white day

Hey Maggie,

It's my thing!  Your healer did our past lives as sisters...in both lives she saw me as an intellectual, separated, watching, analyzing.  I guess I am just this stalker type, sliding silently through life, yet observing and seeking understanding...I remember asking her if I was ever going to get into my body, and she just smiled.

And made me hold a meteorite to prove how otherly I truly am!!

I was thinking about the toad today. I was thinking that it is so strange to come in the house and google the spiritual meaning of things I see.  Yet when I am outside, when I am connected and noticing, that is when I feel most of this Earth.

Then I realized that if I lived in a true community with elders, I would have someone to ask when the animals have a message.

I used to be close to a Cherokee woman. She told me that when the animals do something to draw your attention, there is a message for you.  Then she added that I should consider these encounters the same way as I would try to think about a dream.

So I do...

I have been yoga walking, I think. I read about it, and have been trying to do what the article described. One is supposed to inhale for as many steps as to exhale.  To move slowly and deliberately.  I was doing that today, when I realized I could feel my knee bend, my foot come into contact with the Earth.  I realized, I usually just walk, one more thing I do without presence or focus...


I watched a documentary about Henry VIII. It said he was the most tyrannical, selfish man to ever lead a country.  But it said that the US would not be the country it is without him. He started the religious fervor that led to the Pilgrims leaving Europe, looking for religious freedom - the kind of freedom that meant they had the power to kill those who did not conform, as opposed to being the prey in Europe.

I was thinking about our Irish ancestry a few days ago when we were talking about the lack of healthy in the world.  We have two Irish great-grandmothers, Bridget Mary and Mary Frances. I wonder how much of the violence in our family comes from them.  The British Isles were repeatedly attacked.  That creates a national gene associated with violence. But Henry took manor-lands away from Catholics in Ireland, and gave them to his loyal Protestant followers, which started the problems in Ireland today.  Generations of violence, it had to move into the families, into the homes...became part of the culture...

Now we have families who have been there for hundreds of years, who feel like this is home, warring with people who have been there for thousands of years.  It's the exact same thing that has happened here.   The same people, British monarchs, gave away these lands to colonists, never recognizing the people or the culture here. Now we have land claim trials - people who have been here for hundreds of years are terrified of those who have been here for thousands.  The terror stems from our knowledge that we are wrong...

How do we escape...the ongoing question.

Also read a summary of a new book about slavery, showing that slavery was central to our country right from the beginning.   If I can find it, I need to read it...The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry by Ned and Constance Sublette.  I remember reading a recipe for slave feed, that looked a lot like what I fed to my sheep.  The idea was to feed them as cheaply as possible, and get as much from them as they could.  That may have been when I started considering our relationship to animals...are we morally allowed to own and sentient being?

(http://www.alternet.org/books/new-book-america-was-built-slavery-and-it-was-much-worse-you-might-imagine)

Happy Columbus Day...

Clare  (feeling very white right now)