Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 7 – Day 359 – 12/9/2020

Bearing Witness to the Living Earth

WE ARE EARTH.
JUST LIKE EARTH, OUR BODIES ARE 70% WATER,
WITH THE SAME PROPORTION OF SALT AS THE OCEANS.
OUR BONES ARE MADE STRONG BY LIMESTONE
THAT COMES FROM PREHISTORIC SHELLFISH.
EVERY ATOM OF OUR BODY
HAS BEEN A ROCK OR A BUTTERFLY OR A DAISY OR A LION.
WHAT WE CALL MOUNTAIN, AIR, AND OCEAN
ARE THE BONES, THE BREATH, AND THE BLOOD
OF OUR MOST ANCIENT ANCESTORS
AND OUR FUTURE DESCENDANTS.
WE BELONG TO EARTH.

let us come together in this moment of eternity from across the planet, our island home, to bear witness and take action for our earthmother, our one body, our home…

may we open to the complexity and mystery of our relationship to Earth and develop ourselves so that we can hold more of the whole and respond to life from that wholeness by connecting with the truth that we are one body…

our earth mother’s heartbeat echoes through all our relations… feel the momentum building as more and more of us hear her call to rise up and stand together as one large orchestra playing a seamless symphony and re-joy-sing in the harmony we embody as a beautiful wave now encircling the cosmos – peace prevails on earth, love is all there is… peace prevails on earth, love is all there is… peace prevails on earth, love is all there is… peace prevails on earth, love is all there is… yes, even in these painful, stretched to the max times at the ending stages of a long drawn out pregnancy, peace prevails in the core of the earth of our being…

join with me now in breathing deeply into the womb of being while placing a hand on your heart and with each deep breath, feel your heart, our one heart, opening a little wider re-membering we all belong to each other, each of our individual destinies is tied with our one collective destiny… to journey to the core of our being, to our heart of gold to be our original face of radiant love, dancing with rainbow mystery…

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 7 – Day 358 – 12/8/2020

holy synchronicity! today’s pilgrimage, like so many, is a trove of riches as it’s Bodhi Day and Imagine Day, the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death when i love spending the day imagining and being peace…

in his honor, in honor of all our relatives, all twenty-four hours of this  day i am imagining… everyone living in the moment… letting it be… looking from our real eyes and real-eye-sing we are one…. all our relations living in peace… all of us dreaming the same dream into reality… sharing the world freely and generously… knowing no one is free, happy, healthy until we all are…

what a legacy! how fully you served in your four short decades on this planet before being cut down so abruptly forty years ago… thousand fold thanks, dear poet rebel with a cause… thousand fold thanks, cosmic ambassador of peace…

~

“Imagine

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace, youYou may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world, youYou may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one”

~

may we all awaken as Buddha did on this day to a new understanding of reality and the meaning of life and real- eyes what we’ve been seeking has been here all along, right in front of us, in our own backyard, in the core of our being… as simple as it is to meet each moment, it’s not so easy to meet each moment openly, with beginner mind, without preconception and what a joy to experience this liberation…

may we all shine on, like the moon and the stars and the sun…

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 7 – Day 357 – 12/7/2020

on this day of  re-membering it’s the 79th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, a day when my country entered a war that was actually illegal as was all war after WWI that was to end all war, but, on this day as we glance across the planet we see we are engaged in endless war resulting in climate and cultural disasters with in excess of 152,000,000 beings in need of humanitarian assistance and 90,000,000 beings and counting displaced from home…

right now, in this moment of eternity it’s like this… we are coming into holydays,  a season of welcoming the stranger, a moment to envision Pearl Harbor anew, to dreamweave a cosmos of true reality… as a safe harbor, a place of true refuge, a place of beloved community in every neighborhood across the land including our inner landscapes, the sacred space where peace begins…

join with me now in breathing deeply in to the womb of being while placing your right hand on your heart of wonder and your left on your belly/womb of wisdom… with each deep breath, feel your heart, our one heart, opening a little wider to welcome the stranger and offer warmth beginning with yourself and slowly moving out in ever widening circles of inclusion re-membering we all belong to each other, each of our individual destinies is tied with our one collective destiny… to journey to the core of our being, to our heart of gold to be our original face of radiant love, dancing with rainbow mystery…

