38

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A man holds an acorn in his hand. He calls out to his young daughter, Come here, Child, and look at this grandfather oak I’m holding. It’s just a seed, she replies. Don’t be mistaken, says the father. The wood is already cut and dried, stacked high in our winter’s woodpile.

Leon, Maria and Arzhan.

The clear aquamarine waters of the Kumir river.

Looking out in front of a cave high in the Altai Mountains.

Maria leads a pilgrimage to the petroglyphs.

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Leon and

Maria in the BILL PFEIFFER

Altai

We were high in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. The late summer darkness had just settled around our small campfire. The gentle gurgle and whoosh of the clearest river I’d ever seen could be heard in the background. Leon urged me, as he had so many other times, to pay attention to the fire. ”The spirits of life and death are dancing there. They say all kinds of important things. When a burning branch or log changes position, there is a message. Listen and see.” Leon Secatero, 62, headman of the Canoncito band of Navajo, is no ordinary medicine man. In fact, he does not even use that term to describe himself. “Spiritual leader” is more to his liking, but all his friends and admirers acknowledge his healing powers and ability to commune with non-ordinary reality in a way that benefits the larger community. I was one of several translators between him and our Altai hosts. We were part of a cultural exchange group sponsored by the Sacred Earth Network, an environmental non-profit dedicated to bringing together elders and shamans from Native Siberian and Native American tribes to share their traditions and, in the process, find mutual solidarity and support. Most of us had been packed together in impossibly uncomfortable vehicles for a week. We had traveled all over the countryside visiting sacred sites, eating much and sleeping little—a deadly combination. I was swimming in fatigue. Looking at Leon you would not know he had slept less than I. This was our last opportunity to share on a deeper level before parting the next day, so everyone dug in to retrieve his or her extra psychic reserves. A young Altai woman, Rollanda, came forward to ask Leon’s advice on marital problems. She was ready to leave her alcoholic, philandering husband but did not know how. Although her husband had not been violent towards her, she was afraid of some kind of retaliation against her and her young son. She was visibly troubled and physically ill with a series of minor ailments. Temporarily leaving the fire, we went inside a tent and Leon alternately spoke and sang gently to her. He was working simultaneously on the emotional, spiritual and mental levels. I noticed that she became more hopeful and energized as the session continued. He did not argue with her fears, but outmaneuvered them by infusing in her a powerful sense of her ancestral lineage and how that is connected to a bigger, deeper web of relations stretching into the future. He just knew—and conveyed that knowing—that her son would grow up strong. She was going to live for a long time and help her people. She would pass this healing ceremony on to her tribe, but she needed to develop strength and patience. He also told her that the solution to her problems with her husband would reveal itself. Leon confided in me later that he could see that her husband was already “fooling around.” It was just a matter of time before he would leave. Exiting into the blackness we could see Maria sitting by the fire. She is an exceptional shaman or xahm in the Altai language, who came to her occupation in a classic Siberian way. When Leon asked her how she had found her path, she said she either had to yield to her destiny, become seriously ill, or maybe even die. Plagued by continued illness until the age of 32, she met the renowned Altai shaman, Aleksei Kalkin. He said to her, “Your illness is a special sign. The coming times will be very difficult for the people of the Altai. Many will need your help as a healer. The more you help, the stronger you will become.”

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Leon and Maria in the Altai

I was listening to this exchange since Chagat, a brilliant young Altai linguist, was translating. I decided the best strategy to deal with my fatigue was to be a “fly on the wall.” Maybe I could even catch a little nap. Instead, as the fire danced, I perked up. This was not a usual conversation with lots of word slinging but almost a ritual with an unspoken protocol. Maria asked Leon how his work began. Leon spoke half-jokingly about his amazing life. “I was working at Social Security. I had it all. The house was paid for. Steady money coming in with a retirement package. Then a bunch of tribal warriors and elders came to my office. They literally dragged me away, and told me it was time to work for my people. When I said no, they took me to a hogan and did not give me food or drink for four days. Finally I relented. I remembered that I was trained for my new job when I was young.” A log moved in the fire and an owl hooted. Leon became more serious. He talked for a long time about some of the events of the past week and the importance of our meeting at this crucial time in history. He summed up by saying: “It is no accident we are together. All the indigenous prophecies talk about a time when the five-fingered ones would be so caught in the illusion of separation that they would forget their Original Instructions. This forgetting has caused terrible suffering for everyone and everything. Now those who can remember what it was like to live on this Earth in a good way can make a clearing through the brush for the others to follow. It’s all written in the petroglyphs. You are lucky to have so many on your cliff sides but you must protect them. They are a living language that can light the way ahead.” Maria looked up at the stars. She made a gesture, thanking the spirits above.

