Community Conversation: Spiritual Heaven and Spiritual Earth

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Spiritual Earth

• When I look at my Shield, I can see it as a diagram of Spiritual Earth that is me, that I am. 
• From JiMi Tao in the Glossary, pg. 113:  Spiritual Earth is “Earth embodied with Allowance and Acceptance of the Emotions of Joyful Beautiful Union.
• I remember a teaching that the Earth is the quality of Love.  Earth’s purpose is to experience life of Love, and we are made of and are part of the Trinities -- TO Love, OF Love, FOR Love, and FROM Love.  These four Trinities are part of the Four Fold Way, a process that allows us to make sense of our lives as our Mental Bodies think, our Physical Bodies sense, our Emotional Bodies feel and we are allowed to recognize that there are many learning modalities and ways to experience ourselves and our world and these ways can help us come out of chaos and move into cooperation and cocreation.  This is the work of Love, and as we learn who we are, we evolve our Acceptance and Allowance of the journeys of others, too. 
• I am the world, and the world is me-like/like-and this is true for All Being.  Spiritual Earth is Love evolving through US living in and through all our bodies—Mental, Physical, Emotional, Etheric, Cosmic.  
• In my contemplation of Spiritual Earth, I came to understand Cherishment as foundational for Spiritual Earth.  I read about Cherishment in JiMi’s words in the Glossary:  “Mystery begins in Graceful Cherishment.  Mystery holds firm all forms of inner Matter, both Divine and Human Body,” and, “Cruelty’s highest potential is Cherishment. . . . Cherishment is the Vehicle from which Love is born . . . is the thing that connects us in generosity, to all life, all bodies, where I am the breath of the wind, the Wave of the Universe, where we’re all one wave together.  When we cherish each other, we live between love and loving. We can sit and allow the fullness of Presence as Cherishment, we will ascend . . . . we gain the health of being.”  
• This is what integrated in me:  Divine Source in Generosity creates all of Creation and Cherishes all of Creation, accepting and allowing All Being to experience life in all its fullness, trusting the process to work through evolution always back to REMEMBERING OUR ONENESS, because LOVE IS ALL THERE IS.  Generosity, Cherishment, Acceptance and Allowance are key components of Being, and all Being is Spiritual Earth.  I am Spiritual Earth as DivineHumanBeingInLove, as Enspirited Matter and Enmattered Spirit. The Being of the Earth, of the Land, is sacred and spiritual Being and so calls to us, invites us to be in sacred spiritual relationship, as we are reflections of each other, part of each other, and part of a bigger whole together. 
• Spiritual Earth, I believe, is Love Being and Becoming—a dynamic (not static) movement—Wave of Matter and Wave of the Universe—that is not a “conglomeration of things” but consists of ordered, interwoven and interdependent processes that follow a Natural Order or underlying principle in a harmonious system of relationships of “energy quantums.” (combining language of both JiMi Tao and  Imre von Soos)  Spiritual Earth is the process of a multitude of holons in relationships in what von Soos calls an Integrarchic System.  I love this word because integration is how I think, sense, and feel my life experience.  
• So, when I create prayer sticks, I am bringing together many holons of physical forms, thought forms, prayer forms, emotional forms into a bigger holon that then is planted in the dirt and sends out through the wind and interactions with grasses and people and the land, the parts of me infused in my creations, and they join with other dynamic prayer sticks to dance together on the lands in which they now live.  When we come together with others and clear land, pray, drum, sing, dance, walk the land, plant the prayer sticks, we are the dynamism of Cherishment, forming new relationships with each other, with the land, with the Beings that live there, with the air, with the neighbors, etc. forming a new holon that connects with, becomes, allows, and accepts even bigger, more encompassing relationships. I see many torus loops of each holon joining together into bigger loops and joining ultimately with the torus loop of the planet and making that connection of DivineHumanBeing, connecting all Spiritual Earth and Spiritual Heaven.  Spiritual Earth a Vehicle of me, us, we—the dynamic process of living Love, re-membering and re-membering, and returning to our Source in Universal Oneness.  

