TreeSisters
Let the birds take your clothes
Let the waves undo your holding back
Let the vines unravel your tired mind
And the earth savour your sweat and tears.
Let your stories burn off like rising mist,
As your past and the false floors of curbed self love
Dissolve into butterfly wings and fire flies
As your edges blur and your Planetary Self ignites.
Let the trees bathe your breath
Let the meadows embrace you
Let the mountains and the bees remind you
Let the sky flood in and allow the clouds to guide you.
Let your undoing be as total
As your becoming is beautiful –
And when the living world has climbed inside
Enough for you to feel four legs, scales and wings.
May you finally know yourself alive as all things –
Indivisible and responsible
Reborn into wholeness
Natural, Sacred and Wild
~ Clare Dubois, Founder of TreeSisters
Breathing with the Mother
A beautiful meditative practice from Chameli Ardagh at Awakening Women
We Are All Related
“In Lakota culture, we give thanks, always, for everything. We wake up, greet the morning and give thanks for making it to another sunrise. We look out and give thanks for Unci Maka (earth) and all her beauty. When it’s time to eat, we give part of our breakfast and Wakalyapi (coffee) to the spirits with a prayer of thanks. We then offer up prayers for the gorgeous day we are about to embark on. By the time I’ve ingested my food and am ready to start my day, I’ve already offered up thanks for so many things.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Being aware that the creator is responsible for everything we do, we see, we experience, is innately part of us; it’s the fabric of our culture. It helps us to stay grounded, humble, Ice Wicasa, or Ice Winyan: common man or common woman. It reminds us we are no better than anything around us, we do not rule over the grass or the pebbles just because we are larger than them.
I feel this is a lesson for all human beings, Lakota or not. This is what seems to have been forgotten in wasicu society, or perhaps they never had it. Based on their past and present history with women, and other nations, I imagine the latter is probably true.
See, in our culture Lakota women didn’t have to rise up and have a feminist movement, because we were never discriminated by our men. We are sacred in our culture. We are rulers of the roost, literally. There are issues now, between women and men, but that is due to acculturation — and that is a whole other post for another time.
Back to what I was saying, this issue of equality between human beings has always been a dividing line between our cultures and it continues to be one; manifest destiny did not, and does not, mean the same thing for everyone .
For Lakotas one of our common mantras is “Mitakuye Oyasin” — we are all related. All of us, no matter who you are (person), or what you are (grass, trees, rocks), are the same. No one is better than anyone else. Our lives really are circular, and yes, everything REALLY is related to everything else…”
~Mary Black Bonnet
∞
excerpt from Mitakuye Oyasin – We Are All Related
To Enter A Wood
Forest Dreaming
“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”
~Jack Kerouac
‘The Dharma Bums’
Think Like a Tree
Think Like a Tree
Soak up the sun
Affirm life’s magic
Be graceful in the wind
Stand tall after a storm
Feel refreshed after it rains
Grow strong without notice
Be prepared for each season
Provide shelter to strangers
Hang tough through a cold spell
Emerge renewed at the first signs of spring
Stay deeply rooted while reaching for the sky
Be still long enough to
hear your own leaves rustling.
~Karen I. Shragg
A Great Sky
THE JOURNEY
Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again
painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.
Sometimes everything
has to be
enscribed across
the heavens
so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.
Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that
first, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart…
David Whyte
What Were We Built For?
‘If we were built, what were we built for? … Why do we have this amazing collection of sinews, senses, and sensibilities? Were we really designed in order to recline on the couch, extending our wrists perpendicular to the floor so we can flick through the television’s offerings? Were we really designed in order to shop some more so the economy can grow some more? Or were we designed to experience the great epiphanies that come from contact with each other and with the natural world?’
~Bill McKibben