“Leon, thank you for coming all this way. My star guides showed me you were coming. Maybe you know about the Ukok Princess? She was buried on the Ukok plateau, at the southern edge of the Altai Mountains, right at the border of Mongolia, about 2500 years ago. She was a shaman and warrior, buried with six of her horses. She also communicated with the stars. In 1994 a team of Russian archeologists found her perfectly preserved body in a tomb underneath the permafrost. She started coming to me in my dreams. I had to go visit her in Novosibirsk (a large Siberian city north of the Altai). She was in a vacuum chamber but her incredible tattoos were starting to wear off. More importantly, the spirits of the buried are sensitive. They need to be respected and left alone. The Princess told me, ‘It is of crucial importance that I get reburied because I am losing my power and my power is part of the power of the Altai. You must ﬁgure out how to get me back.’ I’ve done ceremony, prayed, talked to hundreds of people and collected thousands of signatures for the Princess’s reburial but so far she is still in her metal and glass tomb.” Maria described the situation with the Princess for over an hour. She was calmly and powerfully upset. “Those of us still communicating with the Spirits and who love this land like our children need to stay connected. The monster called Progress is devouring the Earth. So far the Altai has not succumbed, but with the Princess not in her rightful place our defenses are weak.” She paused and looked at Arzhan, her younger friend and colleague. They travel to villages all over the Altai bringing the old ceremonies back to a people only ten years free of the Soviet straightjacket. Arzhan is an extremely talented kaichi, a kind of throat-singing musical shaman. He looked back to see if she would continue. She did not. A temporary melancholy hung in the air. So Arzhan began to play his topshur (a violin-sized string instrument) and I could hear his voice vibrating in different frequencies that rebounded soulfully from the trees. I slipped into that dreamtime space that overcomes me often in that mysterious, powerful land called Siberia. I was riding my horse along the Altai steppe. Galloping away I heard a twangy, otherworldly high-pitched sound in the distance. It was Maria back at the ﬁre playing the Jew’s harp. The rhythm of the stars kept time with the river. Looking over at Leon, I noticed both a tear and a smile. Bill Pfeiffer organizes exchanges between traditional indigenous peoples, particularly those living in North America and Siberia. See www.sacredearthnetwork.org for more information. Note: for more information on the Ukok Princess see “A Mummy Unearthed from the Pastures of Heaven,” National Geographic (October 1994).

Author in front of healing yurt.

Sacred Fire

Autumn 2005

Pistachios crack open your clam-shell smile, slip out of that papery robe, let my tongue curl round your ripened heart. you taste of desert, of ocean, of caravans undulating across windswept sands, of dusty outdoor markets, round baskets of plump dates and tender pink-blood figs, sunrise-ruby pomegranate seeds, of thick wool rugs woven in rich harem colors poured onto floors in cool and darkened rooms. you taste of whitewashed walls and azure sky and the cracking of sun-blistered skin, of heat that penetrates through stone, through earth, through night. you taste of stars overhead and the dancing light of eyes, of silver beads along a hemline, of bite-size mirrors flashing signals in the dark. you taste of warm flatbread cooked on charred and ancient baking stones, the green bite of fresh mint, dark coffee made with water kept cool deep underground. you taste of kneeling, bowing, head to earth to east five times each day, the harsh drone of one man’s voice calling, calling from a tall white tower. you taste of ensh’allah, marhaba, of salt winds off the sea, of wooden dhows, of roasted lamb, of the loose jaws and lush eyelashes of camels. you taste of storms rising from below, of fiery heat and lashing sands that strip paint from wood and flesh from men, of the earth roaring, of blindness and bone. you taste of shops of gold, of wedding lights, of hennaed hands, of courtyard fountains and stolen bikes, of jellyfish and deflated soccer balls. you taste of cool tile floors and red-rimmed eyes and silence — Nora Harms

Autumn 2005

Sacred Fire

Beyond Wild Judyth Hill Poetry dealt me an interesting hand this year. I have often thought how the poet holds thick, sustained electricity between self and the world, then offers it out in conduits of crafted, pungent, alert language. Now, after eight feet of snow, a long winter, a wet spring, a lush garden, and a panoply of wildflowers in our canyon, a need to re-see these delicate relations pops up, crazy and willing, volunteer blue flax and rocket dame, a flush of beebalm, a camaraderie of swallowtails and proboscis moths. My land speaks over and over to me of the requirement of Attention. Asks my willingness to just look, to walk this place, Rockmirth, this 111 acres of ponderosa-ed canyon, in a practice, as Wallace Stevens described, of Radical Amazement. Noticing here the skyward spinning courtships of feisty Rufus hummingbirds; there, the migrating return of black hollyhocks from 2 years past across the garden’s stony path. Grass seed, brought in from the Canadian River watershed over in the Kiowa Grasslands Preserve, now, 3 years later, waist high; and this morning an indigo bunting appears, mirabile dictu, at the feeder, maybe never to be seen again—but we knew, we saw, we were there…. I’ve turned again to my playground view of the world when, knees slung over the cool, round bars of the jungle gym, I’d consider the intricate flicker of the maple leaves in air, and wonder if the trees weren’t actually rooted in blue sky, and if the treetops aren’t secretly the earth-anchored parts. I’m still wondering after all these years, but sure of one thing: Poetry allows me a firm perch on the solid ground of inquiry. It’s worth everything. So again, I stumble happily, pen, tuning fork and spade in hand to ply my ecstatic trade, as questioner, as revisionist, as listener, as maker of mud pies. Around the year 1000, the Japanese woman poet, Izumi Shikibu, wrote this five-line tanka:

And what is it that happens? Quite simply, revelation—but of what? Of the vivid actual, the place where we are. Listen to the immediacy of these lines from an eighth or ninth century Chinese poem, “Men Ask the Way to Cold Mountain,” by Han-Shan, translated by Gary Snyder: Clambering up the Cold Mountain path, Cold Mountain trail goes on and on, The long gorge choked with scree and boulders, The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain The pine sings, but there’s no wind. Who can leap the world’s ties And sit with me among the white clouds? Ah, place. Place, the oldest, newest truth. The adobe brick road. And didn’t Dorothy say, “There’s no place like poem?” The great German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, was, for a time, secretary to the sculptor Rodin. When Rilke reached a dry period in his writing, Rodin urged him to go to the Zoo and to look at an animal until he saw it. Two or three weeks, Rodin said, might not be too long. So, Rilke learned to see, really see, and the practice of his observations ﬁlled his poems with passionate intensity. He wrote of panther, of swan, and a truth of attention to the outer world began to suffuse all his poems. That, then, allowed this experience, the mysterious presence of the invoked invisible: ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO We have no idea what his fantastic head was like, where the eyeballs were slowly swelling. But his body now is glowing like a gas lamp, whose inner eyes, only turned down a little,

Yes, the wind blows terribly here –

hold their ﬂame, shine….

but moonlight also leaks

and the body wouldn’t send out light from every edge

between the roof planks

as a star does ... for there is no place at all

of this ruined house.

that isn’t looking at you.You must change your life.

