The imagination must “be here now.” This is where you actually are, this is reality. Don’t create a fantasy. Know who you are and where you are and what you are doing and really be there.
Beatrice Bruteau.
Celebrating the Fall Equinox - the Indigenous way.
Tracey Whiteye
On September 21, we and about 50 others had the distinct pleasure and privilege to celebrate the Fall Equinox by walking a spiritual journey around Victoria Park in London, ON, led by Tracey Whiteye, a local Indigenous Woman helper and a second-generation survivor of a mother who had been in a residential school.
Tracey's infectious way of engaging us with Creator in expressing gratitude for all of creation was both respectful and so down to earth.
We gathered in a circle around Tracey's Indigenous bundle representing the ancestors. A Metis helper woman placed four strawberries, the "heart" berry, in the four directions on the bundle. A woman residential school survivor was there and was so gratefully and gracefully acknowledged by Tracey.
Tracey went on to thank Creator for the Water which was carried by another Metis helper woman.
Water is life for us, she went on to say and stressed its importance when we are firstborn. It was especially meaningful when she and others of us who knew it, sang the water song together.
What struck me was how she prayed the ceremony, honoring the four directions, the stages of growth through which we all travel, all the while, walking us through those four directions.
May WE, settler folk continue to be gifted by women like Tracey who invite us into their sacred spaces. This truly was a sacred encounter of Creator through the experience of being together in a circle in the beginning and ending with the circle formation. We are all equal by being invited into the Circle.
Let's live that belief in our lives, as Tracey shows us.
- Sister Kathleen Lichti, CSJ
The Who/What/Why of our Walk:
A spiritual journey around Victoria Park led by Tracey Whiteye
WHY
to connect us all and future generations to the land that belongs to the Creator;
to launch Greening Sacred Spaces (London); and
to support and advance the City of London’s Climate Emergency Action Plan.
WHO
led M. Tracey Whiteye, Oshkaabewis Kwe, which means a woman helper or
messenger in Objibwe language. Tracey is a wholistic practitioner, researcher
and educator.
WHAT
honour mother earth and future generations with story telling, songs and
prayers
share the water ceremony
to honour the four directions around the sacred fire;
engage the sacred bundles and other indigenous women who are Berry Fasters;
announce the new Greening Sacred Spaces initiative
and to announce the call for submissions for two x $500 Climate Action London grants, which address London’s Climate Emergency Action Plan and aligns with the Global Sustainable Development Goals.
““It’s education that got
us into this mess.
It’s education that
will get us out of it.””
Weekly Pause and Ponder
There is no map for the landscape of loss, no established itinerary, no cosmic checklist, where each item ticked off gets you closer to success. You cannot succeed in mourning your loved ones. You cannot fail. Nor is grief a malady like the flu. You will not get over it. You will only come to integrate your loss… The death of a beloved is an amputation. You find a new center of gravity, but the limb does not grow back.
Richard Rohr.
No News but Bad News
This has been a summer like none other. The world is full of doom, destruction, and agony given to us in living color, compliments of the media. Most evenings, as I tiptoe to the tv and gingerly tune in to CBC’s The National, I ask myself, “Why am I doing this”? As much as I want to learn what’s happening in our world, usually, I shield my eyes from the plethora of horrors unfolding on the screen. By now, we know the routine by heart. Hundreds of forest fires are blazing across Canada, the United States, and parts of Europe. Floods rampage through cities and towns. Haiti is torn apart by earthquakes. Tornados blitz the Florida coast. The fourth wave of the global pandemic is rearing its destructive head. To add insult to injury, Prime Minister Trudeau has called a federal election for September 20th, seemingly oblivious to the fact that neither disgruntled Canadians nor screaming opposition parties want to go to the polls.
Lately, to save my sanity, I’ve been turning off the nightly litany of a world falling apart at its seams. I hear myself sighing, “Where are you, God”? In the silence, the answer appears. “I’m right here beside you; I am with you always”. Always? Yes, God always is living in us, beside us, and among us, even amidst the devastation we humans have created. My faith tells me that this is true, and I believe it, but the road ahead looks ominous.
“God always is living in us, beside us, and among us, even amidst the devastation we humans have created”
We don’t need to spend our time looking back to why the world has arrived at this juncture. What we need is for the governments of the world and rich countries to lay down their arms and stop the proliferation of weapons. Furthermore, we need people to live simply in harmony with Mother Nature to counteract climate change. Until then, we’ll muddle along until we learn to subdue our great big egos which urge us to be something, to know something, and to have everything.
-Sister Jean Moylan, csj
