Since I last wrote, I have been on an intense journey, riding the wave to a new understanding of the shifts taking place on earth.  Things have never been so clear. It feels like I have slipped down a slippery water slide, which is moving faster and faster as the synchronicities line up and point to the network of all existence- the web of life is blowing in the winds of change. I have met some amazing people walking a path of authentic living from a heart-space. It feels like a time of nothing- left- to- lose so- speak/act –now- or- forever- hold –your- peace!   Every day one is pulled between strong polarities of mind.  One can choose to fall down the slippery slope of fear or choose to block out all those media messages of catastrophe and follow one’s heart to kindness and love and being present with that.

This year began with a certain urgency to see real change in the way humans are mistreating our earth’s resources. I began to feel like my blogs were sounding like a stuck record, repeating the same issues again and again. The blog is called Earth Notes for Hope for a reason. It’s a search for hope, but I had found that no matter how much I sought the silver lining, I could not help having to point out the doom and gloom.   There will always be shadows and light, both create the picture. A painting without shadows may seem one -dimensional. Some artists, like Rembrandt, focus their fascination of the shadows, others, like Monet, paint the light, both are potent and beautiful.

Last full moon; I attended a Sacred Fire Ceremony with a Native American guide who had been travelling around the world, sharing his sacred traditional rituals. (He explained that he had grown up on a reservation in America and due to the social-economic circumstances and the systematic destruction of the tribal memory, (as explained in my previous blog) many of the sacred traditions had been lost. He had to seek elders who remembered these ways who could authentically teach them to him. He had found them and become a member of a movement called Ancestral Medicine Revival, who were teaching the powerful spiritual traditions of his people and breathing life back into them.

While visiting South Africa, Adam met with representatives of the Khoi San or !Xam tribe, and performed a traditional sacred fire ceremony with them. It was part of a cultural exchange. The !Xam also hold sacred fire ceremonies and have a similar protocol. There is a general global movement among Native Tribes to share their traditional knowledge with each other. (This sharing strengthens and revives the traditions. Some worry about losing the traditions to some kind of a globalized mishmash of mixed up cultures, but there is integrity in keeping and remembering these traditions.  It is interesting how many common threads there are in the ancient earth centred rituals and wisdom carried by each of the worlds first peoples, even though they would not have had contact with each other due to extreme geographical separation.

I believe the common thread is that in their humble wisdom, “the sensitives” or medicine peoples living close to the earth have tuned into the subtle energy patterns and laws of mother-nature herself. So it is possible that the ancient knowledge of the earthkeepers and medicine people of the first tribes have so much in common because their pure-hearted wisdom comes from an intrinsic understanding of earth wisdom. Common sense, basically.

The earth is the common factor bringing them together at this time. I attended a special sacred fire ceremony out of town with the !Xam people of the Western Cape too. As we sat by the ashes of the sacred fire, the sun rose with a rainbow halo around it, a sign that the prophecy of the Whirling Rainbow may be coming to pass.

As I said before, extreme polarities of opinion about the fate of the planet are forming and all we can hope for is that the shifts will start to move towards a collective consciousness or a critical mass which will begin to believe in the hope that is beginning to flow.

On one hand, the earthkeepers and medicine people of the earth’s indigenous tribes, along with the children and Greta Thunbergs of this world are moving into a heart-centred existence. It is a change of attitude from one of fear to a general heart-centred consciousness of love and allowing so that the energy necessary for the earth’s healing to take place can flow.

On the other hand, those who live in fear continue to create the reality of fear of lack, which leads to terror and destruction. The mentality of fear creates a shadow reality, which causes the sense of emptiness and hence a need for distraction as well as destruction, and keeps people addicted. They become a nation of junkies creating junk- eating, drinking, smoking and living a disposable existence. It is an obsessive mental state of isolation and separation, depression and anxiety, cut off from spirit family and tribe, displaced and lost, feeling this way causes people to give up on the concept of true loving connection with each other.

Unfortunately, this is the addictive reality that drives the economy at the moment, it is the reality which makes decisions for short term selfish gain with no regard for future generations.  This is the reality that is crumbling as the “world as we know it,” comes to an end.  It is the opposite mentality of the first peoples. So the leaders thought long and hard about how each decision they made would impact the next 7 generations into the future. (With that world view, I am sure practices such as Fracking for gas would never have been contemplated for a moment, even if they had the technology!)