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 7 – Day 356 – 12/6/2020

welcome, welcome to this moment of eternity of our celebrating the astonishing light of being and dreaming a world of wisdom and wonder by raising ecstasy…

let us come together in this moment to rehearse the cosmos of wonder and wisdom for the seven descendant generations of wondrous eternal youth guided by the seven ancestral generations of wisdom… taking a deep breath from the earthmother who loves us so, feel the warmth of ecstasy flowing into the trillions and trillions of wild cells of our ever expanding one body igniting the transmutation of blood into love – we are a sea of love energy, the one heart circulating love everywhere fully awakening to and real-eye-sing we are a cosmos of original blessing with beauty before us, behind us, beside us, below us, above us, surrounding us, within us calling us to wander in wonder along the pathless path of wisdom into ultima thule, the great beyond which is right here, right now transfiguring nowhere into now here…

dancing now here in a flowering field of radical (rooted) regeneration and generation re-joy-sing in the beauty and unity, the wisdom and wonder breathing in ecstasy, being blessing and breathing out blissing…

merry meeting in this field of weaving a world of wisdom and wonder… blessed, blissed be….

and, thanks be to chase the rainbow who is ecstasy…

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 7 – Day 355 – 12/5/2020

let us come together with singing in the spirts, the ancestors who are with us always and feel their presence as we gather round the holy fire of inspiration looking deeply into the anima mundi, great mystery and seeing the shimmering thread calling out to each of us to pickup and weave into the seamless world wide web of life, the circle that can never be broken irrevocably…

inspired by the fire, our roots deeply grounded in earth with our branches reaching high into the sky, let us dive deeply into the ocean of being to re-member, to member again a cosmos of heart consciousness, of harmony and peace and compassion and wisdom as we swim in the rhythm of waves that echo to us when we listen that the cosm is a vast spaciousness of original blessing supporting us unconditionally with an ever expanding wingspan…

looking into the fire, i see and hear the world restored, radically regenerating with our midwifing the rebirthing of a world where rights of nature is the only law, living each moment as sacred ceremony in right relationship with all creation is the way of this world where we are liberated to be whole with our muscle for pushing, so important in birthing, exercised moment by moment to see and be the truth, to tell the truth of every walk of life so that we live in balance, in interdependence…

and what is the world you see forming and hear breathing when you look into the fire of inspiration and exercise the birthing muscle of pushing to accomplish what may have falsely seemed an impossible and overwhelming task until you do it and rea-eyes nature has the final say?

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 7 – Day 354 – 12/4/2020

“I, Chief Arvol Looking Horse, of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota Nations, ask you to understand an Indigenous perspective on what has happened in America, what we call “Turtle Island.” My words seek to unite the global community through a message from our sacred ceremonies to unite spiritually, each in our ways of beliefs in the Creator.

We have been warned from ancient prophecies of these times we live in today, but have also been given a vital message about a solution to turn these terrible times.

To understand the depth of this message, you must recognize the importance of Sacred Sites and realize the interconnectedness of what is happening today, in the reflection of the continued massacres that are occurring on other lands and our own Americas.

I have been learning about these important issues since the age of 12 when I received the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe Bundle and its teachings. Our people have strived to protect Sacred Sites from the beginning of time. These places have been violated for centuries and have brought us to the predicament that we are in at the global level.

Look around you. Our Mother Earth is very ill from these violations, and we are on the brink of destroying the possibility of a healthy and nurturing survival for generations to come, our children’s children.

Our ancestors have been trying to protect our Sacred Site called the Sacred Black Hills of South Dakota, “Heart of Everything That Is,” from continued violations. Our ancestors never saw a satellite view of this site, but now that those pictures are available, we see that it is in the shape of a heart and, when fast-forwarded, it looks like a heart pumping.

The Diné have been protecting Big Mountain, calling it the liver of the earth, and we are suffering and going to suffer more from the extraction of the coal there and the poisoning processes used in doing so.

The Aborigines have warned of the contaminating effects of global warming on the Coral Reefs, which they see as Mother Earth’s blood purifier.

The indigenous people of the rainforest say that the rainforests are the lungs of the planet and need protection.

The Gwich’in Nation in Alaska has had to face oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain, also known to the Gwich’in as “Where life begins.”

The coastal plain is the birthplace of many life forms of the animal nations. The death of these animal nations will destroy indigenous nations in this territory.

As these destructive developments continue all over the world, we will witness much more extinct animal, plant, and human nations, because of humankind’s misuse of power and their lack of understanding of the “balance of life.”

The Indigenous people warn that these negative developments will cause havoc globally. There are many, many more original teachings and knowledge about Mother Earth’s Sacred Sites, her chakras, and connections to our spirit that will surely affect our future generations.

There needs to be a fast move toward other forms of energy that are safe for all Nations upon Mother Earth. We need to understand the types of minds that are continuing to destroy the spirit of our whole global community. Unless we do this, the powers of destruction will overwhelm us.

Our Ancestors foretold that water would someday be for sale. This Prophecy was hard to believe! The water was plentiful, pure,  full of energy, nutrition, and spirit. Today we have to buy clean water, and even then the nutritional minerals have been taken out; it’s just clear liquid. Someday water will be like gold, too expensive to afford.

Not everyone will have the right to drink safe water. We fail to appreciate and honor our Sacred Sites, ripping out the minerals and gifts that lay underneath them as if Mother Earth were simply a resource, instead of the source of life itself.