— translation by Jane Hirshﬁeld

This tells, in ﬂoods of cool lit night-wisdom, a magic secret. When we move out beyond the shelter of the human-made world, we are plunged into the transformational moment— that ﬂash-pan of relation when everything can happen.

— translation by Robert Bly “Beyond Wild” was previously printed in slightly different in Crosswinds. Sacred FireformAutumn 2005

It is this deep, taut seeing, and with it, listening, tasting, yes and mmmmm, smelling of where we are that is the crossing over into what poet Wendell Berry called “The Vow,” that marriage we make to being absolutely present here, up front and center, and plunged into the thick of it.

To live in a place and write in connection with that place is what we really mean by being indigenous. Gary Snyder writes with stunning coherence and simplicity in his book, “A Place in Space,” that to begin to deeply inhabit a place is what allows us to create true community, both with the other-than human and with each other.

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

In Snyder’s essay, “A Single Breath,” he offers a poem by Ikkyu, a 15th century Zen master, titled “Ridiculing Literature”:

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. — Wendell Berry That was the gift the long hard winter offered—that learning to rest in the alive center of Right Here, to fall, once and for all, in love with the Way It Is, what the Buddhists call tathata or “thusness,” a moment so richly written, by Colorado genius and elder, Lois Beebe Hayna, in “Crosswinds and Talismans”:

Humans are endowed with the stupidity of horses and cattle. Poetry was originally a work out of hell. Self-pride, false pride, suffering from the passions, We must sigh for those taking this path to intimacy with demons. Snyder went on to comment, “Poetry steers between nonverbal states of mind and the intricacies of our gift of language (a wild system born with us).” Snyder’s friend, Northern California poet, Doc Dachtler, wrote this response from his ﬁshing camp: Ikkyu says, “Humans are endowed with the stupidity of horses and cattle.”

“Outside your window a bird steps carelessly onto air and air

I think Ikkyu is full of shit.

buoys him. How must it be to lean

Humans are endowed with a stupidity all their own.

on nothing till that nothing lifts you!

Horse and cattle know what to do.

It’s the pure practice of awe. It’s give and let give. It’s touch and know and, better still, it’s right here, the Altar of the Ordinary, a shrine we fill with acorns and adverbs, good coffee and thick cumulus—a way we find by stopping the search, as if what mattered were always elsewhere. The enigmatic, magnificent Sufi poet Rumi wrote in “The Water You Want”:

They do it well…. They don’t need poetry. We are looking at a mystery here… You say language is (a wild system born with us). I agree. It is wilder than wild. If we were just wild we wouldn’t need language.

Give up subtle thinking, the twofold, threefold

Maybe we are beyond wild.

multiplication of mistakes. Listen to

That makes me feel better.

the sound of waves within you… There you are, dreaming of your thirst,

Me too.

when the water you want is inside the big vein on your neck. — translation by Coleman Barks

Autumn 2005

Sacred Fire

�eaver

eavers have taken up residence in my pond. They’ve put a foot-high dam across the outlet creek, raising the entire shoreline that same foot, and creating a half-mile circumference of submerged shore grasses for nighttime nibbling. There are at least three of them. But I call them individually and collectively “Beaver.” In the wilderness, Beaver’s night movements in the water would be safe from human eyes, except during the bright periods of the moon. On a still night, only the stars reflecting on the surface would bob in Beaver’s slight wake. Here, the reflections of multiple city lights on the water warp and distort as the animal circumnavigates his domain, patrolling the shorelines and feeding spots of his pond. Last night, I sat away from the shore, near chewed-up Russian olives. Beaver swam by three times, just next to the shore by a tree twenty feet ahead of me. Beaver is master of silence, of darkness, and of deep water, forming boundaries of silence, space, and water from predators. He makes no sound, gives off no scent while in the water, and can dive deep in an instant. He comes up on shore after dark to gnaw bark or fell branches for future consumption, or construction of his lodge or dam. If alarmed, Beaver dives, breaking the silence with a great “smack” of his tail on the water, alerting his neighbors and anything else for a quarter mile in any direction. Beaver can read your mind, of course, and that tail against the water can be like the Zen master’s stick on your back when you lose awareness. Tonight, for a test, I will sit by that shoreline tree, just next to the water. I will lie flat on the earth and still my mind like the earth. Will I be able to reach out and touch Beaver as he passes? After ten minutes, Beaver passes, patrolling, and is gone. Time passes, and Beaver comes by again, this time moving right to left, turning back left to right, and then back in the original direction, and is gone. More time, Beaver moves back and forth, pauses, floats like a log, moves to shore, and puts his nose on the bank three paces from my shoes, and then is gone. No “plop.” No alarm. Was I seen? Smelled? Sensed? Checked out? Much more time. Beaver comes back and is moving toward shore. I am staring intently at him, slightly excited. “Plop.” Beaver felt my mind, my intention, let off the alert, but did not swim away. Is he curious?

PAUL BERGNER 46

He goes back and forth a few times in front of me, safely out from the shore, and then is gone. I am struggling with my instinct. Am I a predator? Is Beaver safe from me?

Sacred Fire

Autumn 2005

And Beaver is back again, swum around his course again. This time I do not focus on him, but unfocus my mind and eyes in the meditation of “owl” vision. I turn the entire visual ﬁeld into peripheral vision, but attune to it as if it were entirely central vision with perfect night sight. Beaver is undisturbed, and makes another round, this time much closer to the shore. I afﬁrm: “I am the White Owl who sees but does not attack.” “I am the White Owl, who sees all, but is friend to Beaver and Prairie Dog.” “I am he who is connected to the sky, and reveres all beneath it.” “I am he, friend and brother to White Buffalo Calf Woman who taught the way of prayer for the sake of all relations.” Beaver is swimming back and forth, safely away from the shore, but I am seen in the spirit world. We are connected now. Beaver is my teacher. “I am white owl who sees and means no harm.” “I am he who nurses of the cosmic vibrations of the sky through my crown.” “I am he who aspires to constantly remember Father Sky.”

