The Sacred Principle Project

I am not indifferent to the swallows who chirp and fly  in the open space at the end of my street.  From my balcony I see their festivities when the world is quiet and the sky is pale But as the day sets in and the sky grows bluer their chirps get quieter or rather - everything else gets louder. The delivery truck unloading teas and tomatoes at the natural food store across the way. The city bus  starting its route down the one-way street.  The sidewalk cafés setting up and filling up  with breakfast visitors. And my own world gets noisy, too. My son calling for me, my almost-audible to-do list in my head, pings of messages on my phone, the hustle and bustle of morning busy-ness.  The swallows carrying on rejoicing their flying grub.  Their high-pitched noise in the background now merely a memory of music.   I often wonder why else hears them? Who else notices, or cares?   I often forget to check at midday as I cross the street or wait for th...

  We go in circles.  We have been here before. It feels familiar, and yet something happened on the way.  The journey is not linear. The progress is not always evident.  The circle is a spiral; sometimes the curve is tighter while other times we spring ahead.  In a Western mindset, we want to cross the finish line. Cross it off our list.  But ancestral traditions, nature, and science teach us that there is no beginning and no end.  The circle is a cycle.  How about instead of seeing ourselves as caught in a loop, we see it as traversing a sacred cycle? What can we do to help ourselves learn from every repetition, note the similarites and differences, the growth and stagnation? What rituals can we put into place to honor each phase? I recently perused two books from radically different fields that each touch on this theme:  The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra and Food and women´s health ( Alimentación y salud femenina )   by Marta Leó...

Imagine a field.  You are standing in the middle of a field.  All around you are stalks of corn. Deep green, eye-high plants in every direction. Soft tassles hang from ears of corn on each plant, swishing gently in the wind. The ground beneath you is hard, brown-grey. The rise and fall of the rows are like waves, up and down, up and down.  Notable is what you do not see: no bugs, no birds, no weeds. Just stalk after stalk of corn, so dense you can hardly walk through.  A tractor planted this corn. Each seed placed in the dirt was identical, property of a multinational corporation and modified genetically. Herbicide and fertilizer is sprayed routinely along the rows.  This corn will be harvested by machines. It will be processed and packed by machines. It will be turned into feed for factory-farmed animals or high-fructose corn syrup for junk food. It will not nourish. It will not be stored for seed for future plantings, because each seed includes a "terminator ...

 A few weeks ago, I participated in the Sacred People, Sacred Earth Global Multi-Faith Day for Climate Action. Hosted by GreenFaith International Network, I felt deeply aligned with the call to action , which begins:  We are united by a fundamental belief that all people, all living things, and the Earth are sacred. It goes on to say that we envision shared reverence, connectedness, flourishing life, just distribution, and healing for people and the planet. The set of demands are for political leaders and government, corporations and financial actors, religious institutions and individuals. From a place of faith and principles and universal values. I signed on and I signed up, aligned in this call.  My "action" was simple: an offering to Mother Earth. Based in the Andean tradition of ofrendas , this act of gratitude and reverence is a ceremony of relationship and interaction with the earth. Taking my Quechua manta to a pine-needle strewn spot in our favorite local park,...

My thought exploration is posited on The Sacred Principle - the tenet of respecting and revering all of nature and creation as sacred as a starting point.  But I have recently been engaged in conversations and reading that are pulling me to explore sacred principles -- those values and beliefs of Indigenous communities and world religions that have universal, timeless wisdom.  So here is a collection of some of those sets of beliefs and value systems that speak to me and feel interconnected. Included here without assigning priority, judgement or analysis.   Andean cosmovision In the Andes, the Inca had three laws: Ama sua. Ama llulla. Ama quella. Do not steal, Do not lie, Do not be lazy. Of course the cosmovision is much more complex, with the concepts of ayni (reciprocity) as a Golden Rule and ayllu (community) as an organizing principle. A deeply held belief of Andean people is that we are all children of Pachamama, Mother Nature, and owe her our deep respect and...

 What would a food system based on the Sacred Principle look like? It may take many names, but the common approach would be that this food system would be built on values.  Four values ground this food system: relationship, reciprocity, respect, and reverence.  In relationship, we would understand that we are interconnected and interdependent with the food we eat. We would be in deep relationship with the land. We would honor our relationship with water - rain, streams, catchment systems. We would be in right relations with our neighbors, practicing trade as mutual aid, community, circular economy, to fulfill needs and flourish together. The principle of relationship would shift us from the center of control and domination to one of fluidity and interconnection in a web of relations.  The type of relationship is one rooted in reciprocity. A mutual give and take, offering and accepting. The land is generous, and provides for us abundantly. And we must care for the lan...

 I guess I have been dancing around this one for awhile, without even knowing.  And my blogs and thoughts so far, while they surely have been influenced by authors, speakers, conversations and podcasts, have been my own journey. Now I see (of course!) I am not the first and I am not alone.  I throw myself head first into Spiritual Ecology .  Perhaps all I have said and all I have to say has already been said better than I could ever say. And yet I must document the resonance I feel with spiritual ecology. I feel found. Here it is: "Surely we need to recognize that there is a direct relationship between our outer, physical, ecological predicament and our forgetfulness of the sacred in creation." wrote Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee in 2010 in his article about spirituality as the solution to the climate crisis. " We cannot redeem our physical environment without restoring our relationship to the sacred." YES.  Remember. Redeem. Restore. Relationship.   Of cou...