Deena Metzger's Blog, page 6

BEGINNING AWARENESS: APPROACHING THE ELEPHANT PEOPLE Part I Thula Thula and Chobe

Saturday, February 11, 2017, Topanga California

At the very end of December 2016, I returned to Africa with Cynthia Travis and Matt Meyer to meet with the Elephant People who teach us so much by who they are individually and as a species. Understanding the connection they and I have forged over seventeen years comes slowly, if at all, like light approaching from a distant galaxy, from the furthest end, which means the beginning, of the universe. The personal and the cosmic appear to be one: we have been blown apart from what we once knew.

Today, three weeks after our return, I am beginning to grasp something: the very nature of the Elephant herd may be a template for what is being transmitted. It is as if we, humans and Elephants, fell together into David Bohm’s implicate order, a field of being where past and present, dreaming and the manifest, the living and the dead, human and non-human are in dynamic co-existence. This is the real world and we were invited into it.

Friday, January 6th, 2017, Chobe National Park, Botswana

Epiphany: A sudden manifestation or revelation of the divine. There are two aspects to epiphany: first, the revelation of the sacred and, second, being mysteriously drawn to such a vision over time and space. Epiphany implies a spirit-based field of consciousness, a kind of visionary plasma, in which distinct beings with precise histories, join with awareness in acts of creation.

A group of us experienced Epiphany in this way on January 6th 2000 when the Ambassador Elephant first appeared to us at the place we call the Chapungu (fisher eagle) Tree in Chobe National Park, Botswana. That meeting is central to us as we are travel together once again in Southern Africa.

In 2000, I had had an inchoate hope of sitting in Council with Elephants, though I had no idea what that might possibly mean. Now, I title this essay, Beginning Awareness: Approaching the Elephant People. This is the sixth time I have returned to Chobe as on a pilgrimage. To what purpose? How might another meeting and its consistently unpredictable nature serve the natural world and the future?

After the original meeting there were others in 2001, 2005, 2011, 2016, each distinct, each astonishing. My return is always prompted by urgency though afterwards it seems that an essential insight is eluding me at the edges of experience. The Elephants have always come to us in Chobe at the same place at the same time at the last hour of the last day. Each time, we have been met by them in ways that both challenge credulity and assert the awesome beauty of true exchange. In 2008 and 2016, Cyndie and I traveled to other reserves to see if our initial connections, non-locally inspired, might occur in places other than Chobe. And we were met in Tanzania at the beginning of one trip and in Damaraland, Namibia on the last hour of the last day of another.

This afternoon, we are joyous with the new beauty that has arisen in response to the generous and continuing rains. It has been raining in California after so many years of drought, and the weather there is mirrored by the weather here.

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There is an abundance of water and green. When we arrived, we took a boat ride just before a storm drenched us and came upon a massive herd of several hundred Elephants. Then coming to the Chapungu tree two days later, we passed another monumental gathering. Despite poaching, increasing loss of habitat, drought, the plains and savannahs of southern Africa, resplendent with the abundance of birds and game, have intermittently looked like paradise. This time, I am thinking, “Restoration.”

Aware that today is Epiphany, I am trying to temper my hope that Mystery may unfold again and we might find ourselves gathered once more into an inexplicable connection with the Elephants. There is nothing we can do to further this possibility or determine anything about its nature, but we can appear at the appointed place at the appointed time and wait.

We park the truck at the tree as we have in the past, happy to have returned and to spend a few hours in silence watching. We are graced with an unimpeded view of the extended river plain, which has in my memory never been so green, so lush with blessed waters.

There are animals in the distance, antelope and hippo, a few Elephants oblivious to us, who remain far away and my hope begins to waiver as I continuously remind myself not to sully the moment with expectation and longing. It is five o’clock. We will have to leave at six as has been necessary in the past.

But … the two distant young bulls who have been exuberantly scuffling with each other seem to be approaching. Oh this moment – joy and terror! It is fearsome when Spirit makes itself known. The sound of a young Elephant trumpeting penetrates us as a small herd gambols down the closest path from the ridge. They seem not to notice us as they come down but by being here at this exact time, they make it clear that they know we have returned and are offering their respects. They engage with the river and each other.

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The two young bulls stop near our truck, the young ones who came down from the ridge play excitedly, the older Elephants refresh themselves and drink from the water. All in all, there must be twelve or more Elephants congregating here from several directions – and nowhere else that we can see. All arrived at approximately five o’clock and then by 6, they are gone. It is so ordinary on the one hand.

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However, the view of a great bull, an old Elephant walking down a path at six pm is a sight both unsettling and confirming.

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So unremarkable a scene for Chobe– a few Elephants at the river. But for us, yes, nothing remarkable but that they appeared, materialized, at the last hour of the anniversary of the day we met the Ambassador. And when the hour was over, they disappeared. This is not an ordinary event.

Did the Ambassador (herd) come?

Yes.

And so…?

We are in a field of consciousness that we cohabit. A field that changes us even as we co-create it.

Anything else?

Like two particles, once connected, are affected by each other, irreversibly into the future we, the humans, and these Elephants, relating eternally, have become kin.

*****

Friday, January 6th, 2017, Chobe National Park, Botswana

For the first time in our coming to meet the Elephants, we began elsewhere. We have come here from Thula Thula where another story unfolded. Here, we were also met by the Elephants or we were all immersed with each other in mystery and while this confounds me, it supports me: the irrefutable Presence of Spirit sustains me in dark times. And these are the darkest times.

Cyndie and I are all too aware that we will return to the United States while Donald Trump is being inaugurated. Yes, I was young during World War II, and yes, I became aware of the Holocaust, and yes, I made a pilgrimage to the Death Camps in 1989, but I have not been concerned about the government and the future as I fear them now.

In November 2016, Cyndie and I, and others, went to stand with the Water Protectors at Standing Rock. Native Americans have known the fist and the gun, have known systemic violence, genocide, for five hundred years as have African Americans and other people in this country. And now such brutality is being installed in the White House. Being in Africa, we know the entire world is alarmed, as are we. And yet, the Presence is here. How do we carry this seeming contradiction or explain it?

Saturday January 7, 2017, Chobe National Park, Botswana.

A day later. See if you can create the image that I was not able to photograph, the distances being too great. We have arrived here at the end of a drought and it has been and continues raining today and so it is unlikely that the Elephants will come down to the river. We are at the Chapungu tree again. A narrow band of marshland, with some birds, a hippo and an alligator, is between us and the river. Directly across the waters is a bull Elephant who arrived just after we did and stayed until we had to leave. At the edge of the marsh, are the skull and rib bone of an Elephant who died last year in the drought. The Elephants have a profound relationship with their dead so this is a holy site and here we have an alignment.

We watch the lightning descend everywhere around us, hear the thunder and know that rain is coming. It might be daunting. But I must stay here, no matter the conditions. Such an appointment is a sacred trust.

–

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We are being enfolded into a story that is happening now, outside of linear time though including it, through a remarkable alignment of human and Elephant, living and dead. It is also a story of the five other such meetings, of a journey that brought me to Chobe in 2000, of our original encounter with the Elephant Ambassador, of the third meeting when we, Cynthia Travis and myself and others were thrown a thigh bone of an Elephant ancestor – the most precious and unlikely gift an Elephant might offer – of a unmistakable dramatic narrative through which the Elephants tested Krystyna Jurzykowski and myself, of a dream of a Radical Elephant Movement which calls us to save the natural world, of the unmistakable meetings that have taken place when Cynthia Travis and I have traveled to other places to meet these Elephant People, a Story that will include and integrate each encounter we have and may still have in these three weeks in four game parks in three different countries. The future, including but beyond the next two weeks in Africa, is already here in this still moment of time as is the spirit of this ancestor and the bird who walks so easily alongside the dead one.

It is one living Story composed of so many particulars in alliance, like a herd itself, a single humming mind incorporating thousands of beings, living and dead, in a song as piercing as the Elephant’s trumpet and as still as the great animals tread on the holy earth.

***

Saturday February 11, 2017, Topanga, California

Over the years, we have been met by the Elephants. We have interacted. We have gazed into each other’s eyes! At the core of each event is indisputable connection; we have been drawn together over great distances of time, space, geography and history, notwithstanding the equally great differences between species. Each day, Cyndie and I wonder why this is occurring, why we are being called to the Elephants in these most difficult and tragic times in world history. We pray that we might discover new ways to protect the lives and wisdom of these People of another species. And being desperate and sometimes despairing regarding the US political debacle, we wonder whether these beings reaching toward us might reveal ways for humans, whose fate they unfortunately share, to emerge from the thrall of death and violence that characterizes these days.

At this moment as I ask these questions in Topanga, California, a platinum light breaks through the clouds after days of blessed rain following five years of drought, and everything is starkly illuminated; once more, I cannot doubt the Presence.

Do these meetings have to be connected to world events, must they have purpose? There is no imperative, but we are being shown that interconnection over time and space is the absolute nature of the universe. We are in a hologram and so connection is implicit.

Events gain meaning within a field of consciousness. We may experience them as autonomous, think they exist independently of each other and that they can be understood individually, but this is an illusion. Events gain their true meanings in relationship to each other, to history, personal and global, also to the future. Events assumed to be unchanging and fixed because they have already occurred are also dynamic systems, transfiguring as their contexts alter through interaction with other events. There are no borders between events, no walls as, in fact, there are no borders between time, space, or individuals “but thinking makes it so.”

Sunday, January 8, 2017, Chobe, Botswana

Computers allow us the ease to move back and forth in time and space while writing. Before we returned to Chobe, Cyndie, our guide, Matt Meyer and I visited Thula Thula, a nature reserve established by Lawrence Anthony, author of Elephant Whisperer, Babylon’s Ark and The Last Rhino. I wanted to visit this reserve as Anthony had a profound relationship with a herd of Elephants to whom he had offered sanctuary. I wondered whether their liaison was intrinsic to who they were, or whether over time, they had created a field of consciousness and whether others could enter it. If we, if others, could partake of their rare association, what assumptions, orientation, qualities would be necessary?

In order to put the events in perspective, I have to begin this section with an excerpt from “Becoming Kin – Becoming Elephant”, (Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, Issue #4, September 2016) about meeting the Ambassador and his herd once more in 2016:

We are left with the original unfathomable events. How do the Ambassador and his people know we are coming to Chobe? It may be that Elephants, who are most probably more intelligent than we are through their capacity for unparalleled empathy, can read the heart across vast distances, unimpeded by species barriers and send out subliminal communications which I / we receive and respond to by coming to meet them.

I was reading The Elephant Whisperer by Lawrence Anthony when flying home from my 2011 visit to Chobe. Anthony had had a remarkable relationship with Elephants based on intimacy and proximity. One might even say the Elephants engineered their transfer to his reserve in order to create this relationship. I wanted very much to meet him but he died suddenly before I returned to Africa. Then stories emerged of the Elephants coming to his Lodge when he died and then every year, for three years, on the anniversary of his death. How is this possible? What does it mean? What do the Elephants want us to know?

In the last years, we have been allowed to be very close to the Elephants. But this connection has not yielded answers to the essential questions: How and why are they communicating with us? What do they want? How can we meet their call? Perhaps in Thula Thula, we will be able to immerse ourselves in the herd. Perhaps they will speak to us. Perhaps we will understand more than before. I am praying that the Elephants will take us across another barrier.

The following words ended the essay “Becoming Kin” written before this pilgrimage to Southern Africa and the Elephants 2017. In November before we left, we went to support the Native American Water Protectors fighting the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock, North Dakota. If this journey reveals anything, it is that everything is, indeed, related to everything else. Easy to write these words – difficult to understand if one is not born into a herd or an Indigenous tribe. And yet, this is the essential understanding given to us for these times.

On Tuesday the 27th I will return to Africa for almost a month to be with the Elephant People. Until November 8th, I thought I knew why I was going. But since then, I am uncertain, except to be in alliance and heartbreak with the Elephant people who know the dire consequences and agony of Imperial and Colonial mind.

I hoped to be able to spend time within the Elephant herd, to be among them, to be of them. But now I believe my purpose as an Ambassador from humans to the Elephant people and the other animal people, is to say, “I am so sorry.”

…We have elected as President, the father of a family of big game hunters. We may soon all literally know what it is to be hunted for profit and greed. Perhaps this knowledge will help us be more determined in our activity to protect the wild and all living beings.

I am going to Africa to stand with the Elephant People in ceremony and prayer. I want to apologize for us and then to find ways to say, sincerely, “I have, we have, your backs.

***

As I didn’t know what it might mean to sit in Council with Elephants in 2000, I don’t think I really knew what it meant to speak of the Elephant People when I wrote those words above. I am certain that I don’t fully understand. I have made this journey six times wondering if the Ambassador would come to meet us. This question no longer serves. New questions might be: Were there appearances or connections that reveal the nature of a common field of relationship? Do these manifestations have intent or is intention implicit in the new perspective?

***

Did we meet the Elephant people? We did.

Did we apologize? We did.

Were we immersed in the herd? We were.

Was there Epiphany? I believe there was.

***

Thursday, January 26, 2017, Topanga California.

When I travel to the animals, I try to stay empty, without expectations that might shape or distort the possible experiences. Certain mysteries persist – the Elephants meet me/us in entirely unpredictable and persistently enigmatic ways. We do not understand the Elephants any more than we understand the true nature of the world. But these meetings are seemingly outside of animal nature or beyond human-animal interactions, and yet, they occur with enough frequency to suggest that they might be within animal nature. If so, then the nature of universe is essentially enigmatic and yet, given the times, the need to try to fathom it is urgent.

Let me be honest here, with myself, and with you, to whom I am writing. There is nothing personal here – something is being communicated and we happen to be the recipients. The Elephants who engage in the dramatic narrative that cannot be dismissed, do not enhance themselves. They participate in a decipherable theater piece but are simultaneously simply being Elephants. The rapid shift or conversion from one state to another and back and again, is dizzying and unnerving. Perhaps human disorientation is necessary so that all certainties and assumptions fall away and we more capable of discerning the shape or intent of the mystery.

I have been accompanied each time I have traveled to the Elephants with new questions. The questions have been my ground even though there have not been any definitive answers. Still each question constellates a field of possible understanding so that I can proceed to hold the next questions.

Sunday, January 8th, 2017, Chobe, Botswana

Traveling to Thula Thula, keeping an appointment I did not know I had made, I found myself saying publicly “I am going to the Elephant People.” Pondering the need to be so forthright, I began to feel another question formulating when I entered this new territory, one I had not fully considered before: If Elephants are people, are a People, and if I am approaching a new people, what are the rituals and protocols that need to be observed?

The question opened a door. The day after meeting the herd at Thula Thula, I asked our guide, Andrew Murgatroyd, if we could, without intruding, place ourselves in closer proximity to the two Matriarchs so that I could offer respect, speak to them of my/our intentions, and ask permission to be with them, perhaps to be within the herd. Nana, the older matriarch, fifty-four and tiring, has been giving over her responsibilities to Frankie who is ten years younger, the two creating a model for the benevolent transfer of power while retaining deference, respect and honor for the elder for the full length of her life. Both had been present when the oldest bull, Mabala came to the truck the first day, singling out our guide, Matt, exploring his camera case with his tusk and suctioning Matt’s foot with his trunk. An anomalous event or deliberate activity? We didn’t know. Mabala couldn’t have chosen a better subject for his investigations – couldn’t have found someone more comfortable with such an approach.

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The next morning, we came upon the Elephants at a muddy pan. Both Nana and Frankie came in late and left before all the others, the young bulls remaining to cavort and tussle with each other in what mud was left. It was exciting to be alongside them, witnessing their group frolic, but our relationship to Elephants had changed over the years and now we were visiting another People not observing animals. This shift in awareness required a different approach. We were also cognizant that there was little water for their sport or to drink.

We had detected tensions at Thula Thula that took a while to fathom. At lunch, we learned that a water truck had been hijacked on its way to Lodge. The government had promised water to the people in the surrounding settlement. Water and the infrastructures to receive, distribute and protect it. But that promise, like so many other ruling party promises, had not been kept.

Before we had left California, we had read that rains were expected in southern Africa. We were prepared for thunder showers but at the time of our arrival, little of the promised rain had fallen and everyone was tense, including the animals.

So it was when we went out that afternoon that I asked Andrew, our local guide, if we could stay with the Matriarchs for a short period of time so I might contact them. What would he think of such an opening request:

“Can you imagine that the Elephants are a People?” I dared being considered foolish or mad.

He answered, “Oh yes,” without hesitation. “They are a People of individuals, each with their own character and personality.”