“I am he who aspires that every step on the earth be a prayer.” Over and over the litany runs in my mind, stilling my mind, and I wish only to see Beaver and know him and to be one with him. Beaver moves back and forth, twenty times. Whatever is on the shore is, to him, more than just a curiosity, it is a sacredness. Then the count is lost. Then Beaver is gone. And Beaver is no longer an animal to me. No longer something to be stalked or outwitted. Beaver is my elder, my teacher, an unobstructed channel for the Dynamic Sacredness of The Real. The space between us is Perfect Space. I’ve not mastered Beaver; Beaver has mastered me. Civilized me. Taught me respect. I wake in the morning dreaming of Beaver, his backand-forth motions on the water, and my breathing-in and breathing-out are all one thing, one rhythm, perfectly united, silent, ﬂuid, balanced, spontaneous, and free. Paul Bergner is a naturalist and writer living in a small city near the Front Range of Colorado. His pond is on open space near the edge of the city limits, 12 minutes from his home, sandwiched between a pharmaceutical plant and the city sanitation department. 17,000 cars and 5,000 pedestrians and cyclists pass the pond each day. In 5 years of studying this area, he has only found 2 people who noticed that it was an active beaver pond. Illustration by Susan St Clair Bennett.

Here is the story: In the summer of 1972, my friend, Lee Ewing, and I were Minor White’s assistants on what was to be Minor’s last cross-country photography expedition. It was an amazing trip, traveling to such places as the Tassajara Zen Center, the Center of the Eye, Point Reyes, the Pacific Northwest, the Grand Canyon and the desert. We visited with Ansel Adams, Brett Weston, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall. We ate, slept and breathed photography, taking pictures on our own or assisting Minor throughout the day. Much of the trip was spent camping in extraordinary locations. One night at a campsite in Capitol Reef, Utah, a place Spirit of Place much like the Grand Canyon, I had a dream about taking a photograph in a particular way, with flashlights, at night. I woke up in the middle of the night, roused Minor and tried to explain the dream. He took it all in stride and said we would realize the dream and take the picture in the early morning hours. This is a double exposure shot on Polaroid film. Minor gave technical advice, Lee shot the picture, and I stood in front of the camera. It’s a photograph that was literally dreamed up, and is, I think, very much evocative of the spirit of the place in which it was taken. — Jim Metzner

Sacred Fire

Autumn 2005

Laurel Hill John Walden photoart: Marshall Carbee

Autumn 2005

Sacred Fire

We had walked down to the river and into a forest of hemlock and fern. Helen found a place to set up while I continued to the river’s edge and found a big flat rock sitting out in the flow and sunlight. I sat, unwrapped a small cigar and began to smoke. The play of light in the trees and on the river’s surface was grand, theatrical and pretty. The river moved between banks, through rocks, dropped into pools and talked and talked and talked. The river said, “I’m happy,” startling me from my reverie. I looked at where the voice had come from: a rock and a hole. The river, muscling into itself, said, “Gurgle” and “Glug” and continued on; said “I’m deep”; said “I’m strong”; and continued on. You cannot find joy, you already are. Let go of attachment to sadness. Let go of attachment to happiness, anger, fear, hope. Feel them, yes, as deeply as you can when they are present and let them go. That which is left when feelings are gone is joy. That which is left, that which you cannot seek or find, is you. You are that which lets go and only you continue. As I sat on the rock I noticed a branch which had come to rest across the top of another rock further out in the river. The branch was balanced just so, with one end lightly resting on the water, bobbing up and down in the swirl and eddy of the passing flow. It rode there, a little wooden witness to the chaos of the river in motion, in conflict and flow, resistance and acceptance—the dynamic of the world. These were the stories that the river was telling the stick. The story you are telling yourself, reading these words, about who you are, holding this page, sitting there, breathing, is like the river—it flows, it changes and moves, seems to have started somewhere, seems to be going somewhere too. But beyond that story, beyond all the stories, is a you that does not move, a you that is not going anywhere and does not change. A bird flew by. The wind pushed against my face. I looked back up the bank to see Helen step back from her drawing board. I reached my hand down and touched the river’s surface. It was wet.

Spirit of a City Park

The four seasons

in Frick Park, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

I have been experimenting with ways of representing the light and using the cameraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lens in unique ways. I prefer to travel lightly, with one camera and no tripod. Therefore, in the Frick Park series, I have been trying to capture the essence of the woods and trees under changing and often low-light conditions. As a result, I hope to show how the woods feel and are experienced, rather than producing an exact or precise reproduction of the scene. These photographs are not digitally manipulated; rather, the effect is created while the photograph is being taken.

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Melody Farrin

Sacred Fire

Autumn 2005

Sacred Fire

Autumn 2005

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Autumn 2005

Sacred Fire

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Exploring the Phenomenon of

P R AY E R

Prayer is a basis for interacting with the spiritual world. My work is to help you in your effectiveness with PRAYER. Prayer workshops for small groups Individual prayer coaching Companion prayer support If you are interested in one or more of these offers, or have questions, I would love to hear from you.

