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Origin: Iroquois/Haudenosaunee people (Six Nations), Wyandot/Huron people.
Role: Mother Goddess, Sky Spirit, First Woman.
Commonly associated with: motherhood, marriage, childbirth, creation, nature, the feminine in general.
Also known as: Grandmother Moon, the Woman who Fell from the Sky.
Native names: Ataensic, Athensic, Yatahentshi, Iotsitsisonh, Atsi’tsiakaion, Iagentci, Yekëhtsi, Yagentci, Awenha’i, Wa'tewatsitsiané:kare.
Related figures in other tribes: Nokomis (Anishinabe), Our Grandmother (Shawnee), Corn Mother (Wabanaki), Old Lady (Blackfoot), Grandmother Woodchuck (Abenaki), Nogami (Mi’kmaq).
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From Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Adapted from oral tradition and Shenandoah and George, 1988.
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In the beginning there was the Skyworld.
She fell like a maple seed, pirouetting on an autumn breeze. A column of light streamed from a hole in the Skyworld, marking her path where only darkness had been before. It took her a long time to fall. In fear, or maybe hope, she clutched a bundle tightly in her hand.
Hurtling downward, she saw only dark water below. But in that emptiness there were many eyes gazing up at the sudden shaft of light. They saw there a small object, a mere dust mote in the beam. As it grew closer, they could see that it was a woman, arms outstretched, long black hair billowing behind as she spiraled toward them.
The geese nodded at one another and rose together from the water in a wave of goose music. She felt the beat of their wings as they flew beneath to break her fall. Far from the only home she’d ever known, she caught her breath at the warm embrace of soft feathers as they gently carried her downward. And so it began.
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The geese could not hold the woman above the water for much longer, so they called a council to decide what to do. Resting on their wings, she saw them all gather: loons, otters, swans, beavers, fish of all kinds. A great turtle floated in their midst and offered his back for her to rest upon. Gratefully, she stepped from the goose wings onto the dome of his shell. The others understood that she needed land for her home and discussed how they might serve her need. The deep divers among them had heard of mud at the bottom of the water and agreed to go find some.
Loon dove first, but the distance was too far and after a long while he surfaced with nothing to show for his efforts. One by one, the other animals offered to help—Otter, Beaver, Sturgeon—but the depth, the darkness, and the pressures were too great for even the strongest of swimmers. They returned gasping for air with their heads ringing. Some did not return at all. Soon only little Muskrat was left, the weakest diver of all. He volunteered to go while the others looked on doubtfully. His small legs flailed as he worked his way downward and he was gone a very long time.
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They waited and waited for him to return, fearing the worst for their relative, and, before long, a stream of bubbles rose with the small, limp body of the muskrat. He had given his life to aid this helpless human. But then the others noticed that his paw was tightly clenched and, when they opened it, there was a small handful of mud. Turtle said, “Here, put it on my back and I will hold it.”
Skywoman bent and spread the mud with her hands across the shell of the turtle. Moved by the extraordinary gifts of the animals, she sang in thanksgiving and then began to dance, her feet caressing the earth. The land grew and grew as she danced her thanks, from the dab of mud on Turtle’s back until the whole earth was made. Not by Skywoman alone, but from the alchemy of all the animals’ gifts coupled with her deep gratitude. Together they formed what we know today as Turtle Island, our home.
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Like any good guest, Skywoman had not come empty-handed. The bundle was still clutched in her hand. When she toppled from the hole in the Skyworld she had reached out to grab onto the Tree of Life that grew there. In her grasp were branches—fruits and seeds of all kinds of plants. These she scattered onto the new ground and carefully tended each one until the world turned from brown to green. Sunlight streamed through the hole from the Skyworld, allowing the seeds to flourish. Wild grasses, flowers, trees, and medicines spread everywhere. And now that the animals, too, had plenty to eat, many came to live with her on Turtle Island.
Our stories say that of all the plants, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, was the very first to grow on the earth, its fragrance a sweet memory of Skywoman’s hand. Accordingly, it is honored as one of the four sacred plants of my people. Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we “remember to remember,” and so sweetgrass is a powerful ceremonial plant cherished by many indigenous nations. It is also used to make beautiful baskets. Both medicine and a relative, its value is both material and spiritual.
