The Sacred Principle Project

When did we split from the sacred? By "we" I mean the "Western", White, Anglo-Saxon, Judeo-Christian peoples. My people, my ancestry.  In my time living close to and learning about Indigenous traditions especially in the Andes of Peru, I came to wonder: where and when was my lineage Indigenous? We are all from somewhere originally, we all were native to someplace at sometime, right? So when did my family lose our Indigeneity?  At first I thought, it was when we left the land, that the physical settling on one piece of land and staying in one place generation after generation was the characteristic of Indigeneity. Which I do not have as my ancestors left their homelands in the 1600s and early 1900s, I grew up as a settler/colonist/invader on Native American lands, and I have moved to several countries none of which match my native ethnic heritage. But I came to realize that it is not about place itself, it is about mentality. Our relationship to the place. And that ...

I like quiet mornings when I am the only one up. I open the blinds and spread out my yoga mat between legos and crayons. If I am feeling inspired, I light a candle or put on the diffuser with an essential oil. My sacred time.  For several years, I have been doing the videos of Sarah Beth Yoga . In her most recent video, she shared a message that resonated with this project in a deep way. In between child's pose and downward dog, inhale and exhale, she reminded us to "find the balance between the strong and the calm." Not just referring to muscles when she suggests we ask ourselves, "where else can I soften?", she connects the physical with the emotional, the balance between masculine and feminine, the calm in the chaos.  And in a society dominanted by masculine energy, she challenges yogis to "imagine for a moment, what would your world be like if you embraced the soft, celebrated the fluid, the intuition, the gentle?" Aha! The sacred principle manifes...

I have never seen a moonset until this morning. Opening the window to greet the day when - gasp - the pink sky was filled with the full moon.  I laughed out loud at my own surprise. I am not sure what direction I was facing but I definitely never expected to see the moon there, in the morning!  I do not understand orbits or revolutions, I do not know why sometimes the moon is halfway in the sky at noon and other times rises above the sea at dusk. But sometimes the not knowing is the most beautiful part of it all, because then we are open to surprises.  As the moon slowly set over the hills, glowing in a gold-pink from the sunrise opposite, I wondered who else was watching this phenomenon. Who else noticed the moon was not where we thought she would be? Who else stopped in their tracks and stood watching, pausing their morning for this sacred moment? And, who out there actually knew this would happen, and prepared camera and blanket, to document the colorful moonset? I won...

What happens when we make vows to ourselves and our community to live with the intention of the welfare of all beings? Joanna Macy connects Buddhism, ecology, systems theory and activism in her workshops on "The Work that Reconnects". Written into book form along with Dr. Chris Johnstone , Active Hope lays out the key elements for moving through this spiral. Worthy of reflection and intention in what they call a "study-action group", the book provides paradigm-shifting concepts and exercises to pull people together in deeper commitment to the work to confront the difficulties we face on the world, what they call "The Great Turning".  They describe this work as a spiral: the circle that goes around and around, but gets deeper and wider each time. You repeat but you never duplicate. This practice is about coming from gratitude; honoring our pain; seeing with new eyes; and going forth. Based in psychology, there are deep emotional aspects of this work, but t...

 We are how we eat. I am not talking about fast or slow, sitting or standing.  I am not even talking about the proportions of proteins and vegetables, sugars and carbohydrates -- although this is part of it, of course.  I am talking about how we eat. Conscious, ethical, principled eating.  If we practice principled eating, we will be a principled society.  We will consider the farm laborers, their working conditions, health and wellbeing, and fair pay. We would revere farmers for their god-like ability to bring forth creation season after season. All the hands and all the expertise that go into bringing food to life, and to our tables, would be appreciated, not exploited. We will hold pigs and cows in high esteem as part of the web of life. We will seek to be in relationship to our food, understanding its nourishing value, not just filling our mouths and bellies. Nothing would suffer for our gain, because we would understand that any suffering is our own sufferi...

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...