Attacking nations and using more resources to carry out destruction in the name of peace is not the answer! We need to understand how all these decisions affect the global nation; we will not be immune to its repercussions. Allowing continual contamination of our food and land is affecting the way we think.

A “disease of the mind” has set in world leaders and many members of our global community, with their belief that a solution of retaliation and destruction of peoples will bring peace.

In our Prophecies it is told that we are now at the crossroads: Either unites spiritually as a global nation or faced with chaos, disasters, diseases, and tears from our relatives’ eyes.

We are the only species that is destroying the source of life, meaning Mother Earth, in the name of power, mineral resources, and ownership of land. Using chemicals and methods of warfare that are doing irreversible damage, as Mother Earth is becoming tired and cannot sustain any more impacts of war.

I ask you to join me in this endeavor. Our vision is for the peoples of all continents, regardless of their beliefs in the Creator, to come together as one at their Sacred Sites to pray and meditate and commune with one another, thus promoting an energy shift to heal our Mother Earth and achieve a universal consciousness toward attaining Peace.

As each day passes, I ask all nations to begin a global effort and remember to give thanks for the pure food that has been gifted to us by our Mother Earth, so the nutritional energy of medicine can be guided to heal our minds and spirits.

This new millennium will usher in an age of harmony, or it will bring the end of life as we know it. Starvation, war, and toxic waste have been the hallmark of the vast myth of progress and development that ruled the last millennium.

To us, as caretakers of the heart of Mother Earth falls the responsibility of turning back the powers of destruction. You are the one who must decide.

You alone – and only you – can make this crucial choice, to walk in honor or to dishonor your relatives. On your decision depends the fate of the entire World.

Each of us is put here in this time and this place to personally decide the future of humankind.

Did you think the Creator would create unnecessary people in a time of such terrible danger?

Know that you are essential to this world. Understand both the blessing and the burden of that. You are desperately needed to save the soul of this world. Did you think you were put here for something less? In a Sacred Hoop of Life, there is no beginning and no ending.”

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 7 – Day 353 – 12/3/2020

the awakening of the rainbow light of awareness is the beautiful moment when the central sun breaks free within illuminating the soul’s journey on the pathless path…

today begins in a soulful space of re-membering dreams/waking reality of buddhic beings filling life so richly with their unbounded, joyful exuberance of peaceful presence, yes, as the outer day breaks so, too, is the inner day with a dream of my golden retriever bounding wildly through the front door in all his joyous puppy dog energy, yes, riever had come home after being away for 33 years, he had come home to the heart and i re-member our long swims in the sea and wandering in wonder on the beach sands of existence and my longing to live as simply as he which totally mirrors today as i spend so many moments of eternity with another golden retriever though this one is of the two egged variety,,, and a little jingle arises in me with the rising of the outer sun…

~

live simply, live free, live in open, spacious reality

die to the old, birth in the new

enter the cave of dreaming womb, transmuting seed into radiant bloom

flowering now in a garden of delight, greeting this day of joyous light

~

i so love dwelling in this spacious field of gold rainbow light and receiving this gift of a golden key of life – to live simply, to live free, to live in open, spacious reality – has been re-joy-sing me all day long prompting the re-membering of an old shaker song arising from the same open source…

‘Tis the gift to be simple,
’tis the gift to be free,
’tis the gift to come down
where we ought to be,
and when we find ourselves in the place just right,
’twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained
to bow and to bend we shan’t be ashamed,
to turn, turn, will be our delight
till by turning, turning we come round right.

on this anniversary of the second moonth of birth, thank you, chase the rainbow, for stopping the world and inviting our meeting each moment fully, greeting each moment with aloha spirit and staying nestled in downy nests in the dream cave of beloved grandmother spider where in the spaciousness of timelessness we are given the gift of co-weaving the world with wisdom and wonder… blessed be…

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 7 – Day 352 – 12/2/2020

“let tenderness pour from your eyes, the way sun gazes warmly on earth”

~ Hafiz ~

somehow, Oregon’s state logo ~ she flies with her own wings ~ seems  a perfect turn of phrase for this moonth of descending and downshifting and for this moment of slowing down, turning inward and descending into the watery depths, for taking this moment of eternity to bathe in the illumination of lady luna luxuriating in her nourishment of radiance…

she flies with her own wings also brings alive the one who sixty-five years ago yesterday stood in the state of Alabama and acted from a stance of quantum love holding nothing back when she refused to move to the back of the bus, an action which galvanized a yearlong community boycott and ushered in a new chapter on the freedom road… yes, Rosa Parks, a wise and adventurous rebellious spirit flew on her own wings encircled in great spirit’s wings…

courageously asserting and honoring all peoples’ inalienable rights, Rosa was not the first to be arrested on a bus nor was it her first act of resistance against second-class citizenship; Rosa symbolizes the black community’s refusal to be pushed around. Her aim was both local and global – to end all oppression. 382 days later, Montgomery buses were integrated and a young Baptist minister, Martin Luther King, Jr would emerge as the leader of the civil rights movement inspiring us to keep moving forward and reminding us that only light drives out darkness and only love drives out hate… oh, for these words to be imprinted on our one heart and in our every action…

i close this tribute of flying on wings of love on this day of record breaking pandemic deaths with a poem of Nikki Giovanni’s entitled Rosa Parks…