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There is such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. Kindness and something more flow between the braider and the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait. Wiingaashk waves in strands, long and shining like a woman’s freshly washed hair. And so we say it is the flowing hair of Mother Earth. When we braid sweetgrass, we are braiding the hair of Mother Earth, showing her our loving attention, our care for her beauty and well-being, in gratitude for all she has given us. Children hearing the Skywoman story from birth know in their bones the responsibility that flows between humans and the earth.
The story of Skywoman’s journey is so rich and glittering it feels to me like a deep bowl of celestial blue from which I could drink again and again. It holds our beliefs, our history, our relationships. Looking into that starry bowl, I see images swirling so fluidly that the past and the present become as one. Images of Skywoman speak not just of where we came from, but also of how we can go forward.
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I have Bruce King’s portrait of Skywoman, Moment in Flight, hanging in my lab. Floating to earth with her handful of seeds and flowers, she looks down on my microscopes and data loggers. It might seem an odd juxtaposition, but to me she belongs there. As a writer, a scientist, and a carrier of Skywoman’s story, I sit at the feet of my elder teachers listening for their songs.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 9:35 a.m., I am usually in a lecture hall at the university, expounding about botany and ecology—trying, in short, to explain to my students how Skywoman’s gardens, known by some as “global ecosystems,” function. One otherwise unremarkable morning I gave the students in my General Ecology class a survey. Among other things, they were asked to rate their understanding of the negative interactions between humans and the environment. Nearly every one of the two hundred students said confidently that humans and nature are a bad mix. These were third-year students who had selected a career in environmental protection, so the response was, in a way, not very surprising. They were well schooled in the mechanics of climate change, toxins in the land and water, and the crisis of habitat loss. Later in the survey, they were asked to rate their knowledge of positive interactions between people and land. The median response was “none.”
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I was stunned. How is it possible that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment? Perhaps the negative examples they see every day—brownfields, factory farms, suburban sprawl—truncated their ability to see some good between humans and the earth. As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of their vision. When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? If we can’t imagine the generosity of geese? These students were not raised on the story of Skywoman.
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On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruits that bend the branches low. In order to eat, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast.
Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.
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And then they met—the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve—and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories. They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I can only imagine the conversation between Eve and Skywoman: “Sister, you got the short end of the stick . . .”
The Skywoman story, shared by the original peoples throughout the Great Lakes, is a constant star in the constellation of teachings we call the Original Instructions. These are not “instructions” like commandments, though, or rules; rather, they are like a compass: they provide an orientation but not a map. The work of living is creating that map for yourself. How to follow the Original Instructions will be different for each of us and different for every era.
In their time, Skywoman’s first people lived by their understanding of the Original Instructions, with ethical prescriptions for respectful hunting, family life, ceremonies that made sense for their world. Those measures for caring might not seem to fit in today’s urban world, where “green” means an advertising slogan, not a meadow. The buffalo are gone and the world has moved on. I can’t return salmon to the river, and my neighbors would raise the alarm if I set fire to my yard to produce pasture for elk.
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The earth was new then, when it welcomed the first human. It’s old now, and some suspect that we have worn out our welcome by casting the Original Instructions aside. From the very beginning of the world, the other species were a lifeboat for the people. Now, we must be theirs. But the stories that might guide us, if they are told at all, grow dim in the memory. What meaning would they have today? How can we translate from the stories at the world’s beginning to this hour so much closer to its end? The landscape has changed, but the story remains. And as I turn it over again and again, Skywoman seems to look me in the eye and ask, in return for this gift of a world on Turtle’s back, what will I give in return?
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It is good to remember that the original woman was herself an immigrant. She fell a long way from her home in the Skyworld, leaving behind all who knew her and who held her dear. She could never go back. Since 1492, most here are immigrants as well, perhaps arriving on Ellis Island without even knowing that Turtle Island rested beneath their feet. Some of my ancestors are Skywoman’s people, and I belong to them. Some of my ancestors were the newer kind of immigrants, too: a French fur trader, an Irish carpenter, a Welsh farmer. And here we all are, on Turtle Island, trying to make a home. Their stories, of arrivals with empty pockets and nothing but hope, resonate with Skywoman’s. She came here with nothing but a handful of seeds and the slimmest of instructions to “use your gifts and dreams for good,” the same instructions we all carry. She accepted the gifts from the other beings with open hands and used them honorably. She shared the gifts she brought from Skyworld as she set herself about the business of flourishing, of making a home.