 Prayer Stick Painting

• The beads represent all the components—the beings—the holons—that make up the whole, and together become part of a bigger whole. 
• The Elements are all present in my prayer stick.  The feathers represent and play with AIR.  The orange, red and yellow bead is the Sun representing FIRE.  The blue bead with the wave is of course WATER.  The green bead with plants and the Torus Loop represents EARTH—the Element and the planet.
• The top bead has a picture of the Butterfly Nebula.  I chose this to represent the connection to the heavens, the cosmos, and to being part of the Universe.  I like the butterfly as a being that goes through transmutation, evolving from caterpillar to butterfly in a lifetime.  I like knowing the prayers going forth keep going throughout the Universe. 
• The golden spiraling bead represents to me fractals spiraling into more inclusive and bigger and encompassing holons in the spiral pathway we all walk. The spiral of the beads on the stick also depicts the spiraling dynamic nature of our Being, our path, our movement in the Universe. 
• The pink bead says Cherishment, for I find Cherishment of Source, the Creator, for Creation to be a foundation of all existence, a reason for all Allowance and Acceptance, the comfort to my Soul, a seed of Spiritual nature of all Creation. 
• The blue bead holds the Web of Life, of Light, the web that holds us all in our ONENESS.  The strings of the web are like/like the strings holding the beads and connecting them to the stick. We are connected by heartstrings. 
• The pink bead with the wavy lines represents to me the Wave of Matter that we are, and the Wave of the Universe. We are resonant beings that resonate our beingness to each other just like sound waves, light waves, radio waves, etc. 
• The yellow bead with many hands represents all the people who came together to make, to bless, and to set these prayer sticks in Spiritual Earth holding Sacred Space. 
• The stick itself is like the Reed, connecting Heaven and Earth, like the orange arrows of Powerful Thoughts that become Charitable Ideas for Compassionate Action. 
• I added words—Qualities—that were key to my understanding Spiritual Earth, and notes of music to denote the Universal Song being sung by the prayer sticks in the grasses, in our homes, in the Earth and by all of us through the making, dancing, doing skits, clearing land, drumming, singing, planting prayer sticks and poles, spreading cornmeal and smoke and water, praying, sharing in this ever-present and expanding Dance of Creation.  

Spiritual Earth Contemplation

7/31/2024

Part I Ceremony, Painting, Ten-dimensional Medicine Wheel

Part II Bodies: Physical, Mental and Emotional

Part III Freedom: Growing a New Culture

Part IV Time and Space

Part I Ceremony, Painting, Ten-dimensional Medicine Wheel

We made prayer sticks for our Land Clearing ceremony in the West, as well as the healing and restoration of land in the east and the west, and the space of all our homes. I experience Ceremony as shared action born of reverence, often taking extensive and precise planning as a way of focusing body, heart and mind to gather energies to address a specific intention, question or need. Ceremony is a conversation inLove with all the earth’s elements, and in communion with Guides, Angels, Archangels and Teachers, and all participants, all who are present with each other. This conversation honors Spiritual Earth as all the elements of our lives, our bodies, the planet and cosmos, and honoring Spiritual Heaven as the wellspring of Love, intention and creative inspiration which supports and guides us. These actions in communion allow us to see and experience something that changes our being as we move in ceremonial time and space, in this way making connections that heal, that are in harmony, that move as Divine InLove. Ceremony has its own timing that comes in silence, through conscious awareness, expressed in movement, action, breath, stillness. This sacred time is held within linear time like within a bowl, as it honors all cycles – it aligns inner movement and cycle with outer movement and cycle.

Ceremonial space is boundaried and connected in all directions, and all dimensions. The boundary is set in agreement with all participants, all the elements, such as the trees, the sky and clouds, the posts, the stones, the animals. The boundary is held within and without, a boundary of respect and honoring. We honor each being’s space and timing.