Adam Shield of the feather lead us in a beautiful Sacred Fire ritual, which began with a visualization to guide us to find the things deep in our hearts and psyche which we wanted to release. We then wrote them on a piece of paper, tied them in a red cloth, with sacrificial tobacco and tied the bundle with purple threads. He calmly and beautifully described the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman, who came and taught the ritual of the peace pipe.  There are many versions of this legend.  It is a bit like a Cane and Able story.  Cane and Able are the archetypes that represent the two kinds of men in the world and also the tribes of hunter-gatherers versus agriculturalists.  They have opposite mentalities.  In the Cane and Able parable, they fight to the death. In this story, White Buffalo Calf Women brings Peace to all tribes on earth and teaches them a ritual of sacrifice using tobacco to burn up the fire of anger and hate.  She is like mother earth, she represents the Sacred Feminine energy of the planet.  Although she is very beautiful, she does not tolerate the lustful way one of the brothers looks at her and reduces him to a pile of bones in an instant.

We put our bundles in the sacred fire and released our baggage, having sought the shadow and acknowledged it. Darkness extinguished by light. Letting go means making a sacrifice of the identity you take on because of the story you carry. This is what makes up your reality and affects the decisions you make and the conversations you have. What you give is what you get.

After the ritual I spoke to “Adam and asked him about the “Rainbow Bridge” he had mentioned in another of the stories he told. He told me that the Rainbow Bridge was the coming together of all nations to project a single white light: a vision of a new earth.” It is the opposite of the way a white light shone through a prism or a crystal will create a rainbow effect. Instead, it illustrates all the people of the earth, from the North-South, East and West coming together by forming a new consciousness, which creates a single light beam.

He said he believes the earth is going through a major shift, it has started and it is going to intensify. It will be challenging, but the outcome will be positive if we project a positive outcome. We get what we give.

“The children already have the right consciousness,” he said. “It is up to us to clear ourselves of what holds us back. That is the work we have to do, to clear the blockages so we can see clearly.”

The work of cleaning and clearing the path to a new vision is an intensely personal journey of removing the dogma, the old stories, the projections we have created and the false identities. We have to learn to drop our armour and trust.

The more we let go and trust the universe, the easier it is to find ourselves in a space of love and heart-centred consciousness, which naturally guides us to that place of beauty and love. The further one walks into this place the closer one feels to God.   This naturally creates the ability to feel and project Joy and to be Golden, as opposed to desperately seeking the kind of gold which lies locked up in the coffers of a bank somewhere cold and is only represented by numbers and accessed abstractly by a plastic credit card.

Of course, we need to live and to eat and to pay our way, but it should come as a result of being the light and not as a result of being a slave to a system, which requires one to sacrifice all that is truly golden in order to acquire it. It seems this system has lost all meaning and become an endless void, like a black hole eating itself and everything in its path mindlessly. Yet, on the other hand, when one sees it from the outside, this system that drives our economy is losing power as it spins out of control. (This economic system that drives some people to hunt the rarest creatures on earth and ocean to sell because the fewer there are left, the more valuable they are. Or to build another franchise supermarket on the last piece of fertile parkland, which would be ideal for agriculture in an urban desert.)

This crazy economic logic is like the mad power hungry giant war machine, controlled by the Sargent major in the film Avatar, – he operates the giant robot, becoming it, clumsily, obsessively and stubbornly in his power-hungry loyalty to disconnected idea of following higher orders even though they are no longer relevant or reasonable to the current situation.

Let’s hope that in this time of extreme polarities, the gentle tribal people of planet earth, with their bows and arrows, will ride their “dragons” swiftly in the last battle to save our planet for the sake of true love. Because in the end, when all is destroyed and we have to say goodbye. ( Many have already experienced having to or nurse loved ones,  dying of chronic illnesses as a result of the imbalances in our food and air.) When it comes to the last breath of a loved one, money becomes irrelevant. Love is everything. Priorities become clear.  It’s time to practice love and healing and make that the dominant reality. on the planet. We get what we give. We create our own reality and if we dream doom and gloom, that’s what will come. It’s up to us to turn the tide and visualize healing on planet earth. The tribal earth keepers I have met in the last month since I wrote my last blog, are coming together to work on healing the earth in every way they can.