Perhaps the Skywoman story endures because we too are always falling. Our lives, both personal and collective, share her trajectory. Whether we jump or are pushed, or the edge of the known world just crumbles at our feet, we fall, spinning into someplace new and unexpected. Despite our fears of falling, the gifts of the world stand by to catch us.
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As we consider these instructions, it is also good to recall that, when Skywoman arrived here, she did not come alone. She was pregnant. Knowing her grandchildren would inherit the world she left behind, she did not work for flourishing in her time only. It was through her actions of reciprocity, the give and take with the land, that the original immigrant became indigenous. For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual, depended on it. In the public arena, I’ve heard the Skywoman story told as a bauble of colorful “folklore.” But, even when it is misunderstood, there is power in the telling. Most of my students have never heard the origin story of this land where they were born, but when I tell them, something begins to kindle behind their eyes. Can they, can we all, understand the Skywoman story not as an artifact from the past but as instructions for the future? Can a nation of immigrants once again follow her example to become native, to make a home?
Look at the legacy of poor Eve’s exile from Eden: the land shows the bruises of an abusive relationship. It’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land. As Gary Nabhan has written, we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without “re-story-ation.” In other words, our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories. But who will tell them?
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In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top—the pinnacle of evolution, the darling of Creation—and the plants at the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, human people are often referred to as “the younger brothers of Creation.” We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn—we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live. They teach us by example. They’ve been on the earth far longer than we have been, and have had time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground, joining Skyworld to the earth. Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away.
I like to imagine that when Skywoman scattered her handful of seeds across Turtle Island, she was sowing sustenance for the body and also for the mind, emotion, and spirit: she was leaving us teachers. The plants can tell us her story; we need to learn to listen.
Copyright © 2013 by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013
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What does it mean to live in reciprocity?
Full article by Tammy Gan for Advaya
“An ecosystem is the embodiment of reciprocity. It consists of a multitude of beings related in endless ways. Ecological life is always lived in relationships with others.”
—Andreas Weber
It is clear when we look at ecosystems that there is, quite simply, no possibility of the ecosystem functioning as a whole if each being, each living organism, doesn’t do its part. Biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber explains that: “An ecosystem is a commons, shared and brought forth by all its participants. It is not an assemblage of egoistic agents.” Similarly, in the human world: “we are not atomistic individuals set against one another, but on a deep level we collectively create one coherent process of life”.
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It is easier to see how extractive relationships between humans have ruined us, for the consequences of that are borne by ourselves and those around us. But what about the ways in which the extractive quality of our relationships have impacted the more-than-human world? It is our willful ignorance of this that lies at the heart of our environmental crisis today—save, of course, those who live and have been living in right relationship with the Earth.
Living in reciprocity may seem now far away and unnatural for us, but our Indigenous relatives have always been rooted in living with this principle. Robin Wall Kimmerer explains that “Indigenous story traditions are full of cautionary tales about the failure of gratitude”, and notes that the “worldview of unbridled exploitation is to [her] mind the greatest threat to the life that surrounds us”. The question for her is not, as it is in this economy, “What more can we take from the Earth?” Rather, it is, “What does the Earth ask of us?”
And how do we listen for the answer? Kimmerer calls for deep attention, which she explains leads us into deep relationship. “They are known; they have names. There was a time, not so long ago, when to be human meant knowing the names of the beings with whom we cohabit the world. Knowing a name is the way we humans build relationship. It is a sign of respect to call a being by its name, and a sign of disrespect to ignore it.”
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Naming, respect-building, being-recognition, are all necessary aspects of redefining personhood. A prerequisite to living in reciprocity is just that: reconfiguring what we mean by “person”. Here, again, our Indigenous relatives have not been deluded as we have.
According to Andreas Weber, “Animism, the cosmology of indigenous peoples, is the most radical form to think and to enact reciprocity among beings—human and non-human persons. Animistic thinking perceives subjectivity and matter not as exclusive and contradictory, but as co-present. Therefore, indigenous thought takes the world—humans, plants, animals, rivers, rocks, rain, and spirits—as a society of “persons”, which are in a constant becoming-together.”