In ceremony, Cherishment extends to all that is - dirt, sky, trees, water, air. As I cherish the earth and her beings, I am cherished. We are each and all cherished by the same Source within us – within me, within the Sun, within each flower and each drop of water. In Cherishment we care for each other, and we teach each other through our ways of being- through our shapes, our movements, our interests, our colors, our scents, our energies, our qualities. We teach each other that we are each other’s reflections, this is the intimacy we share. We are all made of Love, as we are the qualities of Love; we are all inLove. In ceremony, this becomes a very intentional, focused conversation. And in life as ceremony, it is a forever conversation. “Soul Nature” - Soul is experienced within, and Nature as often experienced without; yet, as they reflect each other, they are in essence the same.  We find we ARE Nature, and Soul lives within and without, there is no separation. And Nature is within and without. We ARE Spiritual Earth.

Through Ceremony, all cycles are supported, nourished and do flourish through our conscious awareness, in humility, gratitude, and cherishment, when we allow Ego and Soul to find balance. If we do not find Ego/Soul Unity, to allow for conscious awareness of our participation and belonging, Earth cannot flourish - and in many ways, this is happening now. We see how lack of awareness of the Whole (as in colonialism, western mind, callous disregard of other beings, etc.)  has led to breakdowns in human culture and changes in the cycles of earth herself such as climate change. Ceremony supports the flourishing of the highest potential of Earth and Humanity, as One.

This relates to the practice of silence. In silence there is a gift given, a gift that may or may not always be recognized or seen or understood, but as we open ourselves to this practice, we discover the gift. As we walk with the beings of the earth in silence, letting Ego’s opinions and conceptions fall way, we see the simple truth that this is our shared home, and we all share dreams of nourishment, balance, ease, happiness, playfulness. We all share needs and concerns and limitations. We are each and all part of each other in this way, and we consciously choose to be here together in this time and space, to give and receive as part of our essential way of being, of Oneness. What I experience as the ways of Soul inside me, are the same as the colors of the wind, the sap of the tree, the deer in the field, ripples of stream water.  In silence I am present to this, inPresence.

The making of prayer sticks, all the preparations and travel for ceremony, the days of land claiming and clearing, the setting of the posts, the setting of the prayer sticks, tying the feathers, the times of conversation, skits, music, Dance of Creation, shared meals - these all made up ceremony. My painting dreams about all these parts, beginning with how we began, making the prayer sticks. 

The segments of my Spiritual Earth painting

0. Empty space in the center. The space, like in the center of the bamboo, is the center of the painting. This is the place of silence and no-thing. It is the heart of every Being, and the emptiness from which we are all birthed. This is the center of the Ten-dimensional Medicine Wheel and the center of each moment of time, where a new world is birthed inLove. I see the center as the heart. I see the birth of each moment as a spiral moving out from the Void. 

1. Seeds.  Bamboo seeds, seeds of the rosewood tree from which the prayer stick beads are made, seeds of the hemp from which the twine is made. And a needle to begin the beading process. 

2. Eggs in their nest, where tiny birds will crack shells open, to birth themselves, grow, thrive, and eventually offer the gift of their feathers.

3. The bee and the beeswax made from the substance of her body. 

4. The human embryo who begins life shaped like a seed, who will be birthed to grow as a being who will one day make prayer feathers and walk the ten-dimensional Medicine Wheel.

5. The initial sprouts of bamboo, hemp and rosewood, sending roots down into earth, allowing for growth upward to begin.

6. The fully growing plants: bamboo, rosewood, hemp, along with the spiral of the twine.

7. The small feathers placed in a single bead for the top of the prayer stick. 

8. Waters of the earth – ocean, rain, snow, the water of life of all beings, including plants, humans, birds

9. Ceremonialists in Land Clearing Ceremony walking the boundary, setting the prayer sticks, drumming, chanting, praying fluting, inPresence. 

10. The land we travel in and live in, in Harmony, Awe and Wonder. Earth’s Beauty: Desert, mountains, river, lake, meadow, river, sunrise, hawk above.

11. The flowers of the hemp, rosewood and bamboo that create new seed for the next cycle.

12. Parrot clan flying in freedom.

13. The Ear of the DivineHumanBeing that listens for and hears what is needed.

14. The fully formed feathers of Parrot, Hawk, Crow and Turkey, offering their Qualities inHarmony

15. The feet of the DivineHumanBeing that hold us steady and connected to the earth taking steps in Unity with all Being.

16. The hands with which we reverently hold the light of all Being. And it is the flame we use to melt the wax, binding our hearts together.