“If this is so, then they have social structures with their own hierarchies, laws, protocols,” I added quickly. I was aware that we would soon have to tell Andrew the story of the Ambassador so that he could support our hopes and intentions.

The telling of the story of the Ambassador to a new group of people is always complex for it requires the listener to consider animals in relationship to spiritual agency. It undermines human hegemony. Guides and rangers spend their lives in the bush, practicing exact and skilled observation of the animals, sometimes knowing individuals from birth or through particular encounters or incidents. Though the term ‘whisperer’ – one who communicates with animals – is making itself known, it is not generally acknowledged. Few imagine, or admit, that they, themselves, might have such a gift, or that the gift might be common in the ways it once was for Indigenous people. The breach between humans and animals, or humans and the natural world, grows increasingly larger as humans inhabit a manufactured world, living progressively within the artifice of corporate intelligence and cyberspace. To accept the possibility of intelligent, responsive relations between humans and animals, requires humans to step away from the elite conceptions of mind that assert human dominance, superiority and privilege.

While a general audience might be thrilled by stories of human/animal relationships, guides and rangers are less likely to be impressed or convinced. Yet, as our latest itineraries depended upon guides, we had to have their collaboration. Telling the stories did not guarantee such; ultimately everything depended on sharing experiences. Matt had experienced the connections in 2016 and now it seemed Andrew was open to our hope that another kind of interaction between Peoples was possible.

We spent the afternoon looking for the herd. Because of the little rain, the waterholes they frequented regularly, while muddy for cooling off, were without sufficient water to drink. The Elephants had some remaining sources, deep in the forested valley and up on the ridge, places we couldn’t reach. Cyndie and I entered our quiet and persistent rituals of prayers, offerings and gratitude … and hope. It was late in the day that Andrew and Matt spotted the herd moving and we drove to a plateau where Andrew guessed they might appear. We parked the vehicle and waited. If we chased them, we would not catch up to them. Waiting was the only alternative and it is also our desired practice to find a herd and position ourselves so that the Elephants could choose if and how to interact with us.

In a short time, the younger Elephants were coming toward us, as they continued to do from them on, fearlessly and with curiosity, as if our prayers had already been received. Soon Nana appeared some distance away with the very little ones following her and then Frankie with her son Brandon, as always, in tow. We stayed still and I offered my respects as I would have done to any Chief or Tribal elder, asking permission to observe them, be among them for their sakes, I hoped, for the sake of the Elephant people everywhere though I did not know what might result from our connection. “Still,” I added, “I believe I /we have been called here and if that is true, and if common Spirits inhabit a potentially common field of interaction, might we not be called to make ourselves known to each other? The habit of human domination through will and violence is legion; my hope and intention is to yield to Sprit and to you as best as I am able.”

I don’t recall if I spoke directly in my mind of wishing to be within the herd, but it was in my mind that it would be most possible at Thula Thula with its one herd that was particularly familiar with human beings.

The three goals I had articulated before I came were also present:

To be immersed in a herd so as to gain the wisdom they might want to impart,

To apologize for human behavior that was threatening their lives, all lives, the earth,

To find ways to stand with them.

To find ways to stand behind them would mean to support their understanding and actions however transmitted to us. Needless to say, Standing Rock was in my consciousness as the Sioux had designated themselves as Water Protectors. And here we were seeking water.

Were our offerings and requests received? Or were the Elephants following a thread of their own, when Nana and Frankie and then the others veered suddenly toward us, leaving the path they had been following?

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They walked past us in their slow and majestic manner though the narrow corridor in the brush was no wider than their bodies, and the field beyond us was fully open. Our proximity to each other was deliberately negotiated; we were in the force field of their presence, as we would be for the days that followed.

Prayers were heard and received and reality reconstituted itself. The Elephants had responded to us. We were contained in a field of conscious co-existence. For the days we were at Thula Thula, the Elephants greeted us and played with us whenever we met them.

We had had lunch that day with Francoise Anthony who, determined to run Thula Thula after her husband’s death, alluded through a variety of stories to the metaphysical nature of the herd. Francoise was not explicit in her interpretations of the events she shared, but Cyndie, Matt and I understood as if we were conversing in a secret code. Not only did she confirm the Elephants coming to the Lodge on three separate occasions on the anniversary of Lawrence Anthony’s death, but described other events. For example, Nana had, most deliberately, with her trunk, undone all the latches on a boma (enclosure) where captive antelopes were being held prior to being relocated for breeding purposes, while the capture team watched aghast.

The next day, we went out with a new confidence. All of us, including Andrew were involved. At the same time, we were watching the few pools of water become mud and the mud pans thicken and become dangerous. On New Years Eve, an Inyala (antelope) who had fallen into a mud pan was rescued by a group returning from a game drive. The guide and guests had gone into the pan themselves, covered the antelope’s eyes to help him relax and had pushed him to stable ground.

Anthony, our guide, could never be certain where we might find the Elephants as they were desperately seeking water. On our third day, the pool of water in which they had frolicked so jubilantly was entirely dry.

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I was filled with anxiety and dread as I feared what might happen if there were no water at all for the animals. I could determine the Elephant’s concerns by the response of those in the settlements. The people who had hijacked the water tanker had closed all the roads and were rioting. They had made barriers of burning tires so no one could pass. It was a strange variation on the road closing by the DAPL police to isolate the protestors and prevent supplies from reaching them despite the fierce snow blizzards that were dropping temperatures to well below zero.

Still, on our fourth day, we found the herd delighting in the sweetness and abundance of just ripened figs in a grove of sycamores. When we arrived, we were surrounded. It was an answer to my prayer that I might be immersed in the herd.

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After half an hour, Frankie who had been alongside us, alternately grazing and investigating us and the vehicle.

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was leading the herd away, but stopped and looked at us with what Andrew deemed a belligerent expression. “She is like that,” he asserted.

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But I heard something different. She asked me, quite clearly and deliberately, “Do you understand how hard it is to be the Matriarch when I cannot find water? Do you know what it means when the younger ones in your charge have no water to drink? Do you know what will happen to us if there is no water?” That said, she turned and walked away.

Immediately, I knew that she understood, despite having been given refuge on this reserve, that we, the humans, are responsible for her plight and that of her people.What had seemed like a blessed enfolding into the tribe of Elephant people in pursuit of sweetness with a very young bull, toddler age, suctioning the hood of the vehicle with his trunk and the others, young and old eating grass alongside us though Andrew remarked that there was plenty of grass around and their proximity was, therefore, by choice, had suddenly become a briefing on the perversity and danger of human beings.

I reached for my water bottle and then Matt’s and offered what water we had to the earth in prayer. “In the pursuit of water in limited supply,” Matt said later, “it is always the people who win, though we are quickly coming to understand that this is a very short sighted view.” Especially limited activity by the people in power, I thought, thinking of Standing Rock. The fate of people, the earth, the animals, the same.

The next morning we could not find the Elephants, except briefly, when a tiny bull snorted at the waters of a drying pool and went off disgruntled and thirsty. To dig another bore hole would take months and could well endanger the aquifer even more and threaten the careful natural balance of earth, stone and fluid. As we were driving back to the Camp, we heard that the Elephants were coming down as well. It was feared that desperately thirsty, they might break, as they had at another time, the main water pipes to the Lodge, which cannot be buried. This time they didn’t, but they stood silently by Matt’s tent as, perhaps, they had stood silently at the Lodge to honor Lawrence Anthony.

Predicted thunderstorms brought sprinkles that night but didn’t alter the situation. Maybe water would have to be trucked in. The thirst and need of the Elephants is enormous. An adult Elephant can drink 50 gallons of water a day. There are 30 members of this herd and countless other animals. The reserve is fenced to protect the surrounding villagers. The animals are imprisoned; they have no way to find water elsewhere. We were witness to a crisis of great proportion.

In 2009, I had seen photos from CNN and Save the Elephants of villagers confronting mud-covered bodies of desert Elephants who were dying of thirst.

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“Reaching desperately for drops of water, they had lowered their trunks, toppled in, remained trapped and died in Mali’s scorching heat.

“The “last desert Elephants in West Africa “have adapted to survive in the harsh conditions” they face, Save the Elephants said Monday. But now, the group says, conditions have gone from bad to worse, and they are living “on the margin of what is ecologically viable.”

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/africa/05/18/mali.drought.Elephants/index.html

Anguished, again, eight years later, I remembered a journal entry based on a dream on May 25, 2009.

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I pray for a dream to show us a path out of the horror we have created. I pray for a dream to show the way to restoration. I pray for a dream though I have never received a dream in answer to such a request.

I have put out a call to gather those who carry sacred and magical powers. Women are coming together in a rectangular room that will allow each of us enough space to sit in a circle together. Spread out on cloths, kangas, lappas, prayer rugs with ritual items around us, we prepare to do ceremony. I have some trepidation about my ability to communicate the beautiful importance of this gathering. Indeed, we are failing to gather in the way that meets the call. We are losing the energy of what we might accomplish, finding new ways of meeting the current danger. I had imagined we would form ourselves into a sacred community, devoting ourselves to supporting public activities on behalf of healing the earth, peacebuilding and restoration. We are being called into alliance. Combining political, spiritual and ritual activities offers the best chance of success. This is a call for on-going ritual and ceremonial work in support of pragmatic social, political and environmental activities. Our situation is dire: Many are being driven to violence, brutality and cruelty. The animals are being victimized. We are deeply concerned with the plight of Elephants, polar bears, wolves. The earth, air and waters are highly polluted. Global warming is real and is having disastrous consequences.

I try to begin again, but everyone is distracted and I don’t know how to gather them together. A young, dark skinned woman with long black hair lying on a low couch raises herself on her forearms, as in a cobra yoga pose, and begins chanting in a foreign language. The young woman’s voice is deep and resonant and the song gathers us to attention and creates the field in which our mandate, for it is a mandate, can be accomplished.

Writing the dream, I accept that I have received spiritual instruction that can help accomplish our deepest hopes for the future if we make these activities the very core of our daily lives. This is the labor that calls to each of us even as it entirely transforms and refocuses our definition of work. It is not only that we are called to do this work together in a group but that we are each, in the way we are trained, called to it as our primary activity. Each of us, devoted and alongside each other. The very definition of work and making a living is altered by the requirement to put ritual activity and prayer first before our work, before our personal concerns and lives.

At Standing Rock, the Elders said, the way to effectively protect the waters is through Prayer and Ceremony.

On the last day at Thula Thula, the rains come. The long lucent call of Burchell’s Coucal, the rain bird, has been realized. Wearing rain ponchos, we seek the Elephants and see them on a distant ridge we cannot reach. Then we cannot make our way up the wet road and slip and slide until our open vehicle is stuck in the deep mud. There is no other vehicle which has the capacity to help us and we are many miles from our camp. Stuck in the mud in a similar way in Liberia with everyday gandhis, Cyndie and I met the rebel, General Leopard, who then gave up his intention to become a mercenary and joined our NGO. It takes a long time and much effort to reverse our direction, go to the bottom of the steep hill, reverse, and with as much speed and power as can be mustered, make our way over the rim and back to camp. Covered with mud ourselves, we are exuberant.

That night we sleep and wake to the rhythm of thunder, lightning and rain. It is our last morning. Because of the mud and rain, we not know if we will see the Elephants. We pass ponds filling with water and I am relieved. Andrew says there is enough for a few days. He continues driving, taciturn, as is his nature. We climb a road that our little group hasn’t traveled before. At each juncture, we fail to see the Elephants. Coming to a turn on a precarious road, Andrew announces that we have come to the very end as there is no other turn-around.

But … “Look,” says Andrew. On the far ridge, in silhouette, Frankie and Brandon and a few of the others are grazing. We watch them until they disappear on the other side of the hill to join the rest of the herd.

[image error]

Had we come a few minutes later, we would not have seen them. This is, as it has been and continues to be at Chobe, the last hour of the last day of our pilgrimage.

***

After our return, Francoise Anthony communicated to us that the rains continued at Thula Thula and the streams and pans were filling: “We have had beautiful rain after your departure and nature has come alive! miracles do happen. I am getting a geologist to come and check our land for water so that we can be prepared for the future.”

[image error]

Thursday, January 26, 2017 Thula Thula photo by Vusi Gumede

Sunday, February 11, 2017, Topanga California

We are in a Story. I have been in this ongoing Story since I determined to be in Council with the Elephants. Who or what was orchestrating this moment and the other moments over the last seventeen years when I had, inconceivably, yielded to and followed a call for connection with another species for their sake, may always remain entirely mysterious. Still, I pray that our strange and unpredictable connections might influence the restoration of the natural world and the vital future of these People who are keystone to us all.

My notes to the dream of 2009, said: “Such collaboration between Native American elders, medicine people and younger Native American activists has recently turned years of failure of achieving goals into success.” These words written in 2009 are the current perspective of the community of Water Protestors at Standing Rock. They have not moved from this position though Trump has extended permission for the Dakota Access pipeline and Energy Transfer Partners to dig under the sacred lake. Perhaps they are the words we all need to meet our global crisis. What are the Elephant People teaching us? What do we learn from being gathered together in this Story?

There is a Story told here through Elephant language of activity and visitation, a story of relationship, connectivity, spiritual awareness and ethical considerations.

There is a Story told here of the Elephant People who have spiritual agency and with whom we can collaborate.

This is a Story about the possibilities offered through dream, ritual and prayer.

This is one Story and many stories. The Stories themselves are visitations. They teach us how to live. We are living these stories and they, in turn, are alive in us.

A field of consciousness gathers us into itself. Events arise out of the field’s essential nature. We are of that field and enfolded back into it.

This Story is told in a universal language. This Story is an act of creation.

If we let ourselves fully enter this world, the future is possible.

Let us meet in this field of wonder:

[image error][image error]

*****

Filed under:

A NOTE FROM DEENA METZGER AT THE END OF THE YEAR About Going to Standing Rock, About Going to be with the Elephant People, About Meeting The

[image error]Today is the winter solstice, 2016.  On this day in 1996, I was in Norway at the Arctic Circle.  I had gone to Lofoten Island for ten days of silence and dark, hoping, without success, to see the Northern lights.  This was the penultimate day.  I spent it in ceremony.  Suddenly, the night sky turned red and I went out onto deep snow as a great black bird, larger than any I had ever seen, flew through the aurora borealis.  I remember this so I will not doubt the Presence of Spirit even in such disturbing times.  I have been fortunate as events which I can, logically, only attribute to Spirit, are with me often.  But sometimes circumstances overwhelm my deepest knowing, sometimes overwhelm the faith I have based on experience not liturgy, faith that is the same, for me, as hope. Then I remember the on-going Presence of Spirit and I go on.  I go on not knowing, but I go on.

I began writing these words, and the surprising rain which has been falling, unexpectedly, the last days, suddenly changed from a gentle female rain to a downpour such I have not heard in four years of drought.  Music on the chimney and skylights pervades the house.  The rain comes, after four years of drought, and my heart is eased.  How can it be otherwise?

***

A few weeks ago, as some of you know, several of us went to Standing Rock.  We went for different reasons but essentially to stand with the Water Protectors, to have, as best as we were able, their backs.

For those of you generously contributed to Standing Rock through us, we thank you.  I was able to put a sealed unmarked envelope directly into the hands of LaDonna Brave Bull Allard who started Sacred Stone Camp and is still there fighting DAPL now, and then another similar envelope with checks made out to the Indigenous Environmental Network into the hands of one of the directors. Deliberately, I did not count the cash nor did I total the checks, nor did I identify the source.  To give without attachment, to return what truly belongs to the Native Americans, was my goal.

“We truly appreciate your generous donation to the Oceti Sakowin Camp. We are determined to stop DAPL, protect Native Sacred Land, the water for everyone, and sovereign treaty rights. To accomplish these goals, many resources will be required.  In addition to our efforts for winterizing the camp, keeping everyone safe, healthy and warm, your kind donation will allow us to continue the struggle. North Dakota winters are cold as well as challenging.”

We arrived with the first blizzard and it cut short our ever so brief time there.  But we were there long enough to marvel at the courage, fortitude, skill and devotion of the Native people who were, at the time we arrived, providing for over 9,000 people.  The Sioux elders said,

“Ceremony and prayer are the bedrock of Indigenous peoples’ connection to land and water and are central in protecting them. Actions are ceremony and along with meetings, usually begin with prayer.”

