Council of All Beings Spring 2015 report
Our Council of All Beings convened on March 14, 2015 in a
sunny “Sky Room.” The Council was
sponsored by Our Sacred Earth and the Goddess Circle of the Unitarian
Universalist Church of Boulder.
We called the
directions and spoke the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Prayer to connect with the
Spirits and the Beings of the Past, Present and Future and calling for
Healing. In so doing we created sacred
space for the Council
We worked with 3 questions:
As this life form what do you enjoy and where
do you live?
What difficulties to you
encounter in your environment and particularly with human encounters?
What would you like humans to know and what
gifts would you like to give them?
Following is A)
Description of what this Council experience provides.
B) Excerpt of each
Life Form’s Speaking answers to these questions
A) The Council of all Beings experience
It sneaks up on you ….by stepping inside the “skin” of
another form of life,….and suddenly you realize and know from inside the truth
of each being in the circle and it’s intimate relationship with other
beings.
Not from outside looking upon, you are inside the life
forms, seeing and being effortlessly part of the interconnected web of
life. It is a felt sense of interconnection rather
than one we know in our left brain/mind….and what a difference it makes! That is the magic. When Fish speaks, we enter the experience of
Fish and know from our felt body and emotional sense…..the Truth of what Fish
shares about swimming in toxic water…breathing the toxins along with the water
…. and having pollution on its scales.
One of us later said, “We seem able to respond more readily
to the realities of other life forms from within our nature beings and inside
the life form we are representing, than we do in our socialized human selves.”
Stepping out of our socialized style of conversation, and
calling on the sacred nature of Life via the directions and the Haudenosaunee
Thanksgiving Prayer, being drummed into the sacred circle, while donning our
masks, stepping through the gateway greeted by Tree into the Council
Circle….all this is a kind of permission to enter a state of being open to Life
in its deepest nature.
B) The Life Forms
Speak:
I am Stream. I’m given birth by the rains and snow. I grow from a tiny trickle to a noisy stream,
to wide rivers and then to the sea.
I am being contaminated and poisoned
by greedy [and irresponsible] humans. I
want humans to know that by assaulting me, you are assaulting an essence that
gives you life and you are assaulting yourself. I need respect and care to keep me pure, healthy, beautiful and
free. My gift and strength which I offer
to humans is flexibility and the power of yielding—not resisting but changing
flow in order to reach one’s destination in spite of obstacles. (Stream, Arden Buck, on left; tree on right)
I am Fish. I breathe water through my scales so clean water is important to
me. Polluted water is very difficult
for me….in fact we fish are so often contaminated that some are not safe for
consumption by other life forms.
I want humans to know they are not
more important than other life forms. We
are all equal. We are all part of an
interdependent world.
I give to
humans the gift of flexibility like fish and like water; I say, move with the
flow, adapt and don’t take so much.
(Fish, Marianne Ousler)
I
am Beaver. What I bring is change to
streams and canyons, over long time, making meadows and new kinds of forests
become home to many creatures and plants. It takes a lot of chewing to
make a meadow.
Humans: we want you to know how
interconnected we all are. Trust that nature does not need to be altered
nor undone. Be patient and share with us.
With humans, we wish to share
knowledge that free flowing water is a necessary blessing, trust in how nature
has worked things out, and understanding that we millions of interconnected,
diverse beings know more than any one or one hundred humans know.
Harry Albert (Beaver)
Tree on left; Beaver on right..
I am Fox. I live in meadows, forests and streams. I get along and last better than most other creatures with human beings,
because I can share their yards, gardens and porches.
I want humans to know that we are
all inter-connected. We all need the
forests, rivers, meadows and oceans. Human beings must do whatever they can to help all of us live a healthy
life…with clean air, water. I give the
gift of the beauty of the natural world to humans.
Deb Grove (Fox)
I am Honey Bee. I pollinate all our food for creatures and for human beings. I am one organism among a thousand individual
bees and together we are also one [being].
To humans I say: the new plants and chemicals you use are
harming us.
You can learn from us the value of
working together – what thousands of individuals can do working as one. We want you to see and understand the harm
your ways are causing us and that you do the same harm to yourselves that you
do to us.
Jeff Davies (Honey Bee)
I am Crow (caw caw)
I live anywhere and everywhere, in
the air. Cars kills animals and they
become my food. I love to PLAY, to fly and laugh all day in the
sky.
I see so many vast changes with my
excellent vision and hear stories on the winds. I see Fracking, warming
of the Earth, Forest Fires and floods -- and the air in places is filthy
and the water tastes terrible.
To you Human Allies I say, use your voices and wake the
others up. We crows talk among ourselves constantly – please do the same
as we do.
Oak Chezar (Crow)
I am Tree and I am Forest. We are one and the same. I delight in the gentle breeze as it plays
through my branches and gives me the opportunity to move.
I give the gift of stepping into the
web of life, the sense of interconnectedness as an important place from which
to address problems which plague humans. Step out of your problem & into the space we offer from which to see
the whole. We trees hold that sense of fullness of living interconnection and
offer it to humans.
Bonnie Sundance (Tree) (see photos above)
I am Spider. I am many sizes from very small to
large. I am seeing more people be able
to appreciate us and our place in life.
I offer you my ability to listen patiently. Bring your fears to me and other nature
beings and confront them in our company. I listen.
I offer you the protection of biodiversity and knowing we
can all survive together.
Coco Gordon (Spider)
I am Frog. I live by a pond.
Water enters my body through my skin. I am not happy when there is pollution in my
water. I also worry that with the drought
that my pond will dry up. I can’t hop
very far so where will I go?
I ask humans to please stop polluting the water where I
live. I am important to the web of
life. I eat bugs. I am eaten by other
beings. I may be small but I provide
sustenance and keep the mosquito population under control.
Debbie Davies (Frog)
I am an Aquatic
Bird.
Scott B. as Bird & Drummer
I live in both the water
and on the land. I am grateful to be of
the air and of the water …to expand my being into the endless sky and to find
sanctuary in the pulse of the waves.
The once clear sky, which allowed us to see for miles, is
now filled with a plethora of pollutants which hurt all life and make it hard
for us to breathe and to travel freely the way we used to do.
We Aquatic Birds would like the bipedal ones to simply
realize our importance to them and their importance to us, that we are only
different by form.
We need human ones to care for the air and water so that we
can continue to support the biodiversity of life.
Scott B. (Aquatic Bird)
I am Whale
Karen Judd (Whale)
Coming: Kelly LoGiudici (Praying Mantis)
NEXT COUNCIL OF ALL BEINGS:
will be held in 2016
To Express Interest: go to Contact Us and put Council 2016 in comments
http://our-sacred-earth.org/contact_us.aspx