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All Spiritual Traditions Arise from the LandRead the article from Sacred Fire Issue Seven
Inside Issue Ten
9 Wisdom Keepers + Interspiritual Conference + Tatewari + Grandfather Fire + The Poetics of Place + Erick Gonzalez + Lessons for 2012 + What is Our Future + Greed + Manitonquat + Medicine Woman + The Seventh Prophecy + Robert Moss + Indigeous Struggles + Teztan Biny + Redwood Speech + Cynthia Frisch + Sharks + How to Hear the World + MORE
For many, many thousands of years, humankind experienced every facet of the world as being alive with spirit. The earliest peoples regularly communicated with the plants, with the animals, and with the natural forces of the world.
This was not a religious practice, not a belief system. It was an everyday fact of life. These relationships were essential to our health and well being.
Some say, We've evolved beyond superstition. Why should we care how early people lived?
Yes, we’re modern now. We think we've conquered the earth, that we've harnessed the elemental forces of nature. And some people live lives of great power, comfort and excitement.
Meanwhile...the whole world suffers. Call it climate change. Call it social injustice. Or ground water pollution, drug addiction, eroded topsoil, ethnic cleansing, ocean dead zones, family dysfunction, extinct species, autism, or profound feelings of helplessness, alienation and depression.
Call it what you will. When we treat the world and everything in it like inanimate resources, rather than like the dynamic, sentient Beings that they are, we create tremendous imbalance.
Sacred Fire is here to promote listening. The kind of deep listening that comes from hearing, not with our minds, but with our hearts.
To bring balance back into the world, we need to listen to the people who have come before us, the ancestors.
We need to listen to the people alive today whose traditions remind us of the stories and lessons that served humankind for thousands of years.
And we need to listen to the living spirits of nature that are there to help us awaken to all of life.
Listen deeply. Be in conversation with the world.
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