The first thing we learned were The Seven Lakota Values:

Prayer. Respect. Compassion. Honesty. Generosity. Humility. Wisdom

For a discussion of the values see: http://www.ocetisakowincamp.org/seven-lakota

Before we arrived, we received the following instructions about how to deport ourselves at the Camp.  Whether one goes to Standing Rock or not they are essential documents, worth studying alone and in community so that we can learn how to walk in the world in good ways.  http://www.ocetisakowincamp.org/
Whether you go to Standing Rock or wish to support the Water Protectors at Standing Rock or at all the other sites and actions that are beginning or continuing in order to stop the Black Snake, please read the following so you will learn how to live:

http://www.standingrocksolidaritynetwork.org/uploads/4/2/9/2/4292077/joining_camp_culture_final.pdf
http://www.standingrocksolidaritynetwork.org/uploads/4/2/9/2/4292077/whenyoureturnhome_final.pdf

We awakened at 5 am each morning so we could make our way to Oceti Sakowin Camp in time for the morning prayers at 6:30.  The temperature fell to the low 20s and the wind was blowing.  We gathered in the dark, in an ever enlarging circle around the sacred fire that had been burning since the Camp was organized to stop DAPL.  Snow had fallen on the tents, teepees, yurts, domes, straw bale improvised dwellings that were housing the thousands of protectors of the Water Protectors.  Wisps of smoke from wood stoves blended into the icy air.  To the north, on the ridge of the hill, which is a Sioux sacred burial site, DAPL search lights interrupted the slow beauty of the transition from dawn to day.

Still, there was a sacred fire.  Still, we listened to the elder sing the morning prayers.  Still we heard the women sing the sacred songs to bless the water and we walked with them to the river, where each woman was assisted hand by hand by men lining the slippery walkway, so that we might, individually, go to the water, offer tobacco, and pray.

Dawn came.  Daylight came. The Camp came to life.  Food was prepared, propane and fuel delivered.  People started building more shelters for the coming visitors.  A village the size of a small city was being constituted before our eyes through hard work, cooperation, devotion, ceremony and prayer.

We left Standing Rock as the first of 2000 veterans were arriving.  Chris Turley, a member of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma who had served in the U.S. Army for nine years arrived after walking 240 miles before he received a ride.  He said, “I’ve come here because of the vow I made when I entered the armed services, which was to protect our country from both foreign and domestic threat/terrorism.”

His words could have been spoken by any of those who made the arduous journey to stand with the Sioux Water Protectors in below freezing weather.  On Tuesday December 6th, the Veterans gathered before elders including Leonard Crow Dog, Arvol Looking Horse, Phyllis Young, and Faith Speckled Owl, to offer the following words on bended knees:

“We came here to be the conscience of the nation. And within that conscience, we must first confess our sins to you, because many of us, me in particular, are from the units that have hurt you over the many years. We came. We fought you. We took your land. We signed treaties that we broke. We stole minerals from your sacred hills. We blasted the faces of our presidents onto your sacred mountain. When we took still more land, and then we took your children, then we tried to take your language, and we tried to eliminate your language that God gave you and that the Creator gave you. We didn’t respect you. We polluted your earth. We’ve hurt you in so many ways, but we’ve come to say that we are sorry, we are at your service, and we beg for your forgiveness.”

***

This is the solstice, this is the turning toward the light in what many of us fear will be the darkest time we and our country has ever known.  Many of us are still reeling over the results of the election.  In our communities, we are asking how we are to proceed, what we are to do, how we are to stand, how do we resist?

I believe Standing Rock has answers for everyone.  When I ask Native friends how we will survive Trump’s government as individuals and as a nation, they often say, “Trump?  We’ve been living with the violence and greed of colonization for over five hundred years.”

In other words, Native Americans in both hemispheres, and Indigenous people everywhere have been living with violence, greed, lies, distortion and danger  for five hundred years AND they have kept their values, ceremonies and beliefs, their love of and respect for the land. Now when the Earth and all beings are so viciously threatened, when all life is at stake, they are standing in prayer and ceremony on behalf of the future.

In order to meet these times, we can stand with them and behind them if we learn the ways.

At Standing Rock, as non-Native people, we have to face ourselves.  “You are Settler-Colonists,” the Native people say.  The label is a clear mirror into which we can look in order for all life to survive.

How shall we meet these dark times?  How shall we stop DAPL and the Black Snake?  How shall we meet the Trump presidency?  How shall we save the Earth and all life?

If we study the instructions above from Standing Rock, we will know something of how to stand.

On this Solstice night there are four words in my heart:
Remember,
Restore,
Resist,
ReVision.

Remember Spirit, the old, old ways, the wisdom ways, Indigenous knowledge, beauty, heart. Remember what sustained us as children and in right relationships, and what sustains life and all beings.  Engage in the practice of remembering.  Ceremony and prayer.

Restore the Earth, the wild, all generous and loving ways of life. Restore sanctuary. Restore spirit centered, earth based wise cultures.  Restore ethics and generosity, and live according to all our relations, mitakuye oyasin. Ceremony and prayer.

Resist the death culture and imperial mind.  Resist any and all attempts to coerce us into living and acting against our principles, values, neighbors, and deepest held beliefs.  Fiercely protect everything and everyone one you love. Ceremony and prayer.

ReVision, not only medicine but all institutions, our culture, and our lives so that all beings flourish.  Ceremony and prayer.

***

On Tuesday the 27th I will return to Africa for almost a month to be with the Elephant People.  Until November 8th, I thought I knew why I was going.  But since then, I am uncertain, except to be in alliance and heartbreak with the Elephant people who know the dire consequences and agony of Imperial and Colonial mind.

I hoped to be able to spend time within the elephant herd, to be among them, to be of them.  But now I believe my purpose as an Ambassador from us to the Elephant people and the other animal people, is to say, “I am so sorry.”

You can read my essay on the last journey I took and my reasons for going again at Becoming Elephant, Becoming Kin, as published in Dark Matter: Women Witnessing.

I will be traveling again with Cynthia Travis and you can read her essay in Dark Matter. Listen With Your Feet.

We have elected as President, the father of a family of big game hunters.  We may soon all literally know what it is to be hunted for profit and greed.  Perhaps this knowledge will help us be more determined in our activity to protect the wild and all living beings.

I am going to Africa to stand with the Elephant People in ceremony and prayer.  I want to apologize for us and then to find ways to say, sincerely, “I have, we have, your backs.”[image error]

Filed under:

Meeting the Times November 9 2016

Yesterday, two experiences early in the day assured me of the existence of spirit. Then I was, as are many of us, mystified, stunned and fearful as the unimaginable came closer. Donald Trump was elected president. For some the world shattered.

I have to ask: What are we called to at this moment?

Let me say what I must directly. We are stricken. We don’t know what is coming toward us, what we will be called to meet. And we don’t know what to do or how to do it.

I am thinking about the Water Protectors at Standing Rock. Despite adversity, they have created a village. It formed on behalf of endangered and violated Water and on behalf of sacred land and the ancestors. The elders created protocols for entering the culture of Standing Rock:

“Ceremony and prayer are the bedrock of Indigenous peoples’ connection to land and water and are central in protecting them. Actions are ceremony and along with meetings, usually begin with prayer.”

A small group of us will join those at Standing Rock from 11/29 to 12/2. It is more important than ever to stand there on behalf of Water.

There are sacred circles of standing stones across the globe.  Dan Berrigan spoke wisely in the midst of the Vietnam war: “Just don’t do something, stand there.”

Several people met at my house on election night. No one should be alone tonight, we said.  We agreed that rather than watching the returns constantly, we would spend the night in silence, prayer and council. We invited spirit, we passed a prayer pipe several times; we listened deeply.

A core question repeated itself: How do we meet this moment?

For myself, there is a clear call to divest myself from all the systems in which I am / we are embedded that have led to these dire circumstances. Even as they will beckon more powerfully, so determinedly must I refuse them. I am aware of a similar need to disentangle from Western and colonial mind that have brought us to this brink.

Watching a tsunami of fear and analysis which is reifying the divisions and the danger, I will not declare war or name enemies.  i want to walk the No Enemy Way.

It is a time for living the medicine without compromise or accommodation. We are being called to lives of exquisite integrity.

Let us try not to be self-righteous; let’s try to be courageous.

In the darkest times, we have seen people abandon each other out of fear and to serve power. We saw it in this election. Let us try not to be like them.  In the darkest times, we have seen people join with and sustain each other.  Let us be those people.

We are being called, once again, to meet what we must.  Perhaps this is not just a spiritual opportunity but a spiritual demand.

In our circle last night, simple ways repeated themselves:

Invite spirit.  Listen deeply.

Move with heart and prayer.

Bear witness.

Create, confirm and sustain community.

Stand in communion and community with each other, with all others. Stand in the community of all beings. The 19 Ways became increasingly relevant:

Protect the Mother, Earth, as the primary, daily, on-going activity.

***

Last night we consulted the I Ching. Question: How do we meet this time?

Hexagram 50. The Vessel. (No changing lines):

Ding is a ritual vessel that signifies connection with the spirit world and the ancestors. It is divination… submitting questions to the oracle, as well as the right moment to act. …It offers nourishment to the warriors and sags and the sage-mind in all of us brightening the eye and ear. It suggests a mandate, a fate conferred by heave that is also a duty or responsibility. It means becoming a true and responsible individual.

1972, I marched with thousands of people in Santiago, Chile, in support of President Allende and the Unidad Popular. One year later, I was in Cuba on 9/11/73 when the brutal golpe in Chile occurred. For the next years, I recited the names of those I had met in Chile as if saying a rosary to protect them. (It was not all I did on behalf of Chile to end the horrific violence. I was devoted.) Whether coincidence, magic or the power of prayer, those whose names I said, were not killed by those who were torturing and murdering.

Today we are putting all the names into the circle. We call you into the circle. Let us stand with and love each other and the Earth very well.

Mitakye oyasin, all our relations.

***

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Returning to Africa and the Elephant Ambassador

I am refering you to the posting this again because it is the reason I am going to Africa with Cynthia Travis of Everyday Gandhis. Not for my / our own sakes, but because we are so heartbroken about the world. As you, who are reading this are, as well. While I am alive, I will not accept that we cannot save all life from the current trajectory of global destruction. Certain realities have not made enough of a difference in our behavior: that the climate is changing drastically, that we are responsible, that our disregard for the earth is criminal, and that modern warfare is a primary culprit. And so I return as a humble seeker to see if something unexpected and, perhaps unprecedented, might emerge from a soul and mind alliance with another most intelligent and similarly heartbroken species, unable, as we are, to change current non-indigenous human activity and violence. Some synergy on behalf of all species.

My first journeys, as chronicled below, confirmed elephant (animal) intelligence and agency, incontrovertibly. Understand that the elephants in the wild met me/us four times on four separate occasions, over twelve years, but at the same time in the same place! At a certain tree, in Chobe Wild Animal Park,between 5 and 6 in the afternoon in Botswana. Cynthia Travis, Valerie Wolf, Michael Ortiz Hill and I were together in Botswana on one of those occasions when the Elephant Ambassador met us directly and threw us the most precious gift possible, a bone of one of his ancestors.

Elephant culture speaks loudly of heart and relationship. We humans are not the experts in the realm of the heart. The encounters with the elephants speak to their spiritual and psychic awareness and skill. But now, what feels like an urgent journey, is on behalf of the possibility of a spiritual and pragmatic alliance between members of different species so that we, who the Kogi call, and rightly so, the younger brothers, might somehow shift all our ways.

I am /we are praying that the elephants will appear, that the Ambassador will come again, and that this meeting will, in ways I cannot predict or imagine, actually serve to align our human species’ heart, to re-tune, entrain us, that it will …. I do not know what, but that some way will appear that will serve all life, all our relations. I am going to this other species as a supplicant.

We will be in the Wild in Africa from January 4th to the 19th. Please keep the elephants in your hearts and prayers and open yourselves to whatever may be asked of us on behalf of all life. I had a dream some months ago in which I was recruited by the Radical Elephant Movement to participate in actions on behalf of the earth that were far beyond any ideas I had of how we might proceed at this time. This journey arises from that dream. And from our belief that such dreams are sent by the spirits and so we are deeply called to listen.

In hope and prayer, Deena.

(Feel free to share this if you think it might have value beyond ourselves.)

“There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of bodies on…


deenametzger.wordpress.com











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LIVING BY DREAM

LIVING BY DREAM was published in the inaugural issue of Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, edited and published by Lise Weil. http://www.darkmatterwomenwitnessing.com

Dark Matter publishes writing and visual art created in response to an age of massive species loss and ecological disaster. It is a home for dreams, visions, and communications with the nonhuman world…especially those with messages for how we might begin to heal our broken relationship to the earth.

***

A Map to the Next World

Joy Harjo

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for

those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged

from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It

must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it

was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the

altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our

children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born

there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to

disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to

them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the

map.

Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us,

leaving a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s

small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a

spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking

from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh

deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world

there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song

she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you

will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they

entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the destruction.

Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our

tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was

once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

***

People lived according to the dream spirits in the old, old times. Then the Church, the State, and later Science taught the people to distrust and disregard them. Attending the dreams in the old, old ways was prohibited and the priests and secular rulers persecuted dreamers. Learning to live by dream again restores the ways that honor the spirits and realigns human activity within a web of relationships.

The sacred ritual of the Eleusinian Mysteries was practiced in Greece for 1500 years until 396 CE, when the Christian/Roman empire suppressed them. (See Birth and Rebirth in the Eleusinian Mysteries on my The Mysteries were extensive ritual and narrative events that were prepared for rigorously in March of one year, and then enacted eighteen months later in September. During the Mysteries, as many as 1500 people at a time walked the nineteen miles from Athens to Eleusis, engaging in complex activities on the way. Much of what we associate with rites of transformation was practiced here: purification, fasting, dietary restraint, rites of endurance, meditation, theater, sport competitions, and visioning. Women and men, citizens, slaves and foreigners were all able to participate if they prepared for and committed themselves to the beautiful extremity of the event.

My consciousness was reawakened to the old ways of dreaming through the means of a play I was writing that drew increasingly on the spiritual context and intent of the Mysteries. As has happened to me many times, the writing of the play revealed the nature of dreams far beyond what I had understood until then. I don’t remember why I started studying the Mysteries, only that they pulled me down into the sacred underworld as they were meant to do. I was immediately ‘entranced’ when I learned that the underworld had been a destination in the Mysteries, a place of wisdom and transformation. (Pluto, the Roman name for the equivalent god, Hades, means ‘treasure.’) Christianity, to gain hegemony, had demonized the ritual event, declaring Hades to be hell, Dionysus/Pan to be Satan. A ritual required by the ancient world on behalf of soul-making was forbidden. Soul, as the ancients would have warned us, began to disappear and was increasingly replaced by secular materialism.

At this time, I was working with an improvisational theater group. Our work led to the development of different characters who became important to me and to the actors. Unexpectedly, the characters began to create relationships among themselves in my imagination, and the play Dreams Against the State was born. Each of the contemporary characters was based on a figure from the Mysteries and, in the first draft of the play, there were entre-acts in which the Gods – Demeter, Hecate, Persephone, Hades, Hermes – appeared. Later, their roles were incorporated into the characters so that the audience could see that we can each live the intensity and passion of divine energies if we allow ourselves our real lives.

In the play, the contemporary characters were drawn together ‘underground’ through the power of dreaming at a time when dreaming was illegal. The dangerous upper world was inhabited by police and other forces of conformity and repression who sought to stifle all vital and individual life energies. When one of the dreamers was captured and incarcerated, the dreamers had to develop the ritual means to retrieve her and restore her body and soul.

Theater director Steven Kent and I re-enacted the Mysteries in 1980 (and twice again in the 90s) for the first time since 396 CE. We began the long ritual at the Cave of Dicte where Zeus had been born on the isle of Knossos. As we descended the narrow spiral of stone stairs, each myste carrying a lit taper to illuminate the way down into the dark, I knew that we had found the entrance into the ancient way of the dream. We were stepping into another world, not only the underworld from which we would emerge ritually, but into the old, old world whose ways would continue to guide and sustain us from that time forward. Rising quietly in the morning, telling dreams before speaking and before breakfast, and using the dreams to enhance and understand our experiences was our way then of beginning to live according to our dreams.

More than forty years later, the necessity is even greater to live the dream, to live by dreams and the values they teach when the dreaming community is aligned with spirit. The centuries since the Mysteries have ricocheted between a search for spiritual consciousness and increasing cruelty. An age of unprecedented brutality is upon us as on-going violence is directed against humans, animals, the earth and the spiritual life. One can argue the many reasons for the agony of these times, but the phenomena of urbanization, militarism, media saturation and control, and the forces of economic, political and social domination have left few, if any, safe havens for any beings. Perhaps there have been people who have suffered some of our ills before, but never has such pain, suffering and dispassionate cruelty been the fate of so many, if not most of the world. If the imperium of technology and power has its way, everything may die.