Sherry Morgan 416.654.6358 (Toronto, Canada) sherry.morgan@primus.ca

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                                  

                                             

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     

            

                                                                     

 54

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Getting Right with Money

Mark Blessington

It’s a Question of Balance

Warning: Reading this article could make you feel sick.

recently began doing a series of workshops called “Getting Right with Money.” During the breaks I would talk to participants and they would tell me how they felt. I was surprised by how many felt some nausea at various points during the workshop. Some were upset by the facts about our bad money habits. Others felt their stomachs tighten when the Chinese Five Element system was applied to money. They were experiencing an unexpected level of clarity and insight into their personal money issues. Later in the workshop, they often had different responses. Some were smiling and enthusiastic. The nausea had subsided and they were excited about applying what they had learned. Others felt daunted about the work they had in front of them. Still others felt overwhelmed and were sure they needed more help. After discovering this pattern, I started warning people that some might experience a sense of nausea or tightening in their stomachs. I encouraged them to pay close attention to when these symptoms ﬁrst appear; they may provide insight into their speciﬁc money issues and what they can do about them. If you choose to proceed after reading this warning, good for you. You may be on your way to improving your relationship with money. Our Terrible Relationship with Money Americans have a terrible relationship with money. We spend too much, borrow too much and don’t save enough. These trends get worse every year. If you think you don’t have a problem in any of these areas, you may be fooling yourself. It would simply be

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un-American for you to not have one of these problems. More likely, it’s just a question of how serious they are for you. Spending

Since the early 1980s, our average growth in personal spending has been higher than our average growth in personal income. The pattern was particularly bad between 2001 and 2003. It hasn’t always been this way. From 1960 to 1981, our growth in income was higher than our spending growth.1 Any CFO (Chief Financial Ofﬁcer) would need a darn good tap dance if they were reporting this type of bad news to their shareholders. Does your family CFO (the one who pays the bills and balances the checkbook) have a good explanation for why your spending is growing faster than your earnings? Personal Savings Rates for the Last 50 Years 10% 9% 8% 7% 6% 5% 4%

8.5

Average Income Growth

9.0

Average Spending Growth

8.6

7.5

6.5

5.5

6.5 5.9 1960-1981

1982-2004

Savings

Since the late 1980s, our savings rates (personal savings divided by personal income) have dropped to incredibly low levels, and have been at 1.2 percent of personal income for the last two years.2 In other words, we spend almost every penny we earn. That’s embarrassing! Borrowing

3% 2% 1% 0% 1955

9.5

1960

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Our “consumption compulsion” drives an incredible addiction to debt. On average, our debt rate (total outstanding debt divided by personal 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 income) is 106 percent. In other words, it would now take a full year of income to pay off all of our personal debt. Only 20 percent of our annual income would have been needed to pay off our debt back in 1946.3 Total Debt Rate Some say that’s not so bad, since these ﬁgures include 120 home mortgages. Well, unless we win the lottery, how could we ever allocate a year of income to pay off our debt? Remember, currently we only save 1.2 percent of 80 our income a year. If, all of a sudden, we got right with money and started saving 10 percent of our income every year, it would take us 20 years to pay off all of our 40 debt. For this to happen, we could never have a cut in pay, be laid off or get disabled. Not a safe bet for the 0 average adult if you ask me. 1946 1959 1991 2004 1

Bureau of Economic Analysis, Personal Income and Its Disposition, Table 2.1, lines 1 and 28. Growth is calculated year-to-year, then averaged.

Bureau of Economic Analysis, Personal Income and Its Disposition, Table 2.1, lines 1 and 33.

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Flow of Funds Accounts, Table B.100, line 32 and Table F.100, line 1.

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Getting Right With Money

Consequences

Perhaps one of the saddest consequences of our bad money habits is that dreams of a peaceful retirement are starting to look like mirages. Almost 20 percent of American adults have zero or negative net worth.4 This means that if they cashed in everything they had and paid off all their debts, they would have nothing left, or they might still be in hock. Many more Americans do not have enough saved for retirement. For example, it takes about a $175,000 nest egg to supplement How People Feel About Work social security and maintain a $22,000 income.5 However, the 21% bottom half of America probably Love it only has an average retirement nest egg of $75,000 to $100,000, 79% which will only produce $14,000 Don’t love it to $16,000 of annual income. As a consequence, the alternatives are unpleasant: suffer a serious drop in standard of living if you stop working, or work till you drop. Given numbers like these, many will need to work till they drop. Many more will experience a tremendous decline in their standard of living when they retire. They will have to sell their homes, move into much cheaper housing and live on much less. Still more will be become wards of the state because they’re disabled and don’t have enough savings to support themselves. Feeling trapped at work is another consequence of bad money habits. People can’t afford to quit and look for a new job even if they feel unfulﬁlled, unappreciated or abused at work. They need to put up and shut up. Evidence of this subtle impact on Americans comes to the surface when you ask people if they really love their work. As best as I can tell, about 20 percent of the American workforce actually loves his or her work. The rest feel something else.6 While most of us feel entitled to be married to someone we love, most of us somehow think it is OK to not love our work. 4

Robert H. Frank, “Americans Save So Little, but What Can Be Done to Change That?” The New York Times, 17 March, 2005.

Calculation assumptions: retire at age 65, obtain a 5% real annual return on investment, live for 20 years and leave nothing as an inheritance and obtain $8,000 a year from social security based on a $22,000 annual income at retirement, which was the Average Gross Income for the bottom half of American taxpayers in 2001.

Two primary sources were used: (1) John Bowe, Marisa Bowe and Sabin Streeter, Eds., Gig: Americans Talk about Their Jobs, which covers 126 job interviews and was published in 2000; and (2) Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do, which covers 133 job interviews and was published in 1972.

