Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [114]
Piti piti n a rive.
Margaret Trost is the founder and director of the What If? Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing hope and opportunity to impoverished children in Haiti. Working in partnership with a Haitian community, the foundation supports food and education programs that make a difference in the lives of thousands of children. Margaret is the author of On That Day, Everybody Ate: One Woman’s Story of Hope and Possibility in Haiti (Koa Books, 2008). For more information visit www.whatiffoundation.org and www.onthatdayeverybodyate.org.
The Grandmothers Speak
ANN ROSENCRANZ and JYOTI
“We grandmothers have come from far and wide to speak the knowledge we hold inside. In many languages, we have been told it is time to make the right changes for our families, for the lands we love.… We are at the threshold. We are going to see change. If we can create the vision in our heart, it will spread. As bringers of light, we have no choice but to join together. As women of wisdom, we cannot be divided. When the condor meets the eagle, thunderbirds come home.”
–Agnes Baker Pilgrim, oldest living female of the Takelma Band, Rogue River Indians, and keeper of the Takelma Sacred Salmon Ceremony, speaking at the inception of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers in 2004.
There is a living legend, a story of awakening, calling us back in time to an original way of life and evoking memories that we humans carry deep in our cores. Around the planet many First Nation prophecies speak of the coming of a council of thirteen grandmothers as a catalyst and a calling to awaken to the new world that is announcing itself. According to these prophecies, the grandmothers are actually calling it into our awareness.
We [the authors of this essay] share this story that our grandmothers and grandfathers shared with us, and that we in turn share around the fire with our grandchildren. They have told us not to fear; a time of great shifting is upon us. “Where there is life, there is hope,” they say. Our elders have told us that when we surrender our need to know and then devote ourselves to the Unknown, the veils part and we participate in miraculous healings from terminal illness, psychosis, and chronic depression. The original people pass on these ways of prayer in which all life is honored as sacred. When entering into dialogue with Creation’s intelligence, we reverently approach life as a mystery and it responds to us. When we live without expectation and judgment, we accept what appears. We wake up in the dream and begin to participate in its weaving. In this weaving, all aspects are essential. Challenges stimulate solutions. And those solutions begin to create the new dream.
In following this dialogue with Creation, our community (called Kayumari) has been led to indigenous elders who encouraged and developed this way of seeing. Over the last twenty years, our elders took us into their families and shared their prophecies of this time of purification. They tell us that we are living in an era of upheaval, of choice and great healing. The nature of life brings all into balance. We have come to a time where the pendulum of balance has swung to an extreme, and our task is to participate in the rebalancing.
In their sacred relation to the earth, the original peoples take care of Her, serve Her, and know Her as their mother. We listened as elders spoke to us of the gathering of sacred clans, the unity across religious, racial, and gender boundaries. This challenging era demands that we unite as one people and fulfill our birthright to sustain our relation to one another and to our Mother Earth.
Our community heard the call. In November 2003 the members of Kayumari’s nonprofit church, the Center for Sacred Studies (CSS), sent an invitation out to indigenous grandmothers around the world asking that they consider joining in council together. We explained that we needed their voice;