New Mexico
#NativeAmericanHeritageDay
November 26, 2021“Native Americans are the keepers of traditions and defenders of our natural resources. This Native American Heritage Day, I honor our culture and our ancestors. At the Interior, we will continue to include Indigenous knowledge as we protect our lands for future generations.”
-Secretary Deb Haaland, 54th Secretary of the Interior, 35th generation New Mexican, Pueblo of Laguna Tribe
[Image: Lakota Man/Twitter]
‘That’s what gods do, they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make songs for generations to come.’ -Anthony Doerr ‘Cloud Cuckoo Land’, p.439
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PCSD
“We’re still in the genocide. It’s still happening; we’re still doing it.”
Why?
We need to look at our “individual power in relation to the world.” -Rose
Rilke: “…blessed our those who stood quietly in the rain. Theirs shall be the harvest; for them the fruits. They will outlast pomp and power, whose meaning and structures will crumble. When all else is exhausted and bled of purpose, they will lift their hands, they have survived.”
Mixed-media artist Rose B. Simpson lives and works from her home at Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico.
(This piece was commissioned for the the Conspire conference, Center for Action and Contemplation, in New Mexico.)
https://www.rosebsimpson.com/about
[Rose B. Simpson, Holding it Together (detail), 2016, sculpture]
Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ
All our relations
The Last Archive
Jill Lepore, historian and Harvard professor
“Indigenous paradigm, a paradigm about relationships–all things are kin, rocks the skies, trees, family…”
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-last-archive/id1506207997?i=1000540005084
LATIMES
“The Indigenous Serrano Language Was All But Gone, This Man is Resurrecting It.”
When Ernest Siva was a boy on the Morongo Reservation in Riverside County, he listened to the music and stories of his ancestors, who had lived in Southern California long before the land was called by that name.
He recalls running around a ceremonial fire on the reservation at age 5 as a weeklong ceremony honoring those who had died the previous year culminated with the burning of images in their likeness. Dollar bills and coins were thrown into the fire in tribute as tribal elders sang songs reserved for special occasions. Siva and his cousin chased after the singed money that fluttered out of the flames, largely ignoring the traditional lyrics in the background.
The specific words and rhythms are now distant memories for the 84-year-old Siva, a Cahuilla/Serrano Native American.
Siva is working to change that. For the last 25 years, the Banning resident has been a tribal historian with the Morongo Band of Mission Indians.
CIVIL EATS
In the face of climate change and persistent droughts, a growing number of people from Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico and elsewhere are adopting the traditional farming practice.
Historic Zuni waffle gardens, circa 1919. (Photo courtesy of Kirk Bemis)
“It’s going to be difficult, but in the meantime, we still have to do what we can to find ways to adapt and live with it. And I think that the waffle gardens are one tool for us to make it through.”
(The) hope is for every household within the Zuni village to have a backyard garden, and that such a shift could cut a family’s need to shop for groceries in half.
“A small, 4-by-8 [foot] garden will get you a good four to five buckets full of corn, which is not enough to completely live off, but enough to feed our families, survive, and carry out our traditions.” He also thinks it’s important for the Zuni people to lessen dependence on grocery stores, which the pandemic showed are vulnerable to supply chain disruptions.
The Resurgence of Waffle Gardens Is Helping Indigenous Farmers Grow Food with Less Water
Maria Popova
The Marginalian
“Ever since we climbed down from the trees, we have been looking up to them to understand ourselves and our place in the universe. “Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree,” Hermann Hesse wrote a century ago in his sublime sylvan love letter, affirming that “when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.”
Centuries, millennia before Hesse — before Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Prize for her courageously enacted conviction that “a tree is a little bit of the future,” before scientists uncovered the astonishing language of trees, before Western artists saw in tree silhouettes a Rorschach test for what we are — the indigenous artists and storytellers of the Gond tribe in central India have been reverencing the secret lives of trees as portals into the inner life of nature, into the wildness of our own nature, into a supra-natural universe of myth and magic.”
The Secret Life of Trees: Stunning Sylvan Drawings by Indigenous Artists Based on Indian Mythology
LoVe & Renewal
April 26, 2021P
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M O O N
This can manifest as a difficult moon as aspects of wanting more freedom to move forward meet with limiting influences and hard work.
Resiliency and flexibility are very helpful during this time especially around unexpected changes, events, reversals and decisions. Be careful with being impulsive.
Put some practical thought into any important choices around changing or adjusting anything major in your life. Take this opportunity to tap into your own wisdom as well as to find a new courage for those changes you do want to make.
You may experience an inner tension that brings up any imbalance you feel around time – how you spend it, how you use your energy etc.
Use this full moon time to take an inventory of what you value so you can set intentions and get support around what is most important to you. We are all ready to move on, to go forward and experience more freedom.
And yet we are being pulled back to take yet another look at what needs to change, to be healed and to be released.