But as we grieve this time on earth, we also see that there is a parallel return of vision, dream and spiritual presence, which, if attended, may save us. This vision, these visions, are the reasons we gather together to see how we can sustain the future.

At the time when the Eleusinian Mysteries flourished, Greek citizens, then others, were enjoined to participate once in a lifetime in order to gain a soul in this life and the next. It may be that we are being similarly enjoined to gain a soul by listening deeply to our dreams and living according to their sometimes very demanding wisdom. Since the advent of psychology, dream analysis has been a familiar process designed to help people improve or heal their lives. Living by dream on behalf of community and the future is quite different. It is not important to tell our dreams or to understand them unless we are willing to live accordingly. Dreams received in this way, fully respected and honored, can teach us how to live. To live by dream is to change one’s life and mind entirely.

In the old days, dreams came to an individual on behalf of the community. Such dreams have the potential to reveal and drive the essential shifts of consciousness and behavior that can save the earth. To invite such dreams again, to open ourselves to the dream spirits, to accept the dreams as wisdom-givers, to gather in community to ponder their instructions and to live accordingly, are ways to live on behalf of the future.

Not every dream is of portent for the future. Not every dream contains ethical instruction or direction for the community. Dreamers may be involved in nightly narratives, but only some are essential guides. Over time, often with a teacher, elder or companion, or in dream circles, we learn to distinguish them. Sometimes it takes several dreams over time to reveal where we are being led. I will consider several dreams together, as they constitute a field of consciousness that has guided me, with increasing intensity, over the years. Contemplating the dreams, sometimes for years, I have also chosen at times to offer them to others so that we might be guided as a community to incorporate the wisdom being transmitted. Because we are not grounded in a dreaming culture, not everyone who hears such dreams can take them to heart. But increasingly, as we consider the state of the world, as we grieve together and dream together, we are awakened to ways of supporting each other and the possibility of change.

When these dreams came to me, I recognized them as significant, even urgent, and offer them to you to contemplate in that spirit.

Spain. Around the time of World War II, of Franco and Hitler. A film is being made. The first scene is of a young woman too poor to become a great dancer, though she is gifted. The second scene is of a street festival becoming a riot. A man pulls down his pants so a demented king can anoint his penis with firewater. Joy turns into debauchery. The third scene is a group of men who will kill anyone. We look for a place to hide from the coming blood bath. Scene four shows a parade of polished sedans. The wealthy class, young men and women in formal dress, are aloof to the dangers around them.

At the end, Brown Shirts are marching down the street, filling the roadway, ten abreast. I climb a steep wide flight of stairs, as steep and broad and narrow as the stairs to the top of the Mexican pyramids, but these are European stairs. There is nothing at the top. No structure. From above, I see the Brown Shirts approaching. There are not that many yet. They are not the majority yet, but they are very dangerous. One scene leads to another of increasing dehumanization, soullessness and violence.

We must leave Europe today. If we stay longer, it will be too late. We have twenty-four hours to leave Europe.

In 2001, I brought this dream to Daré, (Council) the community healing event that has been meeting at my house for fifteen years. The last lines translated quickly into urgent instructions: Twenty-four hours to leave European mind.

Over the last years, EuroAmerican mind and Western civilization have come under great scrutiny from non-Western people and developing nations. European mind is associated with the hegemony of the Church, the military, science and materialism that set out to conquer the peoples of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres in 1492. In that year of the Inquisition, Jews and Moors were expelled from Spain. This same mind prohibited dreaming, the inner life and earth-centered, spiritually-aligned, indigenous wisdom traditions wherever they were encountered. That legacy of persecution exists to this day across the globe.

As I am well acquainted with World War II, I didn’t think the dream was giving me a history lesson. It was asking me to see where I was carrying the destructive qualities of Western mind without realizing it. I was being asked to consider where I and my peers are unconsciously aligning with power and riot. I was being asked to scrutinize my life so that I do not inadvertently invite fascistic thinking into the world. The dream was asking me to scrutinize my soul.

The stairs in the dream resemble the pyramids of pre-Columbian peoples. They link the Holocaust implied by the presence of the Brown Shirts with the holocaust against the Native people in North and South America which began in 1492. The dream invokes the global European occupation: a history of violence, brutality, burning, slavery and torture, land and resource appropriation, exploitation, pollution and all the possible ills of war and conquest. The dream awakens me to the urgency of changing my/our minds.

In the dream, the Brown Shirts, Nazi Germany’s Storm troopers, the SA, are returning. Observing from the sacrificial altar at the top of the stairs, I see the return of such violence as led to World War II and the Holocaust. I see what led to the Inquisition and the Conquest of this country. I have twenty-four hours to end my identification with the values, all the values, that led to those times and which are threatening to reassert themselves.

When I had breast cancer in 1977, I knew I had to change my life in order to be healthy, and I did. I moved out of the suburbs to a very simple house at the end of a dirt road. I gave up community college teaching and taught writing at home. I tattooed my chest instead of having reconstruction. I began speaking and writing about cancer as silence, as a particular affliction of women, as a metaphor for our political lives, and a consequence of our increasingly violent relationship to the environment. Having created the Writing Program at the Woman’s Building and the Feminist Studio Workshop, I was very sensitive to the fact that our EuroAmerican culture treats women and the earth in similarly brutal ways. I lived as closely as I could to the values I held dear, trying not to compromise on anything that was important. And as the title of one of my books suggests, I practiced Writing For Your Life.

While cure is instant, healing is ongoing, a practice. In 1986, nine years after I had breast cancer, I developed a program called Personal Disarmament, which calls us all to self- scrutiny. Participants were asked to examine their own inner governments. Are we living under the dictates of an inner general? An inner war machine? Are we armed? Are we developing the equivalent of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons? Did we stockpile weapons? Do we have armies? Will we agree to no first strike? Will we disarm?

Writing the scenario of our inner governments was like writing and living in a dream. I was shocked to discover that my inner government was a theocracy that denied full citizenship to its creative members, confining them on reservations. I had thought I was a free spirit. I discovered I was not. I discovered I ruled by force. I set myself the task of changing again.

Years later in 2001, the dream of the Brown Shirts emphasized an inner system of repression and also dramatized the global danger to all life. The dream’s critique of how we live went far beyond the personal or psychological. The earth, its peoples, the natural world, all are endangered.

First I had had to learn what is making me and others so ill. Then I had had to learn what is destroying our communities. Now I had to learn what is killing the earth. Stepping out of European mind became the focus of my intellectual, ethical and spiritual work.

Again in 2006, I dreamt the Nazis were coming. I could easily interpret these as precognitive dreams warning me/us about the developing fascism in the U.S. and globally. We can, foolishly, use such dreams to confirm our fantasies that we are innocent and the others are the enemy. But I prefer to understand them also as a reflection on our lives and our history and so as instruction, as an increasingly urgent call to awareness and living in different ways, both for myself and the community.

In 2007, another dream:

There is an occupation in the works. It isn’t clear in the dream whether it is a foreign army or a home army. This seems not to matter, for the army is dangerous in ways I once associated with the Nazis, but which are now rampant across the world. This is happening here and we are in danger. We are trying to pack the car that is in the room of the apartment where we are living. The room is dark and the images are vague. There are children in the car, lying down in the rear behind the back seat and we are packing food, clothes, supplies for the dogs, between the children. I have no sense of the personalities of the children or the people in the car, only the fear that we will not get out in time, that we will not find the route to avoid the soldiers or police, that they will recognize us as among those to be arrested or killed, that we will not be able to cross the border or find a place to hide.

This dream came just after I led a Circle, The Council of Possibilities, in Oakland, CA. A conversation about water boarding was occurring in the public sector. Michael Mukasey, who supported enhanced interrogation techniques on al-Qaeda suspects, had been approved by the Judiciary Committee to be U.S. Attorney General. Accordingly, protesters had been demonstrating water boarding in the streets in Washington, DC. It was clear that Cheney and Bush approved and ordered torture; Rumsfeld had just been indicted in France for torture, as Kissinger had been earlier for his role in fomenting the brutal golpe against the democratically elected government in Chile, in 1973. Neither can now travel abroad for fear of being arrested. Extreme unwelcome changes challenging all our democratic values were taking place in the United States.

The dream made it clear that we had to give up innocence. We are all endangered. Fascism is here and we are its vehicles and its victims. There is no place to hide.

These dreams indicate momentous changes in our culture and society and in the world. They call us to action.

In 2009, I had another dream, set in Europe and in America. It challenges the belief that some can be safe while others are endangered because the rich or powerful can successfully negotiate with evil to protect only themselves and their loved ones. The dream starkly emphasizes the need to leave the European mind that creates privilege:

This is another time. Central Europe. Early twentieth century. A candelabra appears like a heraldic symbol on a shield in the sky. A miracle. Words in red are inscribed beneath the shield. 100 days.

She, the old woman, or my mother, warns us: There are smugglers outside. We go back into the European manor house. Our rooms are above the wide staircase that, as in the first dream, resembles the stairs of an Aztec pyramid.

Watching through the window, we see a group of men dressed in black taking things from the house at the corner. They will be here soon. I ask my mother to find something to give them. Silver, not her best but antique, good enough, is stored in an anteroom. We find a solid candelabra. It has not been polished in a long time, but is a fine silver piece that turns dark green- blue, like brass or metal that has aged. I know that she must give away something valuable. I know she wants to hold on to everything. I am trying to protect her and I am also hoarding her valuables, so she will have them, so she will have something for the next time, as if she could bribe them and remain safe.

I wait for the doorbell but the smugglers jimmy open the door and come up the large staircase into the house. Trying to find out who these smugglers are, I speak to them about the Mob in Brooklyn and the possibility of buying ”protection.” Even so, I understand that there is no guaranteed exchange and they will be back for more.

Through the window I see an old woman running. They have taken her things too, but things don’t matter to her. She yells to me that she left her doors unlocked. Nothing matters, as they won’t ever find her real house. She is running very fast, especially for an old woman, and I follow her, barely keeping up. We run through the entire country. A single red dirt road turns here and then there. We are no longer in Europe. We are in two time zones simultaneously—contemporary New Mexico and New Mexico before the Conquest. We enter a labyrinth of clay tunnels and stairs that lead down into a vast cave house, with a clay floor. The dwelling is essentially a workshop. A kiln occupies one area. She works in clay and silver. While there is no evidence of her work, this is the place where she works, where she is entirely happy, where the smugglers will not come, where her life is. Where I will stay.

When I awakened, I thought first of the number 100 in lights. I had recently read that several Native American tribes believe it is necessary to repeat an activity for a hundred days to make it a habit, in order to integrate it into one’s consciousness. I was being instructed that I had to do what was necessary so that the old, European mind would give way and the new way of thinking would become habit. It was clear to me that I/we must give up valuing things and possessions, the antiques and valuables we are clutching. The two candelabras indicate the difference between a sacred sign and a battered object that had value once. The 100 days of creating consciousness are heralded and the dangers of hoarding are revealed.

The teachings were clear: The old (European) world is a dangerous place. Making payments is a way of staying connected to the system. We must come to a new world. As with the Mysteries, it is necessary to go underground and return to the earthen ways.

Dreams are not linear events and do not yield to the kind of analysis associated with European mind. Rather, dreams often present a field of relationships in which images and events resonate with each other. Sometimes our lives are like dreams. The silver piece offered to the smugglers to protect my mother is a flattened version of the brass elephant that is by the door to the patio in my house in non-dream life. The elephant was a gift from Lisa Rafel, who came to Daré at a critical time and by her singing into the body of a woman who was ill, initiated our particular form of healing. Lisa’s gift of the elephant and her gift of healing is flattened in the territory where European mind dominates. In the dream, the silver candelabra has great value to those who adhere to European mind. In life, the brass elephant represents the sacred.

In 1998, I went to Zimbabwe with my then husband Michael Ortiz Hill, who introduced me to a Shona medicine man, Mandaza Kandemwa, a nganga. As I had become a healer, it was very gratifying to recognize that we worked in similar ways, though we languaged our work differently. Mandaza would say, “The spirits are heavy upon me” and I would say, “Illness is a path,” but we would mean very similar things. Within a short time, I was working with his community and patients as he worked with the people we brought from North America. By unspoken agreement, we initiated each other, exchanging our own teachings, ceremonies and ritual. From the beginning of our friendship, we entered into dream work together, each of us knowing from our own experience and teaching that attending the dreams is an essential form. These profound experiences altered me deeply and I was able, upon my return, to further teach and train others in healing ways.

Meeting Mandaza and his community, participating in his Daré, watching how he worked as an indigenous healer in an urban setting, revealed to me the depth and value of native healing ways. I began to ponder how equivalent healing communities might develop in the United States. In 1999, I was called to sit in Council with Mandaza’s community and also to sit in Council with elephants. I did not know what this could possibly mean, but several of us including Mandaza went to a wild animal preserve in Chobe, Botswana. There on the last day in the Park, I met and entered into a relationship with an Elephant in the wild whom we now call the Elephant Ambassador. I write about my history of becoming a healer, about my meeting Mandaza, and this remarkable exchange with the Ambassador in Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing.

Healing from EuroAmerican mind means stepping out of hierarchy into relationship. Elephants have complex and developed social systems extending from their young calves back to their elders and ancestors, and from which we have much to learn. Indigenous people know this about the animals. They have great respect for other beings and live in a harmonic web of relationships and alliance.

Meeting an Ambassador from another species brought the understanding that the animals and the beings of the natural world are equal partners on the planet. (See The Language of Relationship on this blog). They are our peers, and the old, old ways teach us how to live in right relationship with them. I have met the Elephant Ambassador in the wild four times over twelve years. I have also met in dreams other elephants that I know in waking life. One we call:

Spirit Sister. In the first dream, she comes in from the forest and we nuzzle each other. In the second, she is living in the house as kin.

I believe she came in my dreams so that I would remember these truths about the nature of reality that are at the lived core of the old, old ways.

After the meeting in Council with Mandaza’s community and with the Elephant Ambassador, I introduced Daré to my community. Fifteen years later, that Council-based, spirit-led, dream-focused community healing circle continues. By 2001, I began to understand something of what might shift if we changed our relationship with animals and the natural world. By 2004, the Lakota wisdom mitakye oyasin, all my relations, became central to Daré.

There are many indigenous traditions that speak of the Fifth World or the Next World, a real place that we can access only if we leave our dangerous Fourth World ways behind. Joy Harjo references this world in her poem, A Map to the Next World, above. The next or Fifth World is ruled, as is this universe, by its own cosmic laws. To be able to live in this world, one’s entire nature and being have to be resonant with these intrinsic ways. This cannot be negotiated; one is aligned or one is not. In this instance, ethics, values and actions are as absolute as are the laws of physics. The values of interconnection and deep respect for the beings of the natural world and the spirits are fundamental.

To live in the Fifth World we must strip ourselves of our Fourth World qualities and become other beings. This activity is as rigorous as the imagined journey through a black hole into another universe. To enter the Fifth World means we change our ways entirely.

People often speak of dreams or other ways of knowing as being given to us. What we mean by this is that the understanding is not a creation of our minds, but comes from beyond us. Sometimes such gifts come in a single unit, like a dream or a story. Sometimes they come over time. As a teacher and healer, I have over time received or been given directions for transforming our lives that I call the Nineteen Ways to the Fifth World. These are a distillation of the paths we are called to take so that we can live in ways that serve the future.

It could well take a lifetime to understand and incorporate and truly inhabit any one of the Nineteen Ways. We don’t have lifetimes. I began to explore and teach them to myself and to others. The Nineteen Ways create a field. It is the field that creates the world. (See 19 Ways of the 5th World on this blog)

After receiving the Nineteen Ways, I had a dream that changed my life again.

I have won a contest that I have not entered. I have won it three times. The award is a trip to New York for a year, where I will be educated and trained. After the year, I will be an indigenous woman.

I understood this dream as a mandate. I am to apply myself to becoming an indigenous woman. I am taken back to my origins to begin again on a different trajectory. I must discover how an indigenous woman would think and act in these times. I have taken on these instructions far beyond 100 days. I have entered into a different way of living. Before I speak, before I act, in the face of any important decision, I ask myself: How would a wise indigenous elder, free of the great damage of the on-going Conquest, act? I model my life accordingly. Over time, I see my mind changing and my ways of living, as well. Living as an indigenous elder calls one to put the community and the earth before oneself. It means one is loyal to and committed to the future. It means we respond out of relationship, not out of self-interest. It means alliance, not competition. Harmony not conflict. It means we know the earth and all her creatures are alive. This has come to me from the dreams.

