I know it feels daunting at best to witness the scale of the change needed in our world today.
It feels beyond heartbreaking to witness the violence the Earth, lands, and her children are subjected to in this era of capitalistic and colonial violence. You might often feel powerless and lonely with your unique, beautiful voice to make the changes needed in the face of increasing hate and loss of humanity.
It will feel that way for a while. It will.
Earth. Our great Mother, our most ancient elder, our most wise family member, is calling all of us right now. So loudly. And I know so many of you hear the call, feel the pain, and want to keep responding with deep Love and wise actions.
She is making her cry so loud that we cannot ignore it anymore. And all her relations are being affected. She gives us a chance to listen more deeply and act radically differently. She wants us to feel it more deeply. So we can truly awaken to our ancient nature, to the boundless potential of our loving soul.
But each of us has a choice. We always had a choice. There are two paths we can choose from. One is to numb and close the heart so we can keep living in the ignorance and illusion of the stories at play and continue life as usual, maintain the status quo of separation and materialistic view of the world, or we can open our hearts and feel this calling more deeply to answer what we are feeling in our guts with genuine wisdom, radical actions of change, and profoundly different ways to be in this world.
Without change, we will have no choice but to keep the heart numb to stay in this broken paradigm; you cannot survive that kind of life with a wide-open heart.
Many of you I know are so bravely committed to seeing the insanity of the systems of violence in place, the profoundly broken ways we address issues and are seeking, learning, and remembering ancient ways of wisdom to respond with a different life, a different prayer, a different presence, to the call of the Mother and her children.
I see and know the courage it asked of you to take that path. Oh, this courage to choose, again and again, to feel more, reconnect, remember, and shed those layers.
The often heartbreaking and scary life choices you are being asked to make.
The burden to feel the collective call beyond the self-sheltering and pleasuring.
I see the infinite layers of daunting shedding of false identity required to enter this time of significant changes, this time of prophecy. It is far from easy and won't be gifted by the structure in place. It won't.
We must claim this sanity back into our lives and our world.
We are called to see the true enemy. Ignorance. Or what my Andean teacher would call "Forgetting." Forgetting that all we do is interconnected. Forgetting that what we do to others and to her, we are doing it to ourselves. Forgetting that when we disrespect and hurt others, either humans, animals, trees, plants, or rocks, we are hurting ourselves.
We do need wise elders, timeless wisdom, and a clear ancient compass of sanity to navigate this world and not be hypnotized by the spells of dark witchcraft, the violent and divisive political and religious narratives, the grip of the systems of power and division that blind us to our deep connections to each other.
I was reminded of this when meeting and listening to Tiokasin Ghosthorse, an elder and a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota. We need more than a change of government, energy source, or laws. We won't be saved by new technology or more of "this broken world of new fancy toys and creation." We need to step out of self-ignorance and change our paradigm. The old paradigm made of borders and dominance over "anything and everything" outside of what I call myself. Tiokasin invited us to pray (in Lakota language, prayer also means act) from our heart space, to stop using the words "I" and "me," and to ask our Mother and our elder brothers (trees, plants, animals, rocks) for guidance, wisdom, and healing.
Maybe as we return to this ancient bond, to the craft of deep listening, to more silence in our minds, we will finally hear what is calling all of us beyond those broken veils of separation and realize the immense illusions we were feeding through the lies we believed to be true and the atrocities we had birth.
So don't ever be discouraged or in fear or worry because, despite this path's immense challenges, an ancient voice of wisdom is birthing in the depth of the crumbling and destruction and in the heart of the awakening collective.
Angell Deer