So, be patient, ask what can be healed, and do the work so you can move into the future from a solid and practical foundation and not one built on impulsive behavior. ~Lena
Power Path
thepowerpath.com
The full Moon in Scorpio is Monday, April 26 at 9:33 PM Mountain Daylight Time
🖤
April 21, 2021
Father Richard Rohr wrote this prayer yesterday after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of the murder of George Floyd. Richard and the Daily Meditations editorial team invite you to pray these words, along with your own, as your contemplative practice today.
Center for Action and Contemplation
Albuquerque, New Mexico
We are still wounding.
November 18, 2020
From the ACLU:
You may have heard “Come and Get Your Love,” but did you know that Redbone’s “We Were All Wounded at Wounded Knee” was banned by several radio stations in the ’70s? This Native American Heritage Month, we honor the group.
Democracy persists.
And just because I played it on the radio so many times, here’s Redbone performing on the Midnight Special in 1974. ‘Come and Get Your Love’ peaked at #5 on The Billboard Hot 100 chart and spent 18 weeks in the Top 40. It landed as the fourth-most popular song on the Hot 100 for 1974. -dayle :)
Debra Anne Haaland (born December 2, 1960) is an American politician serving as the U.S. Representative from New Mexico’s 1st congressional district. The district includes most of Albuquerque along with most of its suburbs. Haaland is a former leader of the Democratic Party of New Mexico. Sharice Davids and Haaland are the first two Native American women elected to the U.S. Congress. Haaland is a member of the Laguna Pueblo people. [wikipedia]
The Hill
by, Rebecca Beitsch
The Biden transition team is in the process of vetting Rep. Haaland for the Interior secretary post.
If tapped by President-elect Joe Biden, Haaland’s nomination would be historic, making her the first Native American Cabinet secretary, overseeing an agency with vast responsibility over tribal issues and public lands.
More than half of the president-elect’s transition team is comprised of women and nearly half of its members are people of color; Biden has also vowed that his new Cabinet and administration will be very diverse and “look like America.”
‘Spiritual questions are more important now than ever.’ -Harari
April 9, 2019
Fr. Richard Rohr: ‘My colleague and Episcopal priest Cynthia Bourgeault writes about this in her book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene:’
Today, within the mainstream of Christian sacramental practice we have indeed forgotten much of what our wisdom forebears once knew. Most Christians are still familiar with anointing only in its most stark and literal form, as the sacrament of “extreme unction,” administered shortly before physical death. While the ceremonial use of anointing for healing is on the increase (and this is a positive trend), even within these healing circles most people are unaware of the tightly interwoven threads that connect this action, through Mary Magdalene, to redemptive love and rebirth into fullness of being. They would be astonished to discover that anointing has not only something but everything to do with bridal mysticism and that it is not physical death but “dying before you die” that is its primary field of reference. To reclaim anointing in its original context would make it the sacramental centerpiece of a whole new vision of Christianity based on spiritual transformation and the alchemy of love.
Center for Action and Contemplation
March 28-31
‘The quantum, the subatomic, the elemental, and the very minerals of the earth.
The very waters that fall upon the earth, run through our rivers, our bodies, and fill our oceans.
The plants, the trees, all living and growing networks that root into this earth.
The animals in our skies, in our oceans, on the land, all creatures great and small.
Human beings: every race, nationality, status, equality, or gender–ALL human bodies.
The angels and the spirits, those that move in the unseen realms and in other dimensions.
The great planetary bodies, the galaxies, and the whole cosmic mystery.’
God loves things by becoming them. -Richard Rohr
No despair of our can alter the reality of things, nor stain the joy of the cosmic dance, which is always there.
-Thomas Merton, 1915-1968
Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of.
-G.K. Cheserton
“Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both eh hiding place and revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and cals seeing ‘contemplation.'”
-Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ
“Have I not told you that I am in the spirit as the spirit is in me? It is man who sees only poverty, for he sees with the eyes of the master of the world. But where man sees poverty, the spirit sees only abundance. What the spirit sees, I see, and what I see the spirit sees, and what the spirit sees, is.” -The Gospel of Thomas
For Richard Rohr, there are six simple claims that order the fullness of his finest book “The Universal Christ: How A Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For, and Believe.”
- Christ is not Jesus’ last name. It’s a word used by the ancients to talk about the anointed one, and the Reality and flow of love in the universe found from the very beginning of time.
- We might then “accept being accepted”– that we are fully loved and embraced as we are, not because of who we are or what we do.
- See Christ in every thing. And not just fun, ecstatic parts of life — but in the depths of grief and pain as well.
- Start with original goodness. Why do Christians so often talk about “original sin?” It’s not even in the Bible. And in fact, the Bible starts with a story about how every thing and every one is good, good, good, and very good.
- Love is the meaning — it’s the underlying energy that powers the universe and available to each and every one of us as a divine flow.
- And, a sacred wholeness, which includes even the negative aspects of life’s way — typified in the Christian story as the cross.
“Jesus of the People”, artist Janet McKenzie
The Christ Mystery is indeed “the way, the truth, and the life,” but this is not about a religion or group one can join (which is how we have heard it), but rather a mystery of Incarnation that can be experienced by all, and in a million different ways.
-Richard Rohr, Oneing
“I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have every had.” -D.H. Lawrence