Let us return to the initial premise. In the old, old days, and now, once more, the dreams come on behalf of the community and these times. They are presenting us with the dilemmas we are facing and will face in the future and they are teaching us, as they once did, how to live. These dreams, then, are available to guide any one or all of us.

It is possible that the world can heal. Dreams are showing us the ways.

Filed under:

SABBATICAL

[See below for events before or during sabbatical.]

SOME months ago, I knew I needed time off to write.  In my early years, children and family, teaching, activism and holding community formed an essential unit and still I managed to write in the between times. My first published book, Skin: Shadows/Silence: A Love Letter in the Form of a Novel is composed of short entries that could be written between taking my sons to school and picking them up, or during naps, or their visits to friends. Many of my books were written that way. Several times I rented an office. Wherever we lived had enough physical space – a writer needs little – but rarely had enough mental or spiritual space. When my sons were teenagers, I rented a trailer in Valyermo, CA, a desert area two hours away from my home where I went, when I could, for weekends alone to write. When my children were grown, I could do healing work and teach and write at the same time. I was able to take time off, to go into silence. The books appeared. But over the last years, teaching, healing, community building, activism filled the spaces that should have been occupied by creative work, walking the land, speaking with the spirits, family and companionship. Pondering this, it would be easy to blame age, an inevitable slowing down, but I find myself working longer and harder with equal energy. I think the difficulty is with the times in which we live. A deadly combination of increasing administrative nonsense and extreme need caused by the global and national descent into violence, brutishness and environmental destruction demands our constant attention, willingness to bear witness and to grieve.

Yesterday an interviewer asked me how I had been affected by and what am I thinking since making the pilgrimage to the Death Camps in 1989, which I wrote about in The Other Hand, the novel that wrestled with the two koans of the 20th century – the Holocaust and the Atom Bomb. My answer surprised me.

I remembered how we wondered about the Germans who didn’t respond to the Concentration Camps. We wondered how they allowed the Holocaust – not directed only at Jews – to exist and continue. But now, we live with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, rendition and waterboarding. We are involved with secret prisons, houses of torture and global scrutiny. We know and yet these unconscionable activities continue. Also DU, white phosphorous, Agent Orange, GMOs, Round Up, Fracking, Keystone Pipeline. Yes, we know …. and yet! The mind of WWII continues; it seems we have ingested it and become what we claimed to have gone to war to oppose.

The Holocaust itself has morphed into Ecocide. Genocide, still existant on the planet, has developed into the murder of the Earth and all Life. Attending such times with heart and compassion takes every moment of every day.

I started a novel three years ago. It has a certain necessity to it.  I am determined to follow this new urgency. I am taking a sabbatical to write this and another book, and to be with Spirit in order to gain, if I can, some wisdom and perspective with which to meet these times.

My sabbatical begins July 1st. It will go at least until December 31st. A few events are still scheduled between now and then and I am listing them here. I may or may not post anything on this Blog. I make no other commitments except to Spirit and where I am called as I listen as deeply as I can. My hope is that you will accompany me with deep listening and prayer. Restoration, sanity and beauty depend on our doing the work and changing our lives. We have to do this together.

Writer’s Intensive May 24-30, 2014 Topanga CA

Writing Workshop: Finding the Stories of Our Lives. June 6-8, 2014 


Rowe Conference Center, Rowe MA More info: http://rowecenter.org/events.php?event=287  
email:  info@rowecenter.org

– June 21-27, 2014 Topanga CA 

Healing Stories – Sept. 5 – 7, 2014.
Sacred Wisdom Centre, Guelph, ON, Canada
 Contact: Barbara Booth barbara.susan.booth@sacredwisdomcentre.com

ReVisioning Medicine Council and Clinic, September !3-15 2014 , Minneapolis MN  Contact Michele Rae

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HOW TO START A DREAM THEATER from Dream Network Journal, Spring 2014 [with dream from Ayelet Berman Cohen

Theater director, Steven Kent, and I had not expected to be working together again on a creative project related to dreams at this time in our lives. In advance of producing Dreams Against the State in 1981, he and I had recreated the Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece in 1980 for the first time in 1500 years. I had written the play and Steve was the dramaturge and director. The first production of the play was performed in fifty different venues: private homes, community centers, churches, etc. This deliberate variation on performance space was designed to emphasize the real life danger to dreams and dreaming in our culture and the need for individuals and communities to provide sanctuary for dreams.

 Thirty-two years later, in January 2014, we were co-teaching a class on How to Start a Dream Theater at La Verne University where Steven is a faculty member of the Theater Arts Department. This project is, perhaps, the closed parenthesis of a creative partnership devoted to theater, ritual, transformation and the inner life.

 The creative premise of the class was that the students comprise a theater troupe that visits communities to perform their dreams, and at the same time, are themselves a community whose dreams are explored and reflected upon, theatrically, by the theater troupe. We were imaging being called into a community to enact the dreams in order to help resolve conflicts or disagreements in creative ways.

 Because this class, as conceived, is a unique exploration and a first for Steven and myself, we have been surprised and gratified by the unanticipated directions it has taken. During our first meeting, I was startled to realize what fifty years of working with dreams had not revealed before: the essential connection between dream and theater. Dreams come to us as complete theater events, remarkably scripted, directed, enacted and staged. However, in recalling and communicating our dreams, though we may access meaning, we rarely, if ever, can transmit the quality and intensity of the dream experience itself. Enter theater.

How to Start a Dream Theater met four times a week for four hours during the January Interterm at La Verne University, La Verne California. Ancient Greek Aesclepian medicine considered the union of dreaming and theater as essential to the healing process. Steven and I have visited the ruins of the Aesclepian healing sanctuaries in Greece, but the living theater is long gone; and though the transformational aspect of the Mysteries was preserved in our work, we did not recreate our dreams theatrically when relating them to each other every day. So, in this class we found ourselves exploring a new form with remarkably ancient antecedents.

 Surprisingly, the limitations of working in a classroom with essentially inexperienced students created the impetus for discovery. We had to begin at the beginning regarding dreams, theater and healing. I had expected to be teaching Theater Department seniors but only some of the students in the class were theater majors; the rest were liberal arts majors fulfilling their humanities requirement. The students ranged from freshman to seniors and came from many different multi-cultural backgrounds.

As Steven Kent does with every class he teaches at the University, we opened each session with a check-in, where we often asked the students to share a dream image. We ended with a check-out that consisted of a question or a statement about dreaming or the content of the class. With this simple device we came to know each other intimately, which is rare in a college classroom. Steven’s theater games further relaxed everyone and released energy and tension, thus reinforcing the possibility of bonding. Dream telling each day involved us deeply in the exploration of our inner lives.

 Early on, we made a strategic decision in the interest of efficiency that was critical to the success of the class. We divided the fifteen students into three troupes. Though we heard many of the students’ dreams in the full circle, the troupes worked on their own dreams together when bringing them into form. Because the students now belonged to the dreamers and to the theater troupe, they bonded as a community despite the university setting that generally results in isolation and competitiveness. The students quickly realized they had to be respectful of each other’s inner lives and the necessity of being trustworthy.

Community work happens to be one of Steve’s areas of engagement and expertise, and we were privileged to hear some of his stories about working with gay people in a radical anti-gay state, also with small farmers, with women with AIDs and with other groups in the development of performance pieces. His theater experience with communities, and my experience with individual and community dreaming, together with our life long involvement in the creative process, and more years of teaching between us than either of us wish to tally, were the basis of what we brought to the class.

 When considering the actual creation of a performing dream theater group, we both understood that the performance of the dreams would be the ultimate means through which the community could reflect on itself, provide social cohesion and lessen conflict. However, I didn’t realize that the very act of soliciting the dreams in a collective setting would begin the process through which the conflict might resolve. That meant that if the troupe were also willing to present their own dreams in the process of soliciting dreams from the community, the artificial barrier between troupe and community would dissolve. Finally, enactment could take the community members to yet another level of healing of the original discord.

The most significant understanding came to us when all three troupes independently decided to disregard advice I had given them about enactment. Each troupe met to listen to one another’s dreams and select images/events that reverberated for all of them, which would then be developed theatrically and enacted for the group as a whole. I advised them to avoid “being fair.” Rather than including something from everyone’s dreams, I suggested they focus on one or two images/events they found compelling and performable. However, before beginning the work of scripting and developing, each group chose instead to consider each one’s dreams in order to find a common theme. The for Ruin and Beaurty initial themes were loneliness and separation, explosive emotions, and unacknowledged fear.

At the end of the third week, the three troupes sat in individual story circles, outdoors on the college lawn, imagining darkness and a fire at their center, and spoke of the ways they had experienced these themes in their lives. Though each group exercised confidentiality regarding the details of the stories, when they reported back to the larger group, it was apparent that they had entered the process deeply. They had embraced the experience of loneliness or fear in ‘the other’ as their own, yet recognizing differences as well as commonalities in the origin of such emotions. They had acquired the essential means to understanding and relating back to each other the meaning and implication of their dreams – Empathy.

One student commented that the class had become a group of distinct individuals whom she felt she knew well. Building community had not been one of our stated goals for the class but it became our finest one.

We had found a way, even in a classroom, for the students to experience the exactness and profundity of dream communication. This allowed them to recognize what mattered to them as a community, to refine their intent to communicate this to an audience, to develop language and image to hold their experience, then to embody the experience and finally to perform it for the larger group. The result was that they could bring the dreams back to their original vivid life. Each step in the process eliminated the formal differences between dreamer and actor, between one person and another. Without setting such a heady intention, we were entering into an exquisite balance between our unique experiences, dream language, and the particularity of the dreams themselves, and the trusting and supportive community forming in this setting.

 We were working in a multi-cultural setting and outside of conventional psychological dream analysis. The work is predicated on indigenous wisdom dreaming traditions that assume that dreams are a dialogue between the spirit world and the particular tribe, culture or in this case, troupe and university class. This focus allowed for a creative dynamic between particularity and unity and was of great value and solace to the individual class members. No one was left out of the exchange. Everyone was seen as valuable. The class became a sanctuary for the essential beauty and intelligence of each individual within the safety of the circle formed by the participation of each equally. Which is not to say that there were no difficult moments among us. There were. But as far as I know, these issues were acknowledged and resolved. Increasingly, day by day, the value of the group, the bond between the students was recognized.

 The class process was informed by the presence of Ayelet Berman Cohen, a contemporary dreamer in the old ways. She could not have predicted when she was a prominent photographer in Israel that dreams would become her life. Each night, for twenty years, profound theme-based dreams, as precise and lyrical as any theater or work of literature, have been landing on her, followed by teachings from the ancestors. For many years, she has been dreaming about war, often but not always referring to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and easily translated into any contemporary struggle between peoples. Many of her war dreams are succeeded by healing dreams, or dreams that ßthe antidote to war. In one of the sessions, she spoke of how theater allowed the war to be viewed and understood within the very magic of theater itself. The wound and the medicine together in one venue.

 She gifted us with a packet of six dreams that gave the students original dream images to work with. Independently, the troupes each chose one or two of the same images to dramatize and explore, so we understood that the conflict between victim and victimizer spoke deeply to them. This initial work with her dreams, which were so fully formed and precise in their theatrical intelligence, prepared the students to look at their own dreams and excerpt the wisdom from them.

 Three student dreams at the threshold of the project set the tone for the work to come. One student told a recurring dream that began when she and her family were immigrating to the United States, having already fled civil violence in their native country. In the dream that first came when she was a child, she observed the on-going tension between freedom and imprisonment. The dream had revealed, even to the young child, the fundamental torment that her family and culture were experiencing.

   In relating a dream to his father, another student discovered that the family had psychic gifts that had not been spoken about but were passed on through the patriarchal line.

   Aware of a repeating image in her recent dreams, a young woman decided to call her indigenous grandmother, only to discover that the dreams were warnings that her proposed very generous action would violate her people’s tradition and she would have to wait for the right ritual moment to perform it.

   The final days of How to Start a Dream Theater were spent developing the small theatrical presentations. Within a remarkably short time, each troupe went from acting out various dream episodes to identifying the common emotional elements, finding dream sequences to hold them, and then discarding these images and events for more vital and appropriate images that communicated the fullness of the conditions and emotions to the observers. Informed by Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, the students were then able to revise their pieces once again, bringing each to a new level of reflection and communication, perhaps even more powerful than might arise in a class on improvisation because the images developed from the deep personal dream life of each student.

   The students had not known that dreaming had already and would continue to affect and influence their lives. Repeatedly in the check-ins or check-outs, the students expressed their surprise and gratitude for these ways of knowing that they had previously thought entirely unimportant.

Elenna Rubin Goodman, a community builder, had come to the class from Oakland California. The class served her deep desire “ tobring together community, sacred space and the ritual embodiment of dreams/dream theater.” And we were grateful that we could serve both the students and others seeking new ways of serving community that include validating inner life experience.

 Three texts informed the class: Black Elk Speaks, by John Neihardt, Healing Dreams: Exploring the Dreams That Can Transform Your Life by Marc Ian Barasch, and The Practice of Dream Healing: Bringing Ancient Greek Mysteries into Modern Medicine by Edward Tick and Stephen Larsen. Each text speaks to the ways dream inform and heal culture as well as bringing wisdom and insight to individuals for their lives. So many of the dreams that the students brought into our circle were unexpectedly revealed to be vehicles for connection, community and cultural restoration. Entering and living within a dreaming culture is an essential antidote to totalitarian and fundamentalist thought. This is iterated by Paco Mitchell in the Winter Solstice 2013 issue of Dream Network Journal, an essay that we shared in class: “…dreams are such bastions of freedom.”

The class was not about creating a dream theater; rather, our intention was to facsimilate the experience of dream theater troupes and dreaming communities. We had started out suggesting that the students imagine that they were a dream troupe or a dreaming community; within days the imagined manifested. We learned swiftly that understanding self through exploring and performing dreams is also a means to establishing communal identity while emphasizing the wild freedom and uniqueness at the core of the creative process. Some of the students may go on to use dreams in their creative work. All of them, I am certain—whether as physicians or private-eyes, (two examples of the students’ present vocational goals)—will use dreams as part of their future work in the world.

Considering in retrospect my unheeded advice to the dream troupes and their intelligent insistence on following their own wisdom, I am grateful to have been reminded of the sensitivity necessary in approaching another community — in this case, the community of students. We must always fully respect the other culture and what the community itself knows. Fortunately, I didn’t insist, didn’t impose my own understanding. Fortunately, they chose to discern and honor common themes and experience, and to create communities of respect and relationship among themselves. Fortunately, we all honored the dream.

Each student presented a seven-minute excerpt from the journal they kept for the duration of the class that included dreams, the new understanding of their power and importance, reflections on the class process, and selected passages from the assigned texts. Most spoke their deepest truths to each other, though we had been strangers to each other only a month before. Everyone now understood that he or she has an inner life and all were excited about tending it for the rest of their lives. No one doubted the value, meaning, experience or and beauty of dreaming. The possibility of an on-going dream group was gratefully received.

The final gift from Ayelet Berman Cohen was a dream, which summarized her dream spirits’ understanding of the process that was destined to engage us all.

January 23, 2014

Ayelet Berman-Cohen

(dedicated to the students of the Dream Theater Workshop)

“Restoration”

 

A group of students
meet on behalf of their inner lives.
They speak to each other,
and to their astonishment,
discover that the night before,
they all have had the exact same dream.

 

In their dream
a python lives underneath their house.
There is a group of people shackled to a tree.
And there is another side to the tree.  
A woman who lost her mother is there.
And a shark who looks deeply into the eyes of a boy.
There is fear, laughter, movement and confusion,
each image and emotion
matches perfectly in all of their dreams.

The student body has had one common dream.  
In their dream they see
a woman carrying a suitcase.
She says it is filled with dreams.
She tells them how the Spirits come to her every night
and dictate to her a dream.  
The woman says she has been touched.  
When the students wake up
they know that their inner lives
are no longer the same.

Did the Spirits come to them too?  
How do the Spirits move?  
Who are the Spirits?  
Have they been touched?
They wondered.

The silence had been broken.

 

 

 

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A Brief History of a Feminist Mind

This is the text of a talk I gave for the WCLA Women Writers Series in alliance with the Feminist Majority Foundation /Ms.Magazine February 27, 2014.

When I was invited to this event by Ms Magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation, I couldn’t simply read from a new book. The invitation from Simone Wallace, who with her sister Adele, founded Sisterhood Bookstore, one of the most important cultural institutions of Los Angeles, required another response. So receiving the invitation, I saw the necessity to acknowledge the trajectory I had been on since teaching at California Institute for the Arts, Founding and Directing the Writing program at the Feminist Studio Workshop the first feminist institute for the arts and social change outside of a university, being part of the leadership of the Woman’s Building where Sisterhood had a store and gathering a small committee to organize and host the first Woman’s Writing Conference – Woman’s Words, since a Conference by the same name in Chicago 1893.