This is quite ironic when you consider the fact that most adults spend more waking hours at work than they do with their partners. Maybe it’s an “Energy” Problem Could Americans cure their bad financial habits by going to more personal financial management classes or reading more books? Is it just a matter of knowing how to use spreadsheets to create budgets, savings plans and debt reduction schedules? Given the abundance of financial literature available in bookstores and libraries, combined with the vast number of free resources available online, it would seem that the answer to our money problems is not educational in nature. Americans are resourceful. We can solve difficult problems. We just seem stuck when it comes to solving our personal money problems. Perhaps we need a new way of looking at them. Ancient Chinese Worldview

In this series of articles we will use an ancient Chinese worldview to examine and improve our relationships with money. According to the ancient Chinese7, each human being has a life force, called Qi (pronounced “chee”). Qi is like energy. It animates life. While Qi cannot be seen, the Chinese see evidence of its existence in everything that has life. Qi is said to move through five fundamental states, or elements. The five elements are wood, fire, earth, metal and water. When life energy is used in a balanced way in each element, energy flows smoothly from one element to the next. If we exert too much or too little energy in a given element, bottlenecks are created and we get out of balance. The goal is to spend energy in a balanced way within each element. The wood element, when applied to money, addresses the classic aspects of competing, earning and accumulating money. While some people think these aspects reflect all that is bad about money, the Five Element system reminds us that trees do not apologize when they compete for sunlight. They are not timid about taking what they need from the earth. They are not ashamed of putting on a ring of growth every year. They just do it as a natural part of their existence. The fire element teaches us about the joy of spending money. The act of spending money should be fulfilling. It can give people something important to talk about as a group. It can be an intimate topic to discuss with a life-partner. In “the good old 7

An excellent book on the topic of ancient Chinese medicine is Between Heaven and Earth: A Guide to Chinese Medicine, by Harriet Beinﬁeld and Efrem Korngold, 1991.

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Getting Right With Money

ns FIR um E joy e w ith

The “Money Elements”

E give ARTH g e n coop erously erat e

TER l WA eneuria r p e y entr genuit in

D n O ar O te, e ate W pe ul m m co accu

METAL organize into higher financial order

days,” the act of spending money was highly interpersonal. Often, the buyer and seller knew each other as members of the same community, purchases were made face-to-face, shopping trips were family outings and shopping was done on community market days. This is quite different from the “cold” ways we spend money today, where technology (e.g., internet, telephone, mail) removes much of the interpersonal aspect of conducting a financial exchange. Earth energy tells us that economic exchange is only sustainable when there is balance. If one party consistently takes more than his or her fair share from another party, a correction will eventually occur. Earth energy also knows that a converse, almost magical relationship exists: if you give a lot, you eventually get a lot in return. Earth energy is so concerned with fair exchange that it compels us to speak out and object to lopsided economic exchanges. Metal energy is used for dealing with all of the complexities surrounding money. It is great for collecting and analyzing data. Metal energy creates clear rules to define and protect economic fairness. Balanced metal energy insists on gathering all relevant financial facts that pertain to an issue, and then conducts a thorough analysis to improve understanding of the money problem. Water energy creates new alternatives for solving money problems and finds economic opportunities that are not readily apparent. When this happens, we are forced us to adjust our perception of reality. What we thought could not be done is suddenly feasible. Water energy finds prudent risks and shuns economic waste. Modern Money Wisdom

Here are some of the key “nuggets” I’ve discovered when applying Chinese Medicine and the Five-Elements to money:

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1. It takes all five money elements to find economic peace and happiness. This gives rise to one of the most important money questions you can ask: “Which money element could I/we use more of in this situation?” If you dig deep enough into a money problem, you will usually find it is begging for more energy from one particular money element. 2. We have natural strengths and weaknesses when it comes to money energy. The trick is to not be over-reliant on our economic strengths or overly frightened by our weaknesses. If we persistently rely on our economic strengths and avoid our weaknesses, we will not be happy. For example, if you are highly competitive and enjoy earning money and accumulating wealth, you will not be happy if you do not enjoy spending money (fire), giving generously (earth), using financial discipline (metal) and knowing when to be frugal (water). Or, if you are persistently fearful about financial facts or taking financial risks, you will always have difficulty making informed financial decisions or accumulating wealth. 3. No one is ever happy with their relationship to money if one money element dominates the other types of money energy. It’s like something Yogi Berra would have said: “Too much of a good thing is not a good thing.” For example, America’s preoccupation with spending is throwing our personal relationship with money into a tail- spin. While fire energy is a beautiful thing, too much of it can be highly destructive. Another example: a severe lack of financial organization and discipline is never rectified with extreme metal energy. Any financial extreme throws us out of balance. Balance in every element is always the right answer. 4. Lack of energy in an element can be just as destructive as too much. The Western psyche is highly sensitive to excesses: we can spot incredible mansions or luxury cars from a mile away. It is harder for us to detect insufficient energy in a particular element. But, just because excesses are easier for us to detect, it does not mean that deficiencies are less harmful. For example, if we just cannot keep track of our expenses or adhere to a budget, we tend to think this isn’t so bad. Well, this lack of metal energy can easily bankrupt us. In other words, too little of a good thing is just as bad as too much of a good thing. 5. It is tempting to blame external forces on our personal money imbalances. True, there are huge forces at work in our economy which constantly push us toward imbalance. For example, our media constantly sends a subtle but powerful message that greed is good. Or, Corporate America relentlessly pursues profits regardless of the impact on consumers, employees, the environment or society.

Getting Right With Money

The truth, however, is that we will never rein in the social forces driving materialism if we don’t understand how we personally perpetuate materialism through our everyday thoughts and actions. It is hypocritical to assert materialism is wrong while behaving materialistically. We need to clean our own houses ﬁrst. The Rest of this Series …

If this article did not create any queasiness for you, don’t worry, there’s still hope for you. You could try reading the article again. And, you could read future articles in this series. They will examine in more detail how to detect and correct ﬁnancial imbalance. Each money element—wood, ﬁre, earth, metal

and water—will be described in their balanced, exaggerated, and depleted states of energy. The relationships among the money elements will be deﬁned, especially in terms of how they support and limit one another. The art of diagnosing and treating imbalances will be explored and speciﬁc examples provided. Lastly, we will explore our spiritual connection to money; something that is all but lost in today’s materialistic world. Mark Blessington currently councils individuals and small businesses on how to get right with money. In his prior career he was a consultant to large corporations. His website is www. gettingrightwithmoney.com.