This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said
they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago
Defender to the Black Americans in the South so they would
know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who
helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight
the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because
even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth-place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The
Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the
Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both
the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would
know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled
when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954
when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “sepa-
rate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in
1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a
doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood
why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer
when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps
and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways
when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the
Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while
the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to
St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept
him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all
summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly
lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grand-
children on his knee telling them about his summer riding the
rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money,
Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unac-
ceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the
sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s
body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago,
where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did
to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is
for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa
Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordi-
nary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make
history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama,
who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the
moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods
aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in
Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the
Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks
said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would
there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs.
Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system,
the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and
the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young
men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great
voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting
us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the
Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it
was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not
being able to stand it. She sat back down.”

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 7 – Day 351 – 12/1/2020

welcome to one of my favorite of moonths… descending december… already, i feel the pull of the sun coming to a standstill, soulstice, and like the sun feel my rhythms coming to a standstill as well, a slowing down into the stillpoint, a season of getting down to bare bones, nourishing the roots and cultivating the awakened heart, the essence at the core of being…

yes, may we all travel awakened, lightened, flowing with the wisdom of the deep dark earth where we transform, go beyond the form pattern to be and become our, as yet, unknown self, a dancing star re-membering and real-eye-sing who we truly are…

“For the Unknown Self
So much of what delights and troubles you
Happens on a surface
You take for ground.
Your mind thinks your life alone,
Your eyes consider air your nearest neighbor,
Yet it seems that a little below your heart
There houses in you an unknown self
Who prefers the patterns of the dark
And is not persuaded by the eye’s affection
Or caught by the flash of thought.

It is a self that enjoys contemplative patience
With all your unfolding expression,
Is never drawn to break into light
Though you entangle yourself in unworthiness
And misjudge what you do and who you are.

It presides within like an evening freedom
That will often see you enchanted by twilight
Without ever recognizing the falling night,
It resembles the under-earth of your visible life:
All you do and say and think is fostered
Deep in its opaque and prevenient clay.

It dwells in a strange, yet rhythmic ease
That is not ruffled by disappointment;
It presides in a deeper current of time
Free from the force of cause and sequence
That otherwise shapes your life.

Were it to break forth into day,
Its dark light might quench your mind,
For it knows how your primeval heart
Sisters every cell of your life
To all your known mind would avoid,

Thus it knows to dwell in you gently,
Offering you only discrete glimpses
Of how you construct your life.

At times, it will lead you strangely,
Magnetized by some resonance
That ambushes your vigilance.

It works most resolutely at night
As the poet who draws your dreams,
Creating for you many secret doors,
Decorated with pictures of your hunger;

It has the dignity of the angelic
That knows you to your roots,
Always awaiting your deeper befriending
To take you beyond the threshold of want,
Where all your diverse strainings
Can come to wholesome ease.”

~ John O’Donohue ~

here’s to our weaving the world with wisdom as we wander in wonder welcoming our eternal inspirited souls…

Poetic Peace Pilgrimage – Year 7 – Day 350 – 11/30/2020

on this day of sanctity, in this moment of eternity, in this moonth of nascence, on this pilgrimage along the rainbow trail and in this life of being in the unknowable, in uncertainty, let us bless this space between us, this numinous space, this sacred space of vast open spaciousness where the spirit of all that is always flows through us, where we are one heart always being love…

blessing this space, this unified field of the divine, this pathless path of awakening the heart, of cultivating bodhicitta with one small step and another and another, this journey of healing, of becoming more and more whole as we transmute the holes into the holy, the wholeness we always are even if we have forgotten, numbed out to or in denial about true reality…

thanks be for it all – every breath, every moment, every relative, every trial, every tribulation, every suffering, every liberation – for everything is the teacher bringing us to this moment of peace, of love, of joy, of harmony,, of wisdom, of compassion and grace… thanks be for you and your amazing gifts of kindling fire, the inner flame of spirit, of inspiration, of breath, of our breathing together through our one heart and of our real-eye-sing we are one seamless web interdependent on each of our relatives picking up the thread destined for me and thee to re-weave the web into an ever more expansive and boundless tapestry with beauty behind us, before us, beside us, surrounding us, within us blessing us, blissing us dissolving us into great mystery…