· The segments of the painting are in the shape of the Ten-dimensional Medicine Wheel. The colors of each segment are the colors of the Threads of Conscious Awareness from 1-12. (In segments 13-16 the colors repeat the colors of threads 4-7). The segments spiral from center moving outward.  Each group of 4 segments is a cycle or trinity. (See Thread of Conscious Awareness by JiMi Tao)

· Outside the circle are cosmic beings and larger cycles: sun, moon, stars, constellations, and galaxies, in which we are all held.  

· Even though each segment is boundaried, and the full circle is boundaried like earth in space, there is really no end to the ways the cycles continue to move. The emptiness where everything is birthed is also where everything returns for rebirth. The spiral becomes the shape of a torus loop, moving out and returning. Imagine the center spiral moving out toward you, then opening out and bending, to go behind the image and come through the center again. Like looking at a torus loop from above. See also the Moon Snail shell, it also has a spiraling center within a torus loop.

All cycles are supported, nourished and flourish through our conscious awareness, in humility, gratitude, and cherishment, when we allow Ego and Soul to find balance. If we do not find Ego/Soul Unity, to allow for conscious awareness of our participation and belonging, Earth cannot flourish - and in many ways, this is happening now. We see how lack of awareness of the Whole (as in colonialism, western mind, callous disregard of other beings, etc.)  has led to breakdowns in human culture and changes in the cycles of earth herself such as climate change. 

Ceremony supports the flourishing of the highest potential of Earth and Humanity, as One.

Part II Bodies

We are part of Spiritual Earth through cycles, and ceremony focuses our awareness of cycles – seasons, moon cycles, planetary cycles, cycles of each day and each hour, cycles of human growth. We join in cycles as we joyfully experience all that moves in circles in our own bodies, such as the cycle of our breath, the cycle of our heart pumping blood throughout our body, the moon cycles of hormones and reproduction, the cycles of sleeping and waking, of eating digestion and elimination, the cycle of water as it moves through us. We learn through observation, through science, of the cycles of atoms and subatomic particles, of the orbits of earth, planets and greater revolutions throughout the Universe. As we consciously join through our own celebration in Beauty and Joy, we are conscious of our belonging. We are all a part of All That Is.

I consider how my physical body is my intimate connection with Spiritual Earth.

I notice that all practices of exercise and movement, such as walking, Pilates, Yoga, Qi Gong, Authentic Movement, bring me close into conscious awareness of my body and all the ways it feels, connects, works. Sensations of joints, muscles, bones, organs, and how these support and move with each other as I breath, contract, expand, stretch, relax. These are the ways of all beings of the earth, and of Spiritual Earth. Each being with its signature movement such as crawling, prancing, flying, rolling, waving, shining, hopping, is reflected in my own physical body. This seems extraordinary. And there is no separation from emotional and mental bodies which also roll, wave, crawl, hop, shine, prance and fly. All these ways of being, and many others, happen together physically, mentally and emotionally. And seeing these ways outside of me helps me to know them as also within myself.  They are the gift of reflection within the parts of One Being.

For example, plants teach me about surrendering down to the ground, to dirt, to the rootedness which then supports spiraling, reaching, growing, ascending, and transforming light into my own physical matter. The light of insight and vision becomes me, changes my behavior, my actions, as my body itself changes, and my feelings change. This is a way that plants teach me through reflection.

Part III Freedom: Growing a New Culture

A Queer Life 

An inner process appeared as I was painting and contemplating Spiritual Earth, and learning about the Ten-dimensional Medicine Wheel, about my teaching of Earth First, about Sacred Space and Sacred Time, my soul work. The inner process at first it seemed separate from the Spiritual Earth contemplation, but it turns out everything is related and weaves together.  And that is Spiritual Earth.

It began with a friend (like me, a lesbian who has been out throughout her adult life) telling me of an experience where she remembered something significant in childhood she had never shared before. This started me thinking about similar memories I had hidden away, and never really made sense of before -- memories having to do with confusion, not about sexuality, but about gender. None of these experiences from childhood had sense to me at all, and no one could ever explain them. What felt most significant was I knew then that I could never talk about to anyone, and I didn't. Because of this, early on, I began to feel like there was no authentic place for me, that my inner being was an impossibility. 