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Reconnecting with the Earth

edited by Rita Kesler

The Salmon of Shannon Patricia Monaghan

hen I picture Ireland, I never see a postcard of some generic greenness. I see the Burren, Connemara, Mayo in a wet spring, the mountains of the hag. More speciﬁc yet: I see a familiar greening ﬁeld, a particular thunder-stricken yew, a granite-strewn patch of bog that looks a great deal like other granitestrewn patches of bog but with a certain ineffable difference. For I know Ireland not as a single place but as a mosaic of places, each one steeped in history and myth, song and poetry.

“Each single, enclosed locality matters and everything that happens within it is of passionate interest to those who live there” — John McGahern

“Each single, enclosed locality matters and everything that happens within it is of passionate interest to those who live there,” the great novelist John McGahern tells us. Ireland is the land of the dindshenchas, the poems of place-lore that tell the mythic meaning of hills and crossroads, dolmens and holy wells. The goddess, too, makes her own importance, in various local identities and guises: as the hag called the Cailleach in the Burren, as a reckless maiden in rivers like the Shannon, as the healer Brigit in Kildare. But she is also one, the universal goddess. This infinitely divisible goddess lives in those infinitely numerous holy places of the landscape. I decided to seek the source of the Shannon, the river that waters one-fifth of Ireland, the navigable artery to its heartland. From its mountainy source, the Shannon swells steadily into the lakes where the mythic cow-sisters once swam: Lough Bofin (white cow’s lake) and Lough Boderg (black cow’s lake). It’s easy enough to find in myth, but myth tells more than maps. Irish directions, such as looking for the “green house,” the one painted blue decades ago, no longer distress me. They are

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like coded spiritual messages reminding us that the journey is more important than the destination, that not all places are meant to be found, that not all times are right for the finding. That sometimes what you find will not be what you sought, that sometimes you will find what cannot be sought. Of the Shannon, the same story is told as of the Boyne. The maiden Síonann—called by Ptolemy Senos, “the ancient one”—was determined to become wise by capturing the salmon who lived in the pool. Building a fire so that everything would be ready, she began fishing. Her patience paid off, for she netted the fish and set about cooking it. So far, so good. The moment Síonann tasted the salmon’s flesh, wisdom rushed into her soul. But at the same moment, the waters of the pool burst forth and carried her out to sea. I understand why the ancient Irish saw wisdom as a salmon. As a girl I watched them in the shadows of the riverbanks, waiting for the tide, great looming urgent presences, their gills bloody, their skin torn into shreds by their headlong migration. Alaska’s salmon are a different species than Ireland’s, but they share a homing instinct that leads them from the salt ocean, where they lived amid whales and dolphins, back to the river mouth they exited as fry, to the exact spot they hatched years earlier, there to spawn, there to die. Who is wiser than one who knows the way home? In Ireland, the salmon run begins just as the mayflies—their Latin name, Ephemeroptera, captures the brevity of their lives— hatch, mate, and die, all within hours. It was spring; scores of mayflies added agitation to the Shannon Pot. I watched as they struck the water surface. In the valley beyond, the cow lowed again. Were those silver fins beneath the water? I had come without a map to a place where slant light gleamed on the undersides of slim willow leaves. To a round pool that bubbled softly. To an opening beneath a mountain belly from which wisdom might be born. I had failed in my first attempts to find the source. Might it not take several visits to win the eye of the salmon of wisdom? But after all, I reasoned, this was no longer the age of myth; anything I saw would just be a fish, a migrating fish that had swum up from Limerick, past Killaloe and Portumna, through Lough Ree and Lough Bofin, past Carrick-on-Shannon—just a fish, no mythic being with the power to impart wisdom, just a fish after all. Still I stared at the pool and waited. The Shannon’s broad waters caught the silver moonlight. “If the waters could speak as they flow!” Joyce once wished. But they were silent. It was spring, and salmon should have been breasting the current. But where the “health of the salmon” once predicted a long strong life, now salmon return erratically to the Shannon’s bubbling pot. The Atlantic salmon 62

have declined 99 percent over the last fifteen years; some Irish rivers see virtually no salmon. The Pacific salmon is also in steep decline, although whether from overfishing or global warming is unknown. “Only the rivers remain, slowly bleeding,” Paddy Galvin puts it. I thought of how the great hero Fionn was saved in battle by the maiden Síonann. Fionn might have been killed, but the girl threw him a magical stone that increased his powers. After fighting off his assailant, Fionn threw the stone deep into the river. There it still rests, covered by the shining Shannon waters. But Fionn warned that if that stone were found, the world would end. If greed evaporates the waters, will that stone appear again? The great Greek goddess, bovine Hera, was honored at riverine sanctuaries; in India, primordial Surabhi’s milk fed the gods and was churned to form the universe. Today, almost half the world’s fields are devoted to raising grain for cattle; the demand for pasture has led to the destruction of the Brazilian rain forest. Trees that should transpire our air are cut and burned, leaving great cancerous holes in the world’s lungs. The cleared fields produce for about five years before being depleted, then the cycle starts again. Rainforest destruction leads to global warming, which in turn creates unpredictable weather as the water cycle—river to ocean to rain to cloud to river—is disrupted. The more we worship the golden calf and milk earth’s resources, the more we create the very scarcity we fear. Today, a battle rages between greed and abundance. As Indian physicist Vandana Shiva warns, a greedy few are attempting to homogenize our world by arguing that “nature is a source of scarcity, and technology a source of abundance,” which “leads to the creation of technologies which create new scarcities in nature.” Of two thousand possible potato varieties, almost half of America’s fields are planted in one: the Russett Burbank, which conveniently fits into french fry machines. Did we learn nothing from Ireland’s Famine? Wisdom roots for the side of abundance—true abundance, not the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few, but abundance for everyone. True wisdom knows that enough is plenty. Instead of stock profits for a few, we could have potatoes and milk galore for everyone. But there is yet hope. In east Mayo, on a monument to those who saw past the Famine to an Ireland free of vampire landlordism, are these words of the great Mohandas Gandhi: “The earth has enough for everyone’s need but not enough for everyone’s greed.” How true: the great Cow goddess of generosity, Glas, still wanders, her udders streaming nourishment. We just have to put down the sieve and let her provide.

