Here's a taste of Sacred Fire...
excerpts from previous issues.
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"These days it seems that “shaman” is a label tossed around almost as freely as “natural,” and both are at risk of losing their meaning. In distinctly American fashion, bent on commodifying everything we can get our hands on and even what we can’t, what might be special has become common, and what might be common has become special. So I admit it was both unsettling and refreshing when, a few months later, sitting together at a friend’s home for an interview, the first thing Eda Zavala did was to correct me. “I am not a shaman,” said Zavala. “I am a healer, a Peruvian healer, a curandera. I am not a shaman.”"
from an interview with Eda Zavala, issue 12
"Once upon a time there was a girl with eyes like a wide dark sea and pink-gold skin that was softer than soft. She lived with her one-eyed dog in a land where torrential rains alternated with high-altitude sun, clouds moving constantly and kaleidoscopically across the sky. The rains left the land green and blooming, the earth wet and sucking at the girl’s feet, and the air teeming with butterflies, mosquitoes, and mold-spores"
from a story by Svagita Elks, issue 8
"We are like whales swimming up the rivers or beaching themselves to call attention to the problems of the seas. Our voices seem unintelligible and are easily ignored. And for those of us who have been called from this culture to nurture our connections to the living world, it is so difficult to let go of our cultural conditioning. How do we, really, begin to hear the singing of the world? Look at the living world.”
from an article by Jonathan Merritt, Editor in Chief, Issue 10
"There was an old man once who wanted to be with the wolves and know their thoughts. He went out into the ice and sang to them and asked them to sink their teeth into his heart. I guess the singing kept him warm enough so he lived out there for three days and nights. On the fourth day, the wolves finally came to him, or rather, he realized that all along he had been looking straight at them and only when they were ready had they let themselves be seen. I know about this man because I sat with him in the hospital just a few years ago and I talked to him while I was on night duty."
from a story by Luise Erdrich, Issue 7
"In these times we can all use a good dose of wisdom, a good dose of putting the mind in service to the heart. We need a context for sharing our wisdom-work with others and a framework for transmitting heart-knowledge to succeeding generations. That’s the goal of Sacred Fire Foundation and of this magazine."
from an article by Sharon Brown, Publisher, issue 14
"One of the chlallenges we all face, as individuals, in collectives of societies, or as nations, is to look at our own behaviors and be able to identify clearly and admit to ourselves when we are acting for everyone’s benefit or just for ourselves and our friends or allies."
from an article by Robert Sachs, Issue 7
"What our grandparents have said is that the land feeds us but we feed the land as well. What they meant by that was that we give our bodies back to the land in a very physical way but we also do other things to the land. We live on the land and we use the land and, in so doing, we impact the land: we can destroy it, or we can love the land and it can love us back."
from an article by Jeanette Armstrong, Issue 7
"All indigenous ancestral traditions are filled with stories of how the gods came and taught them how to make shelter and clothing, how to make the proper offerings to maintain their relationships with the plants and animals, with the weather beings, with the land itself. The people knew that the gods inhabited certain sacred sites—mountains, forests, streams, caves, stones, certain inlets of the sea, canyons and deserts. The stories of these gods, the wisdom and gifts that they offered, were the stories of the land. In telling the stories the people knew who they were and where they were and how they were connected to each other, to the plants and animals and to the earth. And, in order to maintain those connections, to continue re- ceiving the wisdom and gifts of the gods, the people made pilgrimages to those sacred places. They held the seasonal festivals, made offerings and maintained their daily prayers."
from an article/story by Jonathan Merritt, Editor in Chief, issue 7