Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [115]
This vision was born out of our international community (Kayumari), originally based in the Sierra Foothills in California. (We recently entered into a collaboration with a Buddhist retreat center on Black Mountain, located in the North Bay Area of San Francisco.) In Kayamuri’s formative days in 1995, people from fourteen countries and many First Nations peoples gathered together to hold the dream of a safe place to pray. Since that time the community has continued to grow as an extended family of prayer and to touch many others around the world. We have grown a church together, the Center for Sacred Studies. We have prayed together and been in sacred relation with each other; holding each other as we birthed our babies; holding each other in song and prayer as some of us, young and old, died before us. When our sisters died, we adopted their children. We have nursed each other’s babies. As our elders inspired us to do, we have dedicated ourselves to the regeneration of sacred culture.
On October 13, 2004, thirteen remarkable grandmothers answered the CSS’s call. They gathered at the Menla Retreat Center in upstate New York from the mountains of Tibet and Nepal, the tundra of Alaska, the Brazilian Amazon, the highlands of Central America, the plains of North America, the Black Hills of South Dakota, the mountains of Oaxaca, the great forest of the American Northwest, the desert of the American Southwest, and the rainforest of Central Africa.
At this historical meeting they established a global alliance, the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers. They shared the visions and prophecies that guided them to say “yes” to joining our resources and prayers dedicated to a global movement for world peace and unity. Grandmother Rita Blumenstein, a seventy-five-year-old Yupik traditional healer, was guided by her great-grandmother. In 1942, when she was nine years old, her great-grandmother gave her thirteen stones and thirteen eagle plumes, telling her that she would be part of a council of thirteen and to save these precious relics for that time. At this first gathering in 2004, the day after declaring themselves an alliance, Grandmother Rita passed these thirteen stones and feathers to each and every grandmother around the table and took one for herself. In that moment she knew that her Grandmother stood behind her with all her ancestors, and that the time they had been preparing her for had arrived.
Grandmother Rita told us that Mother Earth is angry. She wants to shake us awake. She wants us to come back to ourselves. She wants us to realize that we are creating this reality. Will we react to this crisis with rage, hopelessness, and fear, or will we respond with love and prayer, approaching Creation for an answer?
The original peoples of this planet are the antidotes of our troubled time. Their traditional ways have sustained life since its beginnings. As a cultural presence the people have withstood innumerable planetary upheavals, war, genocide, and famine. Humanity has now arrived at the original ground. Every possibility that humankind has ever dreamed (abundance, war, disease, healing) is on the table of choice right now. It is imperative that we wake up from this nightmare, claim the choice, and take responsibility to rebalance our world.
Takelma Siletz Grandmother Agnes Baker Pilgrim tells us that the most important journey for us to embark on is the eighteen-inch journey from our head to our heart. The Grandmothers on the Council are connected to this sacred heart, for they are Life Givers, united with the Grandmother of all Life, the one without ancestors, who nourishes us without question.
The Grandmothers Council is not alone. Elders are gathering all over the earth. The International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers is one of the many instruments of the Grandmother of all Life. They have united to renew our hope. From