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Sitting on the green slope, I pondered the persistence of my search. I was not from the region; I had no special devotion to the river’s tutelary goddess, Síonann; yet the image of a circular pool from which a great river rises held some compelling power to which I responded. And the Shannon Pot had repaid my persistence, for on that splendid day in May it was uncannily beautiful, a place I could credit with nurturing wisdom.

Excerpted from the book The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog ©2003 by Patricia Monaghan. Reprinted with permission from the publisher New World Library, www.newworldlibrary.com. Tollfree 800-972-6657. Patricia Monaghan lives in Chicago and teaches literature and environment at DePaul University’s School for New Learning. She is the author of Dancing with Chaos, a book of poetry. She was the winner of the 1992 Friends of Literature Award.

I sat there pondering the place of place. The pool bubbled. The willows swayed. Then, a ﬂash of silver. And gone. Just like that.

Gone. Just like that.

ears of dam building, pollution, habitat destruction and over-fishing have driven most wild salmon runs into sharp decline or extinction. The air above our rivers is full of ghosts. In the mid1900’s, we thought we had the solution to stop the free-fall of wild salmon runs: simply build fish hatcheries to artificially propagate more and more salmon. We put our faith in technology and as biologist Jim Lichatowich writes, “we believed we could have salmon without rivers.” Today there are hundreds of hatcheries. These facilities capture adult fish and strip them of their eggs and sperm, then raise the fertilized eggs in plastic trays. The young fish are reared in concrete raceways before being released into rivers and streams. Hatcheries have served as a quick-fix solution, churning out fish for harvest, but have not spurred an overall increase in salmon numbers. In fact, in many cases hatcheries have stood in the way of wild salmon recovery. Hatchery fish compete with wild fish for food and spawning habitat. They often breed with wild fish, weakening the wild population’s genetic line. Additionally, hatchery fish often mask the problems facing wild salmon and their rivers by creating a false sense of abundance. Another threat to wild salmon are fish farms; giant pens where salmon are raised for food. Because the salmon are held in such close quarters, disease can spread easily. The waste created by farms can pollute pristine waters nearby: a fish farm can produce as much raw sewage as a town of 65,000 people. While farmed fish are never purposefully released into the wild, fish can escape through holes in the net pens, infecting wild salmon populations with disease, or breeding with wild fish and diluting the wild run’s genetic hardiness.

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Amy Kober

Eating farm-raised salmon carries health risks. In addition to containing high levels of dioxin-like PCBs, the flesh of farmed salmon is colored with artificial dye. Wild salmon get their deep pink color naturally from the food they eat. Farmed salmon are fed pellets; without special dye their flesh would be an unappetizing gray. The good news is we have a choice. We can leave farm-raised fish on the shelf. We can make sure the fish we buy in markets and restaurants is wild. Eating wild fish supports sustainable fisheries and local fishing communities, as well as the health of the rivers that birth these fish. Salmon are products of place. Each distinct strain has evolved over thousands of years to thrive in its home river—from the lush rainforest rivers to the high desert streams hundreds of miles inland. Wild salmon hold the lessons of their ancestors in their blood. We need this diversity, all these salmon, these places, these stories. The most important thing we can do to ensure we have abundant salmon runs again is to restore the health of our rivers. Wild salmon embody the wisdom of place. Perhaps, if we listen, they will show us the way home. Learn more about river and salmon restoration: www.AmericanRivers.org, www.wildsalmon.org. Make the right seafood choices: www.mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp.

Amy Kober lives and writes in Seattle, where she works in the Northwest regional ofﬁce of American Rivers, a non-proﬁt river conservation organization. Rita Kesler is a Plant Spirit Medicine practitioner and Environmental Educator in North Carolina where she guides children and adults to personal healing through reconnecting with the Earth.

Looking Out from the Mesa at San Andres The earth is complete— so rich and full and multi-layered, dense with being, alive at every level, everything imaginable thriving in her folds, intricately connected from her atmosphere to her core and through the infinite realms of her dreaming— so that, looking out from the mesa at San Andres, I drift with the vulture in the pure upwelling wind and I eat the carrion with him and I am the carrion— a rabbit already half eaten— and I am the Lords of Death who carry the rabbit into the ground and piece him out, and I am the Lords of Birth who put him together and bring him back to a new warren in this very valley; and I am the hand that shaped this valley and drew through its center a deep ravine and poured out a labyrinth of mesas and mountains— their shoulders jostling clear to the plains of Ixtlan; and I am the wind that carves the faces of the gods into every rock wall; and I am the rain that wears down the shoulders of the mountains and mesas and makes the grasses and piñon and juniper grow at impossible angles and washes the soil into the valley so that the valley is rich and pushes up corn in the ranchos; and I am the corn—gold tasseled with blue succulent teeth; and I am the farmer whose fifth grandfather cleared this rancho and who, with his family, will climb the hidden trail up this cliff in a few days to join my people in the village for the Fiesta of the Tambor; and I am the strange man sitting on this cliff overlooking this all, intoxicated by the oxygen rich wind, my heart overflowing with gratitude, love and awe, writing all this down. — Jonathan Merritt

Photograph: Kate Baldwin, katebaldwinphotography.com

�hat if…

Tobacco wasn’t evil What if You could change your relationship to the plant And Change your life What if The sight of someone smoking didn’t make you angry What if You were not afraid to smoke What if You saw tobacco, even Big Tobacco, in our culture as transformative With a capital T