Ruth Łchav’aya K’isen Miller, the Climate Justice Director for Native Movement—a matriarchal grassroots Indigenous organization that fights for the rights and lands of Indigenous peoples— explains that the worldview of reciprocity is essentially “a worldview of responsibility for one another, and fundamental community”. If so, then Indigenous tradition and animism (and in fact, animism is not exclusive to Indigenous thought—it is a practice and worldview we all have roots in and that can be local to us all) are not the only places from which we can draw to learn and practice reciprocity.
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The importance of kinship in today’s fractured world
Full article by Hannah Close ‘Re-enlivening relationship in fractured times’ for Emergence Magazine
These times of unrest have been described as a ‘meaning crisis’, though it’s also apt to say we’re in a crisis of belonging. When you crack meaning open, you find belonging at its core. Where there is no belonging, meaning cannot germinate—the seed is without soil, without relation to its life-giving surroundings. To belong means to be irrevocably in relationship with your environment. To be in relationship means to be witness to aliveness and to have your aliveness witnessed. It is an affirmation of the essential porosity that keeps us alive, a process of becoming through reciprocity with the ‘other’. In the words of the Irish poet John O Donohue, ‘in order to be, we need to be with’.
Inhabiting our relational nature with greater awareness can lead to profound liberation, deep belonging, life-affirming meaning, and a level of safety and security seemingly unknown to our neurotic individualist society. The call for connection is not a tree-hugging, romanticist fantasy—it is imperative to our continuation as a species.
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Our relationships are what enable us to step forth into being and enlivenment. Without relationship there is no thing, no body, no where, how, or why. So long as the relationships that sustain us here on earth are severed, so our sense of being here wanes. It is our relationships (to self, other, and earth) that offer us the greatest sense of belonging, and it is belonging that offers us the meaning we thrive on as a species.
Kinship is a way of relating that asks us to go beyond extracting value from the 'other'. It is a form of relationship that acknowledges the deeper dance of reality by operating on the same principles as the very breath which keeps us alive: reciprocity, emergence, and sensuous awareness. You do not have to be indigenous to experience kinship; however, there is much to learn from our indigenous brothers and sisters, whose life-giving cosmologies are largely centered around kinship systems. We would do well to listen without fetishizing, which commodifies identity, and the ‘exotic other’, and to bear in mind the lucid musings of ‘postactivist’ scholar Bayo Akomolafe on the nature of indigeneity: ‘becoming indigenous isn’t about finding essences… It is about being sensitive and open to the world. It is about listening to the murmurings of place, sitting with the unnamed… and coming alive to a sensuousness that often resists articulation or conceptualization.’
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To come into kinship, you must submerge yourself in the river of reciprocity and allow yourself to flow, to be consciously moved by forces other than yourself. It is an act of letting go and, at the same time, taking decisive action towards more intentional relationships with both human and more-than-human beings. Kinship asks that we listen for the needs of others and, more importantly, respond, act.
“We won’t save the world, our relationships will” —Hannah Close
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Here, you will find simple earth-based and nature-oriented practices, prompts and rituals inspired by Skywoman, that will help you embody her qualities and wisdom.
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In the Potawatomi language, sweetgrass is called wiingaashk—the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, indigenous environmental scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer eloquently and beautifully uses the indigenous cultures’ sacred plant, sweetgrass, as a poetic metaphor to explain the origins of plant, animal, and human life on Mother Earth, their intertwined respectful and reciprocal relationships with each other.
“Our stories say that of all the plants, wiingaashk, or sweetgrass, was the very first to grow on the earth. Accordingly, it’s honored as one of the four sacred plants of my people. Breathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. Our elders say that ceremonies are the way we ‘remember to remember,’ and so sweetgrass is a powerful ceremonial plant cherished by many indigenous nations. It’s also used to make beautiful baskets. Both medicine and a relative, its value is both material and spiritual.