My intention tonight is to trace what I was writing and what preoccupied me then, and what I am writing and preoccupied with now. Literature has taught me the value of a body of work, of the slow, deliberate, heartfull development of form and idea so that one’s work and labor might contribute to the community and the future. This is particularly important as we are living in a culture that commodifies art and literature and has no consciousness of history or the necessity to honor and preserve ethical and cultural values – concerns that were core to the second wave of feminism.

The woman’s movement intended to change the world. It was not that we wanted equal participation in a destructive system but that we wanted to shift the means and values so that they incorporated what we believed were benevolent women’s ways, ancient and contemporary, of living in family, community and the world.

Feminism had a great range from protesting war, economic, political and racial inequality, fighting violence against women, opposing nuclear weapons, to recognizing an intrinsic woman’s culture and seeking interactive, collaborative, intimate, nurturing, non-violent, non-hierarchical, inclusive, earth centered, spiritually aligned, respectful social and creative forms. Not everyone held to all the values and interests, but there was enough agreement, complexity and cooperation for the movement to be effective then. Art, politics, eros, activism, spirituality all blended so that feminism became a true movement determined to achieve social and political change that would benefit all. Women were not seeking dominance. We, each in our own way, were seeking sanity, beauty, peace, security and health for all.

Friend, colleague and neighbor, Maija Gimbutas’ archeological work laid the foundation for non-violent cooperative, life giving matriarchal goddess cultures. Marija came to her conclusions reluctantly. She didn’t start out trying to prove that Neolithic goddess cultures were peaceful. She was unable to refute the evidence. When she joined theater director, Steven Kent and me in Greece at our re-enactment of the Eleusinian Mysteries for the first time in 1500 years, she praised our work, saying we had managed to restore the spiritual integrity of the ancient Demeter ritual. Fifteen years later, we regretted that she wasn’t with us when we found an ancient icon of Persephone in Eleusis, approximately 2500 years old, in the place where the Goddess was said to have made her appearance during the Mysteries.

In my own life, I continue to be taken by two streams from Feminism. Political analysis insisted that one bear witness to the world’s atrocities and women’s spirituality is fundamental to my growing experience of the presence of the spirits. Conventional politics and traditional religion diminished as present day events and my personal experience called me, increasingly, to a different life and commitment to community and healing.

One important artistic focus was on form. It was clear that the personal is political and that form is content. Consciousness raising was intrinsic to the discovery of our own lives and stories. It occurred in circles. The shift from a straight line to a circle was an essential radical accomplishment.

Forty five years later, the circle is even more important than we knew. An indigenous community form, it gained strength from feminism and is entering the main stream as conscious people seek peership and equality instead of hierarchy and dominance. I am increasingly unable, or unwilling, to use what seems like a simplistic linear way. Even here, I seek the energy that comes from following the original associative form that called me to woman’s literature and the rest of my life.

From A Traveling Jewish Theater:

Stories move in circle. They don’t move in straight lines. So it helps if you listen in circles. There are stories inside stories and stories between stories and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. And part of the finding is the getting lost. And when you’re lost you start to look around and to listen.

This talk is also going in circles and spirals, moving forward, circling back. The first image imprinted on my heart from literature is still vibrant and active in my life and thinking: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is written in the form of a lighthouse. The shapes of our lives are not straight line, but circles, passing into light, falling into darkness, illuminated and shadowed, again and again.

Marxist self-criticism practiced in progressive organizations yielded in the woman’s movement to the positive forms of consciousness raising. My experience with non-Western and indigenous cultures created a deep respect for the wisdom that emerges in a council form. I began to practice Council in my own life as a way of inquiry and problem solving. At Daré, the healing community which gathers at my house, and which my ex and I introduced from Africa, has Council at the core. Council, story circles, dream circles, healing circles all cohere community. Whenever possible teaching occurs in a circle and outdoors, and around a fire in the old ways.

And so, stories are themselves circles, each with a magnetic center that draws what is necessary to its beautiful and radiant interior.

And so, my writing. My first published book, Skin: Shadows/Silence is a resonance of voices. Later, still not knowing what I was doing but seeking new and coherent forms, I called The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them, a novel in the form of a play. I had not consciously envisioned the infrastructure of the circle or spiral as I would later in Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing, then more fully in From Grief into Vision: A Council, and differently, but as determinedly in La Negra y Blanca: Fugue and Commentary. In many of my works, beginning perhaps with the play, Dreams Against the State in 1981, and then in The Other Hand, in Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn, in La Negra y Blanca, the endings are codas that reveal and unite the themes and voices together as in musical compositions, chorals and choruses.

As I was writing this, I saw that while patriarchal culture became progressively mechanical and technological, woman’s culture became musical – the writer’s voice, the rhythm of the language, its emotional communication increasingly important. Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras were concerned with the sound of their prose because that carries meaning.

At California Institute for the Arts, I taught a class on 20th Century Women’s Literature — it may have been a first in such an institution — and the first Journal Writing class. As Sheila de Bretteville, one of the three who founded the Woman’s Building, and I explored the possibility that woman’s culture still existed, I heard its resonance in contemporary women’s literature and this gave me permission to follow my own instincts in my own writing.

Soon, women adopted the journal and there, again, explored voice as well as prohibited stories. The Journal writing class was inspired by then recent scholarship revealing the hidden practice of journal writing pursued by pioneer women who had no company on their new homesteads and were quietly going mad. The journals often hidden among the linens helped. The other source was my dear friend, Anaïs Nin, who introduced the journal to contemporary life and to me. Now we scarcely imagine our lives without our journals. In 1970, they were almost non-existent. When I compared my writing to contemporary American fiction and poetry, I was out of the mainstream and had no interest in joining. What needed to be said, what needed to be revealed required its own form. African American literature, Native American literature discovered its own music. To create a culture of one’s own that is also resonant with other non-dominating cultures in the world changes the way of life.

In retrospect as we are facing the slow apocalypse of human designed climate change and the genocide of the beings of the natural world, I see that feminism allying with Native American beliefs gives us the essential understanding that may yet shift our consciousness enough for the earth to survive. Goddess spirituality also held “The earth is our mother.” Feminist theory understood that misogyny paralleled abuse of the earth and the environment.

Domination of women and nature co-existed. Violence against women and violence against the earth – the same. War everywhere. Over time I came to know that being against was being in battle. I began to seek forms in my life and in my writing that offered change. Increasingly I and my characters stepped away from conventional forms and values and created different lives.The Woman Who, What Dinah Thought, The Other Hand, Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn, Feral, La Negra y Blanca feature women protagonists who find the means to step into another world – in the last years, learning from Native American spirituality – I recognize it as the 5th World. The books I write depict that struggle to disentangle from western imperialist culture, from patriarchy, from their assumptions, habits, securities and desires in order to live with integrity.

My current teaching is based on what felt like a transmission: 19 Ways to the Fifth World. You can see how they are sourced in Feminism:

1. COMMUNITY. Recognizing and living aligned with community as an essential vessel and means of transformation.

2. COUNCIL. Entering and trusting the ways of Council, Dare’ and Mandlovu mind.

3. STORY. Story is an event and a path. Learning to listen, to recognize, understand and attend the way of Story and the particular path of healing and transformation it reveals for each one.

4. SPIRIT EXISTS. Spirit speaks to each of us in a shared language. Entering into a dialogue with the divine. Developing and living according to a spiritual practice that develops from a real relationship with spirit.

5. THE PATHLESS PATH. Recognizing the path that one has traveled and seeing where one has been taken and the dynamic path that emerges from the journey. Attuning to, developing and being faithful to a spiritual practice on the pathless path.

6. BEARING WITNESS AND DISINGAGEMENT. Bearing witness to the horror and corruption of these times, scrutinizing our lives, and consciously ceasing our involvement.

7. HEALING WAR AND PEACMAKING. Committing ourselves to healing war within us and in the world. Committing ourselves to our transformation from war-traumatized people to peacemakers and visionaries. Walking in peace. Responding peacefully.

8. THE NO ENEMY WAY. Understanding and incorporating the No Enemy Way into our daily private and public ways. Walking the No Enemy Way in the world as best we can.

9. REVISIONING. Revisioning public institutions of thought and action. Imagining and aligning ourselves with ReVisioned Medicine, Science, Law, Economic Social systems. For example, a ReVisioned Medicine practices the No Enemy Way, does no harm and integrates the combined wisdom of medical people and medicine people. Assuming the equal relevance of indigenous, earth centered, spirit centered wisdom in all reasoning and thinking processes. Changing one’s mind.

10. INDIGENOUS WISDOM TRADITIONS. Studying, respecting, honoring, preserving, supporting, allying with indigenous wisdom traditions.

11. DREAM. Living by Dream, Intuition and Divination. Reading the signs and then following other spirit centered ways of knowing. Yielding to initiation and living accordingly.

12. HEALING. Recognizing the presence of healing. Learning the ways of healing. Seeking out healing. Becoming a healing presence.

13. MITAKYE OYASIN. Living according to All Our Relations.

14. THE WILD. Protecting, preserving, sustaining, bringing healing to the wild, the earth and all beings.

15. THE OTHERS – NON HUMAN BEINGS. Recognizing the intelligence and agency of non-human beings and living among them accordingly.

16. BEAUTY AND CEREMONY. Living according to Beauty, Creativity, Intuition, Prayer, Ritual, Ceremony, Loving kindness and Compassion as essential forms.

17. SILENCE. Valuing and engaging in silence, solitude, formless forms and not knowing.

18. SANCTUARY. Honoring, providing, become sanctuary for all beings by learning the way of the land.

19. ALLIANCES. Fostering dynamic relationships with other groups and organizations working in parallel heartways.

THEN recognizing that one’s mind has changed, one is living in a different field of understanding and assumptions. Stepping through the portal to live faithfully according to the laws of the 5th World that mandate serving Spirit and the on-going future.

Even as a young woman, as The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them was written in 1978, I was exploring healing and peacemaking, trying to understand what I would call in later years, The No Enemy Way.

From The Woman Who: P. 11

A woman whose name is Ada walks down the street of an occupied village from the cemetery passing her own house, to the General’s house which she enters without a word to lie down unashamed on his bed. She does this -

– With the full cognizance that she is coming a political act.

***

From The Woman Who: P. 21

The woman who lived in an occupied village went to the General. She knocked at his door with the pretext of selling him eggs.

In the morning, she washed herself and in the shower as water fell on her she asked:

May I be like water. May I bend over rocks. May I not break. May I flow. May I endure.

If I die, may I go up and come down again, may I not be gone forever. May I find a secret hiding place under the earth. May I be a well. May I move under the feet and over the houses. May I be strong. May I be white. May I be pure.

And the water fell on her in great hot sheets ad she soaped her long dark hair and piled it whitely on top of her head The soap curled under her arm, her groin, on all the covered places of her sex and then was rinsed away. And she went to the house of the General and knocked at his door.

***

Sometimes I think feminism failed. The struggle for economic and political equality overshadowed our passion for transforming our lives and undermining patriarchal agendas. Two women Secretaries of State – yes. Hillary Clinton probably running for President. But business as usual in Washington DC. The wars continue as does domination and imperialism. We had hoped it would be different.

Today is my son’s Marc’s birthday. I remember my early involvement with the anti-war movement. In 1960 a photo in the L.A. Times was captioned, Marc Metzger at 3 months of age, kicks up his heels against war.

At that time, I was also worried about milk. Testing had revealed that Strontium 89 with a half life of 50 days and strontium 90 with a half life of 28.9 years appeared in breast milk in 1961 when I was nursing my son, Greg. And it was also in the formula Marc was drinking. The highest concentration of strontium 90 in milk occurred in 1963.

My sons were three and two years old. I was frantic, looking for powdered milk dated before the various above ground tests of the early 60s. In 1961, Women’s Strike for Peace organized thousands of women against nuclear weapons.

I have a cousin who died of leukemia because as a soldier he was put in the front lines – without warning or permission, at the Nevada testing grounds.

This week, as a healer, I am working with a Vietnam veteran in constant excruciating pain from numerous cancers and surgeries all of which are being treated independent of the root cause of his extreme suffering. When I met him, I couldn’t restrain myself from saying, “Agent orange.”

“Yes.”

He had testified for Senate hearings, but that didn’t help him get that diagnosis into his medical chart. From Grief into Vision: A Council, deals with Los Alamos and Chernobyl.

The novel I am currently writing, A Rain of Night Birds, is set, in part, on the Four Corners Reservation where the yellow dust from uranium tailings still blows across the land and pollutes the waters. The protagonist is a climatologist. Not my idea of a novel. Spirit sent it. War, the Bomb and the destruction and poisoning of the earth were then and continue to be primary fields of inquiry and deep concern. It always feels that I am called to these concerns, called to write the books I write. That I have no choice. Spirit insists – and that insistence from Spirit, its Presence gives me hope that we might find ways not to avoid the path to total destruction.

***

From Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn, which I had the privilege of writing with the renowned Argentinean writer, Julio Cortázar, 20 years after his death in 1984. P.43.

Rio ultimately acknowledged that he had a toothache. He had been to the dentist who had treated him without, it seemed, providing instant relief. And Iris did not know if it was permitted to reach out and stroke the somewhat puffy cheek in order to sooth his pain; it was a skill she had but was not something she announced publicly. She could put her fingers on his skin and extract the pain. It would happen so quickly everyone would assume the morphine had done it and would look at her transgression with polite disapproval.

In the cellar at that moment, someone was slowly and methodically extracting a friend’s teeth one by one. Iris had not learned to heal across a timeline or a space barrier. When Iris looked at Rio she saw that he knew what was occurring. This was no naïve display of sympathy. The two events were unrelated co-incidence. Rio did not think he was sharing his friend’s torture. He didn’t claim to be suffering someone else’s pain. Nevertheless, the two events co-existed. Rio’s tooth had been removed and he was suffering real and phantom pain that he had no desire to ease before he studied it soberly to learn its qualities. Iris was relived not to understand any of the languages in which they were now discussing what was broadly referred to as politics, for it allowed her to settle steadily into the pain that flared out into the room as from an infection of lilies. No one has the power to ease pain who will not feel it in her own body

***

In 1989, I made a pilgrimage to the Death Camps of Europe. When I returned, I began writing The Other Hand and addressed it as a letter to Cardinal Lustiger of Paris whose Jewish mother had died in Auschwitz. The protagonist is an astronomer who is inhabited by a Nazi and she attempts to see the holocaust also through his eyes. The novel is an extended koan on light and darkness.

*** The Other Hand p.3

November 17, 1989

Dear Cardinal Lustiger, Your Eminence:

My name is Daniella Stonebrook Blue I am—or was—by profession an astronomer. We are strangers to each other. Your name was given to me by a woman on a bus as we were traveling across New Mexico. Because of her insistence, I am writing to you about this dark period of my life. I need to speak to you about the matter of light. Light is the alphabet of God. I knew this when I was born and then I forgot. This is the first time I have understood it as an adult woman. Even as I prepared to write these words, I didn’t know what they implied until they appeared on the page.

***



The Other Hand page 105,

Rosa had gotten up from the piano and walked into the kitchen as if she were going to prepare a meal and then just as suddenly she laid the pan down on the counter and returned to the piano, improvising on Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star. We were spellbound.

Twinkle, twinkle little star. How I wonder what you are? Up above the earth so high …” It took a long time to get to the fourth line but when Rosa was there, I had chimed in as I had always done as a child, “Like a skymond in the die.”

“What’s a star, Dani? ” Rosa had asked without stopping. “What’s a star, Dani?.” She hit an insistent dissonant chord in the middle of a scale and then returned to her variations on the simple melody again.

Without waiting for my answer, “A star, Dani, is a time bomb. Do you know what I mean?” A few bars of music. “What’s a bomb, Dani? Again, without waiting for an answer: “A bomb, Dani, is a container with a star inside it, ready to go off, taking the whole world with it.”

That plaintive singing. I could still hear it clearly. My mother’s terrible, even demented, singing: “Twinkle, twinkle little star…”

***

The Other Hand page 166

Babylon was a beginning, Cardinal, where the magi, those Chaldeans, those astronomer- astrologers that the Old Testament rails against, had watched the stars with unprecedented devotion, seeing light everywhere, seeing gods in the constellations and the spirit of light passing down into them as destiny.

