It has been a long and productive day. I was up at five, so feel more tired than this time of night might usually warrant.
I sit here tired, wondering what is mine to share.
What comes is silence. Let's sit together, silent, for a time, for all time, and perhaps, with that permission, I will say a little more.
Today was about the ancestors.
My friends and I are trained in shamanic journeying. That is what we do together four times a year. We also feast well and ingest a little wine.
I offer some quotes.
"All my ancestors live undiminished in me and will continue so to live, united with me, in my descendants."
Miguel de Unamuno
"We derive nourishment from our ancestral past. In a Ute song, it is said, "In our bones is the rock itself, in our blood is the river; our skin contains the shadow of every living thing we ever came across. This is what we brought with us long ago."
We are the sum of our ancestors. Our roots stretch back to blue-green algae; they stretch to the stars. They ultimately reach the void.
Between the great original emptiness, the ancestral void, and the body that reads these words, there stand numberless generations of inorganic and organic forms. As geological history is written on a canyon wall, this history is inscribed in our psyches.
Silence and solitude enjoin us to remember our whole and great body."
- Joan Halifax
"Silence and solitude enjoin us to remember our whole and great body."
This is where my dreams begin tonight, in honoring the past to bring forward the wisdom of the ancestors in aid to the future. My vision is of peace, the head of the arrow struck into the ground, Mother Earth, war at rest, peace. Vision comes from the eye of the eagle, the sweep of huge wings. And now to sleep.