Mother Earth - Native Traditions

[Guest guest]

Dear Gerlinde (and All),

 

Gerlinde, here is an article you could 'put away' for

http://www.great-spirit-mother.org/

 

regards,

 

violet

 

 

 

Holy Mother Earth, the trees, and all nature are witnesses to your

thoughts and deeds. - Winnebago Wise Saying

 

 

Nothing is more important for the recovery of the feminine face of God as a rich

and reverent understanding of the traditions of the world's First Peoples. In

them is preserved our original human relationship with Mother Earth in all her

wisdom, humility, and divine radiance.

 

The songs, myths, rituals, and living customs of those native peoples who have

preserved their truth against huge odds speak to us of the grandeur of earth, of

the wonders of nature, of the mysterious and marvellous ways in which Mother

Earth surrounds, sustains, and instructs us at every moment.

 

In listening humbly to the traditions of these native peoples, we remember who

we once were and what we still can be; we can experience once again the naked

divine truth of the natural world and can learn from that experience to respect

the laws of nature.

 

And what do the native traditions tell us of human and natural life if we

listen? They initiate us into the three laws of sacred feminine reality - the

Law of Unity, the Law of Rhythm, and the Law of the Love of the Dance. Taken

together these three " laws " oppose to our fragmented, exploitative,

self-obsessed forms of knowing and living an entirely different, far richer, and

saner vision of what it is to be human and divine, and alive in nature.

 

Read what survives of the myths, songs, and rituals of any tribal peoples -

whether the Innuit from Greenland, the Kogis from Columbia, or the Navaho from

North America - and what will be immediately apparent is the knowledge running

through them that life is one: one energy, one power, one force. Historians of

religion used to believe that monotheism started with Akhenaten and the Jews;

but the understanding of the sacredness of unity behind multiplicity was already

alive in those tribal traditions that see life as one and everything that lives

as holy. According to native traditions all living things are related to

everything else, in a web of extraordinary delicacy that stretches over the

whole universe. All things are in this web and part of it, and everything done

to one of the parts of the web is done to all of the others. What the Mahayana

Buddhist mystics call interdependence (or more fashionably " interbeing " ) is as

old as the Aborigine's understanding that the rock formations of their deserts

were " lines " in a song the Divine World was trying to " sing " to them; as old as

the Innuit's knowledge that before seals could be hunted, the Ancestor Seal and

the Gods of Nature must be prayed to; as old as the Native American's honoring

of the buffalo after they killed it. Native traditions offer us a passionate

awareness of this " interbeing " . For them there is nothing sophisticated or

intellectual about it; it is as obvious as sunlight or the cry of a baby.

Reexperiencing the world in this unmeditated intensity of connection is crucial

to the recovery of the Divine Feminine. Unless we recover the primal poetry of

the Law of Unity with all things, we will go on killing and exploiting in a

frenzy of false separation from nature and so from our deep selves, and we will

continue to ruin our world.

 

The second law that native traditions, wherever they come from, all honor is the

Law of Rhythm. Living in naked reliance on nature inevitably entails a reverence

for those rhythmic cycles that permeate the whole of nature's workings. The laws

of nature and so of the human life that is everywhere sustained by nature's

environment are rhythmic. Our hearts contract and then swell out as they suck in

and pump our blood; spring follows summer and winter precedes spring; the brain

is swept by endless wavelike pulses of sleep, wakefulness, hunger, satiation.

Only by recapturing - and following - this sense of life's rhythms will we be

able to survive. Opening to the law of rhythm requires developing feminine

powers of imagination, attention, receptivity, capacity to wonder, nurture and

cherish, and a constantly, acutely sensitive, and sensible down-to-earth

subtlety of approach that attempts to mirror the suppleness of life itself and

its rhythmic alternations. If we wish to heal the natural world that we are in

imminent danger of destroying, we are going to have to rebuild in ourselves

those inner senses that can listen in radical humility to its voices, attend to

its rhythms, and enact quickly what they tell us.

 

The third law of the Divine Feminine that native traditions inititate us into,

if we let them, is the Law of the Love of the Dance. What is astonishing, when

you read what has come down to us of the tribal myths and songs, is that despite

the knowledge they all have of life and nature's horrors and difficulties, they

ring with praise and adoration and gratitude for the blessing of being alive on

the earth. In so doing, they give all contemporary seekers of the Divine

Feminine, a very clear vision of that living in intimacy with nature the Mother

necessitates - and creates - and what a return of that life-wisdom means. The

restoration of the Divine Feminine to the heart and mind of the world will mean

a return to the type of passionate embrace of life in all its pain, wildness,

and passion that we see in tribal traditions. The native peoples never make any

separation between soul and body, heart and mind, prayer and action, the " other

world " and this one. They did not make these separations, not because they

aren't capable of doing so, as certain arrogant modern thinkers have claimed,

but because they would have seen such separations as crazy, as a betrayal of the

unity of all being. Realizing this unity of being gives native peoples a rugged,

unshakable faith in life's goodness. Within tribal traditions being born a human

is to be born into a dance that every animate or inanimate, visible or invisible

being is also dancing. Every step of this dance is printed in light, its energy

is adoration, its rhythm is praise.

 

The Divine Feminine

Andrew Harvey & Anne Baring - Conari Press

Berkeley, CA

ISBN 1-57324-035-4 (hardcover)

Pgs. 22, 24-26