There’s such tenderness in braiding the hair of someone you love. Kindness and something more flow between the braider and the braided, the two connected by the cord of the plait. Wiingaashk waves in strands, long and shining like a woman’s freshly washed hair. And so we say it’s the flowing hair of Mother Earth. When we braid sweetgrass, we are braiding the hair of Mother Earth, showing her our loving attention, our care for her beauty and well-being, in gratitude for all she has given us.”
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Ground and center. Take a deep breath. Feel your bones, your skeleton, the solidity of your body. Be aware of your flesh, of all that can be touched and felt. Feel the pull of gravity, your own weight, your attraction to the earth that is the body of the Goddess. You are a natural feature, a moving mountain. Merge with all that comes from the Earth: grass, trees, grains, fruit, flowers, animals, metals, precious stones. Return to dust, to compost, to mud.
Meditation from The Spiral Dance, by Starhawk
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“Whales and redwoods both make us feel small and I think that's an important experience for humans to have at the hands of nature,” says Roger Payne in Jonathan White’s Talking on the Water. He continues: “We need to recognize that we are not the stars of the show. We're just another pretty face, just one species among millions more.” Purposefully seek out some places of grandeur in the natural world. Acknowledge your smallness in the vast scheme of things.
Philosophers describe this experience as the sublime. In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton writes: “The sublime is a feeling provoked by certain kinds of landscape that are very large, very impressive and dangerous. Places like the wide-open oceans, the high mountains, the polar caps. The Sinai Desert, the Grand Canyon. These places do all sorts of things to us. Around the end of the 18th century, philosophers started saying that the feeling these places provoke in us is a recognizable one and universal one—and a good one. It was described as the feeling of the sublime. What lies at the center of the experience of the sublime is a feeling of smallness. You are very small and something else is very big and dangerous. You are very vulnerable in the face of something else.
Nature puts us all in our places. Being made to feel small isn’t something we welcome when it's done to us by another person, but to be apprised of our essential nothingness by something so much greater than ourselves is in no sense humiliating. Our egos, exhaustingly aware of every slight they receive and prone relentlessly to compare their advantages with those enjoyed by others, may even be relieved to find themselves finally humbled by forces so much more powerful than any human being could ever muster.
See how small you are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger than you and what you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to you, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our life is not the measure of all things: consider sublime places a reminder of human insignificance and frailty.” (Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel)
—Spiritual practice by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat in Summertime and Living Takes Practice
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“People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, “Plant a garden.” It’s good for the health of the earth and it’s good for the health of people. A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate—once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself. Something essential happens in a vegetable garden. It’s a place where if you can’t say “I love you” out loud, you can say it in seeds. And the land will reciprocate, in beans.” Kimmerer says: “I made my daughters learn to garden—so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.”
Practice by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
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“Go to the oak tree and ask for its story. Go to the river and ask for its story. Go to the goldenrod and ask without saying anything. Ask with your nose, your belly, your eyes. The answer won’t always be words. Won’t always be sound. Sometimes it will be a feeling in your body. Sometimes it will be a smell. Stories don’t belong to human beings. But human beings belong to stories. Let’s enter back into the complex, tangled work of letting go of authorship and letting ourselves be told.”
by Sophie Strand, from her essay ‘Myco Eco Mytho Storytelling’
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Start your day by summoning and acknowledging all the beings—humans, animals and plants—who live in close proximity to you. Author Sophie Strand explains: “By the time I’m done summoning and sending thanks to every being I know in a twenty-mile radius of my home, I’m surrounded by a world of witnesses. The day begins within a more-than-human community. And my decisions henceforth—practical, creative, and spiritual—will be made with the knowledge that I exist in relationship. Everything I do is ecological. When I used the word ecological, I root back to the original etymology: Greek oikos for household. I am not a noun on an empty page. I do nothing alone. I am a syntactical being, strung together by my metabolism and needs and desires, to thousands of other beings. Together we are all a household, and every choice we make, mundane or explosive, takes place within the networked household of relationships.
How best may I act? How may I act knowing you are watching tenderly and attentively? What stories do I need to notice? What stories want to be told? Who needs my help today? And whose help can I receive?