Babylon is where it had begun. The Babylonians had not distinguished between knowing the stars and their configurations, measuring the orbits of the planets, discovering the cycles of Venus, calculating the lunar and planetary ephemeredes years into the future, regulating the calendar, studying equinoxes, solstices and eclipses, and discerning the influence of these stellar bodies. And by some grace, I had found myself in this silent blue oasis in the middle of darkness. A brief blue interlude within the fetid industrial air of the poisoned city of East Berlin.

These had been the people of the stars. I was of their lineage even though they had conquered the Jews and brought them to Babylon, including someone whose name I bear. Daniel, the great magician, who had visions and understood dreams, had been here. He had been a captive and lived his life of exile here. Both slave and minister, he had walked down this very processional. He had looked at the stars from this place. He had touched this wall. He had survived the lions’ den and he had touched this lion. His hand on my hand through the fold of years. The same Daniel directed the Magi to follow the star that rose over Bethlehem indicating new light.

I had come through the arch of the blue gate, blue as the sky, with its gods, with its dragons and bulls of gold and white and was walking along the blue processional wall with its lions, gold and white as stars. There was no one else in this vast room that was, unlike the others, gleaming with the colors of light: gold of marigolds, white of lilies, blue of approaching light, blue of twilight and dusk.

Babylon was a point. A moment of light. Its rays like roads from the temple of the astronomer priests glanced off in different directions of space time: astronomy, astrology, cuneiform, writing, mathematics, diasporas, captivity, slavery, Talmud, Daniel, the Christ Child, Berlin and the Bomb. ….

Let’s meet in Babylon, Cardinal. Let’s go there together and watch the astronomer-priest climb the stairs to the summit so he can study the stars. He was the most honored one. After him came the ones who did the calculations and after them, the scribes who wrote it all down. Let us be with him there because shortly after this moment, he divided in two and the astronomer went his way and the priest went the other way and we see where that has led.

***

In 2005, I was honored to deliver the keynote to the American Academy on Environmental Medicine. A few days later, I went to the land around Los Alamos to do ceremony for restoration. My cousin, Alexis Lavine, then a geologist at the Laboratories, was my guide and companion.

From Grief into Vision: A Council: P. 93-94.

I went with Alexis to the suffering land where nuclear waste and other chemicals from experiments at Los Alamos had been dumped into the canyons and carried by the waters. Lat year, the spirits led Alexis, then a geologist at Los Alamos, to find a cave on land that originally was a sacred home to the Tewa people.

(An identified sacred cave [see photo in book] at Los Alamos has been closed with steel mesh and bars and is inaccessible even to the native people.)

This cave is a sipapu, a portal to the spirit world. We came in under a heavy cloud cover that arose suddenly. We had been required to change the time of our visit so many times, we had to accept that were being called to this place at this exact moment. Though the sky had been clear, I had had the premonition that we would encounter weather and soon we were accompanied by the rumble of thunder.

Alexis stopped, advising me that the cave was around the bend and it was time for us to take off our shoes. As we did, lightning flashed closer and closer and then it thundered again and hail fell furiously. We huddle momentarily under a tree that didn’t protect us and then made our way barefoot over mounds of hail to another cave from which we watched the display of lightning and of hail dancing.

Thunder continued to astonish us with its force and proximity. It was as if we in it and we blessed the Thunder Beings for gifting us with their presence. Water was streaming through the adjoining cave, a small flash flood that didn’t enter where were despite the hole at the level bottom of the common stone wall. After the storm, we made our way to the cave we were seeking. The only standing body of water we saw was at a small rock in front of the cave. Everything around us was renewed, vibrant and alive from the gift of the abundant water as if we were given a sign about the possibilities of restoration.

***

To return to the beginning. The title for The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them came to me in a dream. Finding the icon at Eleusis when the archeologist at first dismissed our claim because they had scoured the area for twenty years and were sure there were no artifacts left, was a miracle. Collaborating on a book with a dead man was a gift from spirit. I was introduced to Cortázar work when a book, New Writing in Latin America, fell off a shelf into my hands and introduced me to Latin American culture and politics which have engaged me ever since. There are miracles every day and they determine our lives. Often the miracles appear as afflictions.

I had breast cancer in 1977. I had been writing a novel, The Book of Hags, about women who had cancer:

From Tree: Essays and Pieces P. 31.

For years the women had been dying. One by one. Stricken in their youth or middle-age just as things were beginning. An unknown assassin. Just at the moment when everything was possible. Education. Power. Consciousness. Self They sickened and died. That is not true. They did not die of their own accord. Something sickened them and they died. They were murdered. Stricken. Poisoned. Assassinated. Suddenly. The doctors call it cancer. It is. But of what nature? And why now? And why so many? And why so young?

When I finished the book, I discovered I had cancer. I was 40. I didn’t know I was a very young woman to have cancer. It was hell. My children were very young. My ex had a heart attack a week later. I was afraid my children would be orphaned. I had to find the life force for all our sakes. One conclusion in the Book of Hags is that cancer is imposed silence. So I took a typewriter to the hospital.Tree, a journal, was the result.

I had a mastectomy. I did not have chemo or radiation. Ultimately, Hella Hammid took a photograph of my tattooed chest and we published the Warrior Poster, designed by Sheila de Bretteville. Having traveled around the world, becoming even a book cover in Japan, the Poster has, I know, saved countless women’s lives, those who might have suffered, might still suffer from silicone poisoning or complications when pursuing reconstruction and or breast enhancement.

This is the text on the poster: From Tree: Essays and Pieces. P. 91

I am no longer afraid of mirrors where I see the sign of the amazon the one who shoots arrows. There is a fine red line across my chest where a knife entered, but now a branch winds about the scar and travels from arm to heart. Green leaves cover the branch, grapes hang there and a bird appears. What grows in me now is vital and does not cause me harm. I think the bird is singing. When he finished his work, the tattooist drank a glass of wine with me. I have relinquished some of the scars. I have designed my chest with the care given to an illuminated manuscript. I am no longer ashamed to make love. In the night, a hand caressed my chest and once again I came to life. Love is a battle I can win. I have the body of a warrior who does not kill or wound. On the book of my body, I have permanently inscribed a tree.

Cancer changed my life. I became a healer. I train healers. I am a medicine woman. I have gathered physicians and medicine people to create a medicine that does no harm to humans or to the earth. We call it ReVisioning Medicine. That is how I met the veteran who is toxic like the earth is poisoned. Seeking to bring healing to him, we are seeking also to bring healing to the earth.

On 9/11 I was in Zimbabwe. Entering the Ghost River opens with these words:

Entering the Ghost River P. 5

What is your medicine? I was asked.

Story. Story is my medicine, I answered.

Cancer taught me to ask: What is the message, the Story the affliction is carrying? What is the healing Story?

In The Woman Who, Ada goes to the General to heal him of war.

In 2007, I met the General. I was working with a grassroots peacebuilding organization in Liberia when we met a rebel general who, because the war was over, was going to become a mercenary in another West African country. Instead he became the youth director of everyday gandhis. We did not become lovers as in The Woman Who, but he calls me Mama Deena.

Peacebuilding and healing one gesture. One thing we learned in Africa is that you can’t have peace unless you heal the land. Our bodies, our communities, the earth require simultaneous healing. Healing depends on seeing the other. The great blessed other is the natural world. The other person. The other animal.

From Feral P. 9

The moment it first occurred to the woman that she would bring the girl home was when the girl had climbed to a sturdy branch half way up the sycamore and ensconced herself there, first removing, then dropping, her yellow leather work boots and then her socks, stretched out like lilies at their tops, fluorescent lime green no less. The girl wrapped what looked like prehensile toes around some of the finer twigs so that it appeared that she had grown into the tree or it into her.

When the woman was trying to discern the nature of the being she was examining, first she thought feral, then thinking feral, she thought wolf. But wolves don’t climb trees, both the girl and the woman knew that Confronted by the girl’s feet, she was compelled to say simian, ape, primate, mono, monkey, but stopped there as no one would identify a species by its feet alone.

Then as the woman teetered between one identification and another without knowing if the confusion or complexity was in the girl or in herself, the girl raised her mouth to the sky and opened it into a fluted goblet as if to catch rain. The sadness the child exuded was so like a perfume that one could not bear taking it in or being without it. Grief eased out into the air extending itself in mineral colors like oil on water, the thinnest of diaphanous films until it found its destination and wrapped itself about the living body, a sculpture in opal and mother of pearl. So many days, the woman admitted, she had been curious about grief while most willing to avoid the textures of its mysteries.

From “Coming Home,” Intimate Nature p. 363

It has taken a long time to be properly humbled by the irrefutable evidence that I have been living much of my life in the presence and territory of other distinct, awesome, might intelligences without having any but the most rudimentary understanding of the meaning of their individual and species lives which I have nevertheless so deeply violated. This cultural and historic obliviousness, which sometimes overwhelms even those traditions that hold otherwise, has now brought all of us to the brink of destruction. So even if I weren’t personally compelled on this quest of alliance, making amends and restoration, even if I hadn’t opened up worlds of beauty and interest, even if I weren’t motivated by irrepressible passions and curiosity, it would behoove me to ask the animals: Who are you? – and to continue to adjust my life according to what I hope will be an increasing ability to understand their answers.

But nothing prepared me for meeting the wild Elephant Ambassador, four times, four separate years.

I met the Elephant Ambassador in the wild in Chobe Wild Animal Park in Botswana. He had walked to the open back of our truck with clear determination and intention. I had had the strange and inexplicable desire to sit in council with elephants, and now he was standing before me looking me in the eye.

From Entering the Ghost River P. 183

In my mind, I said the following to him:

I know who you are and what kind of beings your people are. I have some sense of the extent and depth of your intelligence and development. And I know that you are a holocausted people I know something of this means because I also come from a holocausted people and I have studied other holocausts and the planet in this century. I apologize to you for my species and what we are doing to you. I cannot tell you the extent of my shame and grief. If there is any way for you to imprint me with your wisdom so that we can form an alliance, so that we can, together, accomplish something on behalf of the earth, I am here and I am not afraid.

Alliance with the animals and alliance, also, with the elementals. All the beings of the natural world. The EarthSea Mother is profoundly injured in so many ways including the gulf spill and Fukushima.

La Negra y Blanca was written in the flames of fire storms. La Negra is a woman and/or a spirit or the rain itself.

From La Negra y Blanca 252

The setting sun is very red. Twenty miles away, rugged canyons have been burning for more than a month, columns of smoke, higher than the mountains mount the sky. It will be many more weeks before the fire is contained. It is hard to breathe because of the dense smoke. It is very quiet here as the sun sets; the fire has stilled everything. There is only the hum of a few bees, as of a depleted swarm searching out a site for a new hive to establish a new life. Or there are only a few because the bees are disappearing. A friend says the weather is perfect where he lives; though the plants are full and hearty, they are not yielding crops. There are flowers, he says, but no fruit. Some flowers are pollinated by the wind, I reassure myself, alarmed as he is.

A year later, the fires are transforming the colors of the sky again. This time the smoke turns the sky yellow brown, a sallow color and the trees cower in the wind. Everything is turning brown. I can smell deer flesh roasting in the fire hell of the burning wilderness.

It is August and the smoke from the wilderness fire twenty-five miles away blows over the setting sun, turning the sky brown yellow and the sun blood red. The fire will rage for weeks, even after it is contained, drawing closer and closer to the molten center. There was a drought before the Conquest. The Maya had been taken, as Blanca’s people are being taken, by the follies of empire. The Maya also cut down the trees. Drought followed and then increased warfare. Devastation everywhere. Fire is replacing rain. The trees are dying, the forests are aflame, the poles are melting, animals are going extinct; even the bees are threatened with annihilation. Where drought isn’t, there are floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones and hurricanes.

Blanca takes a rain stick and goes up to the circle of trees above her house. She has placed a sculpture of three frogs in a crude clay basin of water. The drought has reached extreme proportions, calling us back to the old ways of reverence for the earth, to different lives, to prayer and offerings. When there is no rain, the wars increase and the earth increasingly suffers our violence. May rains come bringing an end to the untenable wars we are waging.

***

From La Negra y Blanca 253, 254

The terrible drought of 1989 finally broke in Yaxumá, Yucatán, only a few days after the village shaman, Don Pablo, had conducted a three-day long ritual called a Cha-Chac ceremony to summon the storm gods who would bring rain to the parched lands. Having participated in the earlier ceremony, an astounded David Friedel stood in his archaeological field camp watching the rains Don Pablo had called sweep in from the northeast over the pyramids of the ancient city next to the village. With his triumph written across his face in a huge grin, Don Pablo came running over the crest of a nearby hill, clutching his hat in the gusting winds as he fled inches ahead of a gray wall of rain. A great rainbow arched over him in the brilliant orange light of the setting sun in a magnificent display that affirmed the success of his performance as shaman.”

The old knowledge of relationship comes with the rain. When we are oblivious to relationship, drought is inevitable. The shaman running before the rain is literally attached to the rain spirits, to Chac, to the thunder beings through the bright banner of his ritual work and prayers for the earth.

The sky is clouded over and the winds are fierce each morning and evening as if a storm is imminent although it has not rained for months except the intense moment when Blanca had been typing these words about Don Pablo, the Shaman of Yaxumá, Yucatán and the sky darkened with storm and emptied, rain and hail. May the rains come now.

The sky has turned dark and when Blanca gets up and goes to the door, there it is, a crash of thunder and rain pours down.

As I speak to you in Los Angeles on February 27th 2014, it is raining. It has been the first real rain in Topanga in about eighteen months. It is not enough to last us the next year, but perhaps it will restore the dying sage and the trees. The deer will eat the new grass and be sustained for a short time. In the last months we have put out water for the wild creatures and even alfalfa for the deer. The squirrels in the area share the bird seed with the birds and we try to provide for the wild on the land we have taken from them in ways that might be somewhat equal to how we provide for ourselves. In the last weeks we have seen bobcat, skunk, raccoon and eagle in addition to all our familiar neighbors, coyote, cougar, rabbits and squirrels. These days, everything I do is, I hope, a prayer for rain, the wild and a generous future for all beings.

From Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems P. 292

RUIN AND BEAUTY THE END

A last poem on behalf of ruin and beauty. A last poem hovering somewhere near, alongside everything that needs to be said now, in this time. The last poem for a book may be the last poem for a lifetime. What offering can be made with yet another last word?

Each time I write, I pray the last word will be a beginning. Even I pray for this, I, who love sunset, more than I love dawn, for its abandon to fire as embers turn to coal and then to diamonds that emerge from the heavy night. These are not the diamonds of the field; they do not rip the life out of the earth or the life from the hands of those who must carry the shovels that will dig into their hearts. These are not lights that need to remain buried in the dark.

I am remembering myself now because like everyone else I have spent a life forgetting. I recognize the child who loved trees as well as the woman who fell so passionately in love with light; she would follow it to its birthplace in the distant stars if she were able. When she was younger, she announced her willingness to burn to ash for the sake of blazing, and today she is an aging woman pausing before the bare elm, as skeleton now as the woman soon will be. It will dim before it blazes and so will she.

Who knows but the two, tree and woman, may fall at the same time, the way the acacia fell the night of the funeral, the way the great pine went over, bent over prostrate, along the threshold, the night the wind rose to take everyone down. We cut the pine into round steps; they decay, they fall apart, they ease into the earth or become the kindling we burn in the bright winter fire. The wisteria went down with the pine, but has risen again. It is winding a future of delicate purple blossoms through the eucalyptus trees. It will be fire next time before the fall.

It is not envy, it is not my own death that moves me. I am not wistful before the resurrecting wisteria displaying nubs, hard pressed, like a young girl’s nipples toward the sky. Rather I shade my eyes before the certainty of God, an invisible shimmering bird, perched in the elm’s silver nest, dull bark turning platinum with the Presence.

Soon the ravens will come, the hawks, vultures and owls to take possession of that naked perch, claw to claw, searching for prey and rain in the great round of life that still remains to them despite the airplanes that bruise the surfaces of clouds, poisons dripping from metal tail feathers.

I have written of this all my life. Each time I try to get it right so that life will continue. Not my life, you understand, but life itself. The magic formula constantly eluding all magis. I let each day fall out of my hand, another petal on the patio stones, or on the metal table, splashes of color turning brown, becoming soil again, melting into the future. The earth deserves a long life that will never end, constructed entirely of the sweet and rightful deaths of all the creatures who feed here on the various honeys of creation.

Of course, I am lying when I say my death isn’t a big deal. A poet’s rhetoric. It will seem that the world is dying when I will be dying. I will be leaving but it will seem that the world will be dimming and falling away. A physicist’s relativity.

