by Jonathan Merritt
Portland, OR

Posted  from an article at the Sacred Fire Magazine

 
Photo by Craig Sandler

All spiritual traditions arise from the land.

For weeks, this line plagues me.  Finally, I go outside on an unseasonably warm February day.  I sit beside a small fire and I ask the land, “What does this mean?”

I hear the birds—crows, robins, wrens, chickadees, sparrows, Stellar’s jays—each singing in its own language.  I hear the wind whispering through the cedars and pines, ringing the chimes that hang by my door.  I hear squirrels chittering in the high branches and the quiet buzz of box elder beetles.  I hear the low roar of the freeway two miles away and the explosive passing of a jet.  I hear a neighbor’s door open and human voices, distant, indecipherable. 

I dream a little, gazing at the small flame, and in my dreaming I hear the land.  The land says, “All this arises from me and belongs to me.  Everything is born and spun from me, grows and lives on me and will return to me to be reformed and reborn.  With Wind and Fire and Rain I call everything into Life.  Listen, Life is speaking to you in ten thousand ways.”   I make an offering of tobacco in a circle around me and breathe tobacco into the wind.  I drink the sweet water the land provides and feel the sun warm on my back.  My thought flies to the original peoples, how they inhabited every land from the Siberian tundra to the Amazon rainforests, the Pacific islands to the American plains, the African deserts to the Himalayans.  How could they survive and thrive, lacking fur and fang, claw and wing, except by listening to and living in intimate connection with the land?

All indigenous ancestral traditions are filled with stories of how the gods came and taught them how to make shelter and clothing, how to make the proper offerings to maintain their relationships with the plants and animals, with the weather beings, with the land itself.  To read the full article, click here.

VTH Host note:  Thanks, Jonathan for listening so intently, and for telling us the stories you hear.

Through the Sacred Fire Magazine's beautifully illustrated interviews, articles, essays, poetry and art, readers re-discover a worldview that offers solid footing in troubled times. Sacred Fire re-awakens the indigenous heart in all of us, so we can find healing, create loving relationships and build sustainable communities that honor and celebrate the Divine energies alive and at play in the world.