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This is not a taxonomical exercise. Any name will do. Any way of tracking that invisible and intimate line of connection between you and another being. You exist, not as one end of that thread, but vibrating along its connection. Anything you do to harm yourself, harms other animals and trees and insects. Anything that nourishes other beings, may ultimately nourish you. And when you are suffering, when you are very scared, you do not need to remember a single prayer, or say a holy word. Your body, a doorway poured through with matter, a spider-webbing of relatedness, is prayer enough. Every second you stay present with your connectivity to your ecosystem is sacred, somatic, lived epiphany.
If you pray, ask yourself, does your prayer have roots? Does your god sometimes grow fur? Do your holy words grow leaves? Does your spirituality connect you into your situated ecosystem? If you want, it is a lovely thing to slowly name all those beings that make up your environment. And to seek out new relationships to further flesh out this relational prayer. Gather counsel as you would wildflowers. Pick the ones that show up brightly, insistently, and show you they notice you, just as much as you notice them. Gather counsel as you would pick up a few flat stones to skip across the river. Gather counsel as you would stars, without your hands, held only as a flash of light, in the prismatic blink of an open eye.”
by Sophie Strand, from the essay “Gathering Council”*
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Ground and center, and visualize a round full moon. She is the mother, the power of fruition and of all aspects of creativity. She nourishes what the New Moon has begun. See her open arms, her full breasts, her womb burgeoning with life. Feel your own power to nurture, to give, to make manifest what is possible. She is the sensual woman; her pleasure in union is the moving force that sustains all life. Feel the power and generative life-force in your own pleasure. Feel the nurturing, unconditionally loving, all-encompassing, all-allowing mother in you.
Meditation from The Spiral Dance, by Starhawk
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Ground and center. Breathe deep and be conscious of the air as it flows in and out of your lungs. Feel it as the breath of the Goddess, and take in the life force, the inspiration of the universe. Let your own breath merge with the winds, the clouds, the great currents that sweep over land and ocean with the turning of the Earth.
Meditation from The Spiral Dance, by Starhawk
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Ground and center. Take a deep breath. Feel the blood flowing through the rivers of your veins, the liquid tides within each cell of your body. You are fluid, one drop congealed out of the primal ocean that is the womb of the Great Mother. Find the calm pools of tranquility within you, the rivers of feeling, the tides of power. Sink deep into the well of the inner mind, below consciousness.
Meditation from The Spiral Dance, by Starhawk
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Dive deeper into the world of Skywoman, Indigenous wisdom, kinship and reciprocity, with these resources including books, articles and podcasts.
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✎ Book
‘Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants’
by Robin Wall Kimmerer -
✻ Illustrated Book
‘Sky Woman and the Big Turtle: An Iroquois Creation Myth: An Iroquois Creation Myth’
by Anita Yasuda & Dr Mark Pennington -
✻ Illustrated Book
‘Skywoman: Legends of the Iroquois’
by Joanne Shenandoah, Douglas M. George, John Fadden & David Fadden -
✎ Book
‘As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock’
by Dina Gilio-Whitaker -
✎ Book
‘Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing’
by Robert Wolff -
✎ Book
‘Wisdom of the Elders: Sacred Native Stories of Nature’
by David Suzuki & Peter Knudtson -
✎ Book
‘Turtle Island: The Story of North America's First People’
by Yellowhorn & Lowinger -
✎ Book
‘Legends of the Iroquois (Myths and Legends)’
by Tehanetorens & David Kanietakeron Fadden -
✎ Book
‘The Overstory: A Novel’
by Richard Powers -
✎ Book
‘The Woman Who Fell from The Sky: Poems’
by Joy Harjo -
✎ Book
‘Church of the Wild: How Nature Invites Us into the Sacred’
by Victoria Loorz -
✦ Article
‘Skywoman Falling’
by Robin Wall Kimmerer -
✦ Article
‘What Does It Mean to Live in Reciprocity?’
by Tammy Gan -
✦ Article
‘Re-enlivening Relationship in Fractured Times’
by Hannah Close -
✣ Podcast
‘Relations of Reciprocity with Ruth Łchav'aya K'isen Miller’
by For the Wild
Image Credits:
Lucy Campbell • Caroline Maniere • Susan Seddon Boulet • Sophie Wilkins • Moon Spiral Art • Dawn Dark Mountain • Sue Todd • Mary Fotheringham • Winona Nelson • Betty Albert • Luisa Rivera • Herlinde Demaerel