I like this idea:
Connect to God’s creation listening for moment’s song
Ray Waddle
Guest columnist
When the world situation
gets me jittery, and the phone is abuzz with hustle and doom, I step outside to
catch a breeze. Even there, it’s a struggle.
The heat this summer
feels punitive, a wounded response to human excess from the natural world.
Politics makes even the weather an ideological battleground.
Nevertheless, a few
minutes outdoors is always calming. Land and sky seem to have a mind and heart
of their own and are ready to share them.
I picked up a new book
recently, just in time: 'Becoming Rooted: One Hundred Days of Reconnecting with
Sacred Earth' by Randy Woodley, a Cherokee descendent, author, and
wisdom-keeper.
Woodley’s common sense
and gentle skepticism about modern habits are a refreshing departure from our
tortured debates and methods of coping.
In these 100 short
readings, his message is simple.
Our culture is on a
destructive path, but we can change it. Indigenous wisdom is within reach …
Speak from the heart. Balance work and rest. Laugh at yourself. Pray. Be
generous and accountable. Watch and listen. People long for harmony, mutual
respect, a feeling of awe. Deep inside, everyone wants 'Eloheh,' the Cherokee
word for wholeness, peace, harmony.
'Begin working your way
down the list and incorporating these Indigenous values into your own life,'
writes Woodley, co-founder of the Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice in
Oregon. 'Search for songs, ceremonies, and stories from your own ancestry. Look
for friends who align with these values. Good medicine awaits us ...'
Woodley comes out of
Christian experience. Living on the land alerts him daily to nature’s brute
power but also sharpens his senses to the rain, sun, stars, red-tailed hawks,
wind. Each tree, he notices, sings a different song as the wind blows through
it. Each moment is unique.
'Savor the sacredness of
these times. Allow them to flow freely.
Encourage people to share
from their hearts.
We can’t control the
outcome of any given situation but only respond to it. Let each moment sing its
own song.'
I’m all for it. But it
takes me time to get there, some detox time to root out the annoying
second-hand opinions in my head, the aftershocks of living in the economy of
anxiety.
The detox partly depends
on being open to new images of daily experience. Woodley talks of becoming
intimate with the land, treating the relationship like a courtship, a kind of
marriage or partnership to cherish, not something superficial.
It’s peculiar that the
current technological era considers itself superior to the ancestral past, he
writes. Previous generations didn’t go around injuring 'the earth that feeds
them and maintains their existence as a species.' If we’re so smart, why do we
work against our own self-interest?
Despite our lethal
contradictions, a connection to God’s creation can make the human community
feel confident about the future. We can become adventurers together, learners,
awakeners, deciding how to live out our spirituality each moment on the road to
being better ancestors.
'After all, we have only
today to be fully alive in this world – to be fully human,' Woodley writes.
'Our humanity is exercised one moment at a time, one day at a time. That
includes today.'
Columnist Ray Waddle is a former Tennessean
staffer.
This makes me think of the thought, no matter how far humans progress our environment our nature our ancestors have been around the same as us to this day, no matter what buildings we build the trees we see outside are the same which is why its so important to preserve what we have.
ReplyDelete