Peace with Earth
There was a moment today in the show on
All My Relations when I felt very connected to
Timberly, the host of
New Morning. At the end of an interview with Tiokasin Ghosthorse, she asked him to play his flute. As he did, the camera angle let us see her listening in the background, leaning into the melody with her eyes closed. Music does have that ability to bring us together and to remind us of our connections through sound and tradition.
Before he began playing, this Lakota Indian repeated something he'd said earlier in the interview. Native American spirituality is about peace
with Earth, rather than peace
on Earth. I found that just a wonderful distinction. Too often throughout history, humans have assumed that we have the right to subjugate the things of the Earth—whether animals we take for food, mountains we mine for minerals, or water we divert for our irrigation channels. We live on the Earth, but not comfortably and respectfully with it.
Peace with Earth is about recognizing that humans are just one part of a web connecting all parts of the Creation. We are certainly not the most important part (arguably, that might be the sun), and we cannot separate ourselves from the others, no matter how hard we try. The web is multidimensional—visible and invisible. And it is multidirectional. In traditional ceremonies, Native peoples call on the directions: east, south, west, north, above, below, within, and now. The latter is where we learn to be fully present and aware of what is happening to us.
Native peoples are masters at living in the present—which I felt while listening to Tiokasin Ghosthorse's music—but they also live into the future. A basic spiritual practice is to make all decisions considering how they might affect the next seven generations. So today I'm wondering: How will what I am doing right now affect those who are living here 70-100 years from now? It's hard to even imagine what the world will be like then—but I know that if I don't recycle, and if I don't thank my representatives in Congress for helping to save the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, and if don't care about the famine in Niger, then it could be a lot worse off then than it is today.