As I remembered my own confusions and how they have challenged me my whole life, I thought of the current generation who has brought these questions out in the open in a big way. And I suddenly opened to so much greater Compassion than before - a huge energetic wave. Within this wave of Compassion for myself and for others, came immense gratitude for the younger people who are determined to look through the veils of gender and sexuality, who seek so much greater freedom than I/we ever allowed ourselves in expression of who they are. They have opened all the questions, not hidden them, so that the questions are here before the whole world, and we cannot avoid them. I started to consider the word "queer" - recognizing that it is not just about sexuality, or about calling myself “lesbian” or being in a gay marriage. It is not just about legal rights, such as marriage rights, although of course this is very important. More fundamentally, it is about allowing “queerness” of myself and others - TO BE.  Allowing myself, to BE who I am in my Authenticity. Allowance of myself to BE meaning Allowance of each of us to BE as we are without judgment, and with and through Compassion. It is about a Self-Acceptance I didn’t know I was missing.  

During our Land Clearing ceremony, I walked with the Outer Circle. It felt good to be with the men walking, chanting, with them as they prayed, dug the holes, set the posts, cleared the outer boundaries. I appreciated the masculine in a very full way, unconditionally, in my heart. And I am deeply grateful for the Allowance and Acceptance, to be with them. I felt like I got to play, to walk, to be in my body, in my physicality, within my natural perspective. And to know, this does not mean I am not part of the Inner Circle. I am deeply grateful as well for all the Inner Circle experiences. Grateful to wear a skirt that opens to the Earth in the Dance, grateful for the delight of making flower bundles, to sit together in the dirt, laughing, to be the silent prayer in center. 

I feel Awe and Wonder to consider cultures where differently gendered people are fully honored and accepted, where being “queer” is offered a place of respect and honor. I am growing that culture in my own heart right now.  I grow it through this gift of Awareness and Acceptance of being just as I am in all my queerness. And inAcceptance and inAllowance of others the same.  I need to grow this culture within me and to grow it with others, for Authenticity requires the inner Freedom to Be. 

And my dream is, with others in the world and our community, to grow a culture through each of our hearts, of Acceptance and Allowance, so we do share Freedom. I know this can happen and is happening. The prayer stick, the Ten-dimensional Medicine Wheel, holds all possibilities of enlightenment. And this Freedom is Spiritual Earth, this is who we are.

Part IV 

Time and Space

In the Dance of Creation we see we are in center and balance, and in center of everything. Though we move through the directions we remain in center always and we are the integration of the all the energies moving through us.

In walking the Ten-dimensional Medicine Wheel, we travel through each petal, and back to center. A spiral rises out of the center of the Ten-dimensional Medicine Wheel connecting Heaven and Earth, connecting us with new dimensions. Wherever we are, we are in this center. The center of the wheel helps us to be conscious of our being in center, which is no-thing. It is a reminder that we are always in no-thing, and always from here, center, we are in relation to the directions of up and down, the vertical plane; we are always in relation to the directions of the horizontal plane: East, South, West, North, and all directions in between along the horizon; we are also in center in the sagittal plane (front and back), as we now become aware of time, as the sagittal plane is the plane in which we walk. Here we see where we have been and where we are going, as we are in the present moment which can see both ways. We are taking a step. We are on a path. We are a being moving along a path, and yet we ARE the path, it lives inside of us as who we are. We ARE the wheel. We are always in center.

From The Starseed Transmissions by Ken Carey,

“Everything you need exists in this present moment, and this moment is all that exists. In a brief flicker you will find all the time in the world. Through that you will contact the Living Information that will guide you with infallible direction. This present moment is the stargate…It is the crack between the worlds, not only the worlds of past and future, but worlds of time and space, spirit and matter, form and being. It is a timeless zone, the gateway through which you will again begin to participate in the adventure of 

creation.” p. 36

This moment is the heart of everything, exists in everything, births everything. It is the heart we share.

“Ear Hear Earth Heart One” (- JiMi Tao, Splendor Song of Creation)

InLove,  Annie