“How do we serve the dying?” the exhausted woman asked from her mother’s bedside. Could she assure the dying woman, she had the courage and fortitude to pull away from us and enter the last adventure on her own. Easier said. But every one of us will be in that bed, wondering how to triumph at the end of the taffy pull. We will wonder about how to do it, while someone who hasn’t met that challenge yet will kindly reassure us with what she cannot know. If she is skilled, we will believe her, and we will speed away at sufficient velocity from all that we have until this moment loved more than life, have assumed is life, the whole of it.

This is where we part from the earth that until now we called our mother and so presumed she would precede us in all things. We pull away toward the solitude that is finally, irrevocably ours. We can report to no one from the dark cave that may or may not be a tunnel with a light at the end. Whatever it is for us, no one will ever know. We have been practicing a lifetime to learn to be, finally, on our own.

Earth is not so fortunate. She has made the essential bodhisattva sacrifice. She remains here until all beings are enlightened. Oh how bitter! She is unable to escape us. Even light gets to fly away.

***

In a clay bowl filled with white milk, we washed the dark feet of a soldier who had eaten human hearts. Another woman came and then another, washing, washing. Such forgiveness, acts of utter hopelessness and impossible hope. Forgiveness required that we sharpen knives until nothing could resist us, so we could sever the past from the future, for him and for us. He slashed and we slashed. The milk roiled in the earthen pot. Milk so white, pressed out of a living creature, milk I know because I nursed my sons, swirling about my burning hands. I searched to find all the love within me though the general had devoured the source of love so many times. He had assumed love would disappear from our planet forever; how else could he survive? When we were finished, the milk was so white it could have blinded us. Some deaths cannot be redeemed without acts of utter desperation.

Ruin, you see, is not the end of life despite museums of crumbling cornices and corner stones. Ruin is unremitting beauty flinging us to the ground. Ruin is a supernova exploding, an old one turning in on itself and becoming, in that moment, as much light as will blaze from the sun in the next ten billion years. Ruin is that gamma moment pouring out into the universe now.

Ruin and beauty:

Despair not,

There will be a future;

There will be a future before

Or after we die.

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REVISIONING MEDICINE 2004 – 2014 AN INVITATION

(THIS INVITATION IS PRIMARILY FOR PHYSICIANS AT THIS TIME.)

Join Us For a ReVisioning Medicine Council foR  Physicians, Psychotherapists, Health Professionals and Healers

Feb. 15-17, 2014 in Topanga, California  [Los Angeles area.]

In the old days, when a people were gravely threatened, the Chiefs, Medicine People, Healers, Shamans, and Elders, the spiritual leaders of their communities, called Councils. They looked for solutions to problems by aligning themselves with the ancestors, the Natural world and their wisdom traditions. They were careful to consider dreams, signs, myths and stories. Recognizing that illness is often the consequence of having violated the earth, the community and the spirits, they searched for systemic responses to assure healing. The spirits, animals and plants, even the elementals, communed with them, extending teachings, blessings and wisdom. In times of crises, they gathered, as we are gathering now.

This is an invitation to a ReVisioning Medicine Council to be held in Topanga, California, Feb. 15-17, 2014.

A core group of physicians and healers have been consciously exploring ReVisioning Medicine since 2004.

Deena Metzger convened the first gathering after giving the keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Holistic Medical Association (AHMA). In that talk, she identified both medical practice and the earth as the patients we were called to heal.

ReVisioning Medicine is a council that honors and relies on deep dialogue between medical and health practitioners and medicine people – healers, pipe carriers, shamans, energy workers, dreamers, story tellers, sound healers, indigenous elders and practitioner – as peers. To address healing with heart, complexity and profundity, we gather a broad based healing community to inform and sustain each other.
In a circle of trust and camaraderie, ReVisioning allows each person to examine the gulf between the original call to be a healer and the increasing limitations and distortions imposed on medical practice by different aspects of corporate and institutional medicine, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and government.  It is so important now to have working connections that support the expertise and the heart and soul of our work. Through ReVisioning, healing teams emerge – teams that gather around patients and also improvisational, impromptu teams of and for the practitioners as well.
ReVisioning is an on-going creative process.  In the ten years we have been gathering we have learned that community is essential to healing, that community, itself, heals.  Those who come together for ReVisioning create a community, albeit far flung across the country, that continues to support each individual’s exploration and activity on behalf of a new medicine.
Based on Council principles, everyone’s unique intelligence, medicine tradition and wisdom is appreciated. ReVisioning Medicine is a spirit-based medicine, as healing is a spiritual practice for medicine people. It promotes alliances between the patient and physicians, healers, the family and the natural world. Such partnership has major implications in terms of diagnosis and treatment as does including ritual and ceremony in the healing process.
Medicine determines culture.   Therefore our medical practices need to change for individual, social and environmental health to improve and flourish.   Medical practice itself is one of our patients.  So we gather physicians who can carry seeds of change to create circles of support so that physicians and health practitioners can return to their original calling as true healers.
At ReVisioning we ask: Can medical people also be medicine people?  Can a physician serve the community in the best ways that medicine persons served theirs indigenous communities? Can we speak honestly and from the heart about the grief and vision we carry around medicine and healing? Can we examine together what we must step away from and what we want to change? Can we create medical practices and treatments that do not harm people or the environment?
With the hope of approaching the entire Story of an illness or affliction, and seeing how it may affect both an individual and the community, we seek to expand the narrow medical focus, looking beyond symptoms, the physical and emotional components, beyond testing, seeking many ways of knowing and a range of possibilities for treatment. In the intimate process of healing, we also learn and carry each other’s stories, what we have suffered and how we have triumphed, we recognizing the healer in ourselves and each other and support the path we are each called to walk.
We have each experienced, participated in or witnessed unexpected healing events; this is a safe place to explore them and consider their import. We begin to imagine on-going alliances as we become true healers in a time of history that requires such transformation.
ReVisioning gatherings are always small so that true exchange can occur.  While the days together are planned, they allow for spontaneity and improvisation. We always hope to spend time on the land and in silence or solitude.  When possible we sit around a fire in the old ways to access inner wisdom.
Someone volunteers to be the focus so that together we might discover the deep story of an illness and illuminate the coexisting paths of healing that extend beyond the “patient” to the people and the earth. Particularly attentive to and respectful of what the patient knows about his or her affliction, we listen carefully for the Story. We call this exploration Indigenous Grand Rounds.
Over the years, we have worked with such Volunteers who have been afflicted with various cancers, heart disease, leukemia and kidney failure (from playing in uranium tailings on the Reservation) agent orange poisoning, (Viet Nam), chemical sensitivities, and other ailments. (A good percentage of our Volunteers have been also been participants working in conventional medical fields.) We always try to focus on someone whose affliction has ramifications for the society as a whole and to see how non-conventional ways of healing might inform us and the patient in new ways.
The Volunteer for our February 2013 gathering was a 21-year-old woman who had suffered continuous pain since she was 18 months old, later accompanied by depression and fatigue.  We were acutely aware of the great number of young women suffering similar often undiagnosed afflictions or variously diagnosed as lyme disease, fibromyalgia, etc.  We were, and were not, surprised to observe that that the young woman’s energy increased with her willingness to explore and comment upon the field of her suffering.  She, who had because of pain insisted that she not be touched, embraced each one of us at the end. A few weeks later, her mother wrote, “M is doing great!  She is lifting weights, running a mile, doing yoga, dancing, hiking and meeting new people. She is even boxing.
The Volunteer for the Nashville Council, September 2013, was a woman who had suffered chronic pain in her arm for six years. We (and she) did not know when she was invited that she is one of the Great Storytellers.  In telling her story, she detailed the ways historic, religious, political and economic circumstances combine with medical and institutional abuse to exacerbate symptoms and illness.  We do not know yet if / how her physical condition will resolve, but it was confirmed that sometimes listening to the story, without pathologzing, can be the medicine.
We are very concerned with iatrogenisis. Too many are suffering the side-effects of prescribed medicines, and/or complications from medical or hospital treatments. One physician, using a short hand, referred to the majority of her contemporaries as practicing “pharmaceutical medicine.”
Physicians also become patients and endure iatrogenic events. An M.D. colleague, who was planning to attend ReVisioning, suffered acute kidney failure in 2011 from the prescribed medication for rheumatoid arthritis. Despite having insisted that rigorous research precede treatment, he became the victim of a protocol that was known to cause harm.
If we are free to think differently about the nature of illness and healing, as well as the relationship between common illnesses and modern life, we might seek other interventions, invent treatments that do no harm to individuals or the planet.  ReVisioning calls us back to the original call to physicians to heal and not do harm.
We also gather to support each other on our individual journeys.  ReVisioned Medicine is reciprocal medicine, based on relationship, collaboration, on taking care of each other.
During the last meeting in Topanga, a physician asked for community support. He was torn between the restrictions of corporate for-profit medicine and his heart’s call to a spirit based, indigenously informed, humanitarian medicine.  He was relieved to discuss the heartbreak of his devotion to his patients and the compromises he was forced to make.  Deena met with him in October 2013, in the city where he is currently practicing medicine.  He has formed a deep healing alliance with a medicine woman who lives in this area and also attended ReVisioning.  Far from being lonely in a new city, he is creating unexpected healing possibilities for his new patients.
ReVisioning Medicine seeks to bring medical wisdom together with time tested indigenous ways and contemporary vision. Cooperation between western medicine and non-western healing practices is implicit in Complementary and Alternative Medicine, but these are still parallel systems operating from different perspectives. A new collaboration is essential.  Integrating the old, old medicine of Story, right relationships and respect for the communities of all beings, can bring us back into alignment and health. When medical ways and medicine ways are aligned, then community itself is healed as are many of the grave ills and illnesses of modern life.  ReVisioning Medicine brings all the ways into a unified and dynamic council; it is, we believe, the future.
A few days after the Nashville Council, one physician wrote: “My connection with patients was subtly different this week. I found the willingness for more risk-taking, and the directness on multiple occasions led to some remarkably beautiful sessions. There were shifts in some long- term patients, with whom I’d begun to feel resigned to the status quo. I feel very grateful to you all.“

***

ReVisioning Medicine in Topanga, February 2014 

As this will be the ten-year anniversary of ReVisioning Medicine, we expect this gathering of medical and medicine people from across the country and even the world, will deepen our understanding of how we may collaborate to create and restore a medical/medicine culture that seeds health in every interaction.

Deena Metzger will be leading the gathering again in alliance with Kjersten Gmeiner, MD, Karen Mutter, DO, and Muz, Richenel Ansano, formerly of Global Medicine Education Foundation and now with the NAAM Foundation, the National Archeological – Anthropological Museum of Curaçao.  Joining them will be Lawrie Hartt and Danelia Wild, dedicated healers and musicians who have been carrying ReVisioning Medicine since its inception and Tobi Fishel, PhD, Director of Psychological Services at the Vanderbilt Center for Integrative Health (VCIH) and Associate Professor in the departments of Psychiatry, Psychology and Pediatrics who organized the ReVisioning Council in Nashville, September 2013.

To reserve a space and for more information, including fees, interested parties please call or write to Deena at   310-455-1089 or Kjersten Gmeiner, M.D. gmeiner.k@gmail.com 206-679-5429.

***

Essays on ReVisioning Medicine and healing can be found Deena’s website: and her blog, .

These include: Thinking About Healing; Illness Heals the World; On ReVisioning Medicine and the Possibilities of Miracles; The Soul of Medicine (Deena’s address to the AHMA in 2004); Illness Can Heal the World and Healing in the Community. Her books related to healing include, Tree: Essays and Pieces, a journal of surviving breast cancer, Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing, and From Grief Into Vision: A Council.

Peace and Blessings,

Deena and Kjersten

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BEAR MEDICINE FOR THE WORLD

The USA together with the Russian Federation have put a proposal to the CITES Conference of Parties March 2013 to uplist polar bears (Ursus maritimus) from Appendix II to Appendix I. The proposal considered that this higher level of protection was needed as polar bears, in addition to being threatened in the future by the increasing loss of ice in the Arctic (summer ice has decreased by 15-20% due to climate change) also are significantly affected by trade. Indeed, the USA proposal mentions that from 2001-2010 something like 6798 polar bear products were traded, including skins, skulls, trophies, “bodies” and live animals. 79% of the trade emanates from Canada. http://www.lionaid.org/blog/2013/02/cites-travesty-part-3-polar-bears.htm

***

One of the oldest myths in the world is the story of the young girl who marries the bear.  In most versions, the she is captured by the bear because she is indolent or rude and so is taken back to his people where she becomes his wife and bears (sic) him cubs, part bear, part human.  It is important to recognize that she is not raped.  She marries. Over time she matures.  A true bond is created.  Sometimes her children are bears and she loves them so. After some time, loneliness for her own people calls her back home and she returns with her sons. When they return to human settlement, they take on and keep the shape of the human.  Then, in one version or another, the brothers or her sons, set out to hunt the bear and are taught this mystery by the bear who offers himself to his human kin.

The myth is concerned, primarily with right relationship between human and other.  The necessity for such a connection is implied in the recognition of Bear people.  Bear people and human people are equals in power and the Bear people demonstrate sacred authority.  Shape shifting, bear to human, human to bear, is also is central to this myth.

What does shape shifting mean politically? We can become each other.  This reduces differences.  This implies the possibility of alliances and mutual concerns. Such understanding was fundamental to most indigenous cultures and allowed for ecologically balanced and environmentally sane survival tactics.  Hunting is balanced and sacred wisdom is a gift from the animal to the human.

However the history of Western culture is one of increasing alienation from the natural world. Disrespect has led us to the degradation of the environment. It has led to the crisis we find ourselves in.  The increasing extinction of species leads, if things continue in this way, to our own extinction as well.

Right relationship and respect continues as a theme in the fairy tale, The Three Bears.  Here there is no recognition of the ‘other’ by the human girl.  Goldilocks does not recognize that she is in a foreign terrain and needs to act with respect. She is even more naïve and immature than the girl in the old myth,  Goldilocks assumes she has a right to what belongs to the bear. No bond of recognition or connection occurs between human and animal.  The Three Bears marks the development of disconnection between the species.  This is implied by the bears losing their bearness and living in a human habitat.  This is not shape shifting; this is colonization.

Beauty and the Beast is another variation on the same theme.  Beauty goes to live with the Beast (read Bear.) Then loneliness, for her own people, also calls her home.  However, love has been awakened and she returns to the Bea( r)st.  This is where the story shifts.  The Bea( r)st turns into a man.  The shamanic skill of shapeshifting is replaced by enchantment, a conversion by evil means.  A profound way of knowing is demonized, a common trend in Western culture.

There is a Cherokee Bear legend about the Ani Tsaguhi.  http:www.firstpeople us/.  A young man from this clan makes his way more and more frequently to the mountains.  After a while his parents notice that the young man is growing long brown hair.  He is transforming and wants to live away from the people.  His parents decide to follow and live where he lives.

The clan elders try to persuade the Ani Tsaguhi to stay at home. They send messengers who are “surprised to notice that their bodies were beginning to be covered with hair like that of animals, because for seven days they had not taken human food and their nature was changing. The Ani Tsaguhi would not come back, but said, ‘We are going where there is always plenty to eat. Hereafter we shall be called Yonv(a) (bears), and when you yourselves are hungry come into the woods and call us and we shall come to give you our own flesh. You need not be afraid to kill us, for we shall live always.’ Then they taught the messengers the songs with which to call them and bear hunters have these songs still. When they had finished the songs, the Ani Tsaguhi started on again and the messengers turned back to the settlements, but after going a little way they looked back and saw a drove of bears going into the woods.”

In this story, the bears will live always.  The humans shape shift into bears and the bears teach the sacred songs, reveal the mysteries, so that the hunters will always have good fortune.

In a similar Cherokee story, told to me last month, by Cherokee elder Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, a young man wants to join the Buffalo people but can’t until he proves that he walks among them with great respect.

The old myths teach the good ways (Native American) or right relationship (Buddhist.) They present the political principles through which we are to govern ourselves and our habitats.

How far we have come from this: later Western stories reflect our ignorance and disregard.  The commentary after the myth on the Indigenous People’s Literature site is “Aho.  http://indians.org/indigenous-peoples-literature.html. We are all related.”  This is the essential principal from which good governance develops.

***

In early 2013, master storyteller and dear old friend, Diane Wolkstein, asked me to write an essay for a section of StoryTelling Magazine, http://www.storynet.org/magazine.html. which she was guest editing with Loren Neimi on the Politics of Story.  When Diane died suddenly while researching her next story project on the Monkey King in Taiwan, Neimi continued with the section. BEAR MEDICINE FOR THE WORLD was published in Volume 25, Issue 2, June-July 2013: Remembering Diane Wolkstein.  It broke my heart and eased my heart to be with Diane at the end having known and loved her for over thirty years.

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