“We put our minds together as one and thank all the Birds who move and fly about over our heads. The Creator gave them beautiful songs. Each day they remind us to enjoy and appreciate life. The Eagle flys highest in the sky and was chosen to be their leader. To all the Birds from the smallest to the largest – we send our joyful greetings and thanks.”                           ~ excerpt from Mohawk Thanksgiving Address, properly called Ohenten Kariwatkwa

I peer out the window before the treetops turn golden with the first morning sunlight.  There is faint mist swirling loosely above the surface of a glassy lake, seeming in a rush to be everywhere at once before it disappears in the warming sun.  At the edge of the cattail, there they are.  The boys are back!

Every summer while the ducklings are turning into teenagers, under the close supervision of their Mama, the male mallard will disappear.  Not only do they leave Echo Lake for points unknown but their summer plumage turns drab as the guide books call it.  After a molt that renders them flightless for a few weeks male Mallard become androgynous with eclipse plumage, looking exactly as the female do.  In these waning days of summer I have seen them on the wing in ever-growing numbers.  They are fast flyers, clocked at as much as 55 mph.  They are returning to Echo Lake while their plumage returns to a brilliant iridescence, a slow molt that occurs while the seasons slip from one to another.  The abundance of autumn includes many species of waterfowl.  It is common that the Mallard will stay through, using this lake for their winter shelter and spring breeding.

Science journals say that the Mallard is the ancestor of nearly all domestic duck breeds.  The folks who live across the water from me keep a pen of domestic ducks and chickens, I hear them regularly as I walk around the lake.  A few months ago one of them must have escaped as I noticed a domestic duck tagging alone with a Mama Mallard and her three kids, then juvenile who were not yet flying but still full of themselves.  The Mallard were quite aggressive towards this interloper – chasing it off, tugging at its tail feathers, generally being jerks towards it and causing it to limp severely for several days.   My heart just ached for it.  This domestic duck wasn’t to be dissuaded.  Every time I saw the family, there was the domestic limping along or swimming close behind them.  The tenacity of this duck was amazing.  Eventually the this family stopping chasing it off and it is no longer limping.   It has been granted a place with them.  The wild migrating birds that are returning to Echo Lake have accepted this duck easily as a part of their community, undistinguished from themselves.  We could learn a lot from this story as a human community I think – about acceptance, diversity, kindness, and a willingness to overcome regardless of the obstacles.

The medicine of the duck offers comfort and protection, it is associated with the astral plane and feminine energies, with water. Ducks teach us to handle our emotions with grace and ease.  They serve to teach us to maneuver through the various waters of life, to explore our emotions.  Their iridescent colors symbolic of  our spiritual potentials, as we come into our own through drinking the waters of life.   I encourage you to take a moment to meditate on this medicine, visualize the common and well-known Mallard – what stands out for you?  How can it support you in the transitions of your life, with the emotional waters of the day?  Allow yourself to receive the gifts of duck medicine, you may just be surprised by your own tenacity and strengths.

Mallards are a species of least concern to conservationist.  Their numbers are in the millions.  The same cannot be said for other duck species however.  Of the 42 duck species world-wide, there are 14 species of duck listed as either vulnerable, endangered and critically endangered.  The Boreal Songbird Initiative‘s conservationist Jeffrey V. Wells speaks at length as to the needs of the bird world and how ultimately these needs are for the human world and we’d be wise to tend swiftly to these ever increasing needs.  Using recycled toilet paper is one immediate way each of us can be a source of this protection of these endangered birds as well as the Standing Nation.

Wopila to the boys!  Wopila for the season!

Aho Mitakuye Oyasin ~ All My Relations

The 2996 dead at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 343 firefighters and paramedics, 23 NYPD officers, 37 Port Authority officers.  The approximately 1500 volunteers who have died of disease in the aftermath.  And the estimated 422,000 suffering from PTSD or some form of disease.  6802 American men and women have died in uniform. Nearly the same number of contractors.  30500 coalition partners of war.  Those who committed suicide after returning home.  Those who were considered collateral.  All the families of the numbers above.

The 21,843 Law Enforcement officers who have been killed in the line of duty in the US since 1791 -73 law enforcement officers  & 14 K-9 officers in 2014.

The 20 million or more First Peoples who were  slaughtered after Europeans arrived in North America.  The 100 million buffalo.  The 400 thousand gray wolves.  The ivory woodpecker and passenger pigeon.  And countless other species of birds and four-legged, amphibians and lizards whose numbers have been reduced  a mere fraction since then.  All those species unknown yet destroyed.

The untold number of people who die by violence – every day.

All those exploited at the hands of another.

In memory of the Standing Ones – The 95% of Redwood forest that no longer exist.   Remembering the approximate world’s total net loss of forest area  is 7.3 million hectares per year. The Earth’s lungs, our rainforests, only 6% remain with an approximate 137 plant, animal and insect species lost every single day due to rainforest deforestation, about 50,000 species a year.

Remembering clean water and rivers gone dry.  And the 90% of all large fishes and 75% of smaller fishes that have disappeared from the world’s oceans, the coral reefs, marine turtles and estimated 100 million sharks fished annually for their fins.

The tops of most of the Appalachian Mountains.

The loss of ecosystems and healthy soil.

According to the Coalition on Homelessness approximately 37,000 homeless people who die each year in the US.

Untold Native languages and cultures.

There are no dates for commemorating the majority of this list.  There should be.  We should not forget the backs on which this country was built, nor the generosity of the earth and the precious plenty she provides.  Everyday we’d do well to honor the many species who have fallen – human, plant, animal, the earth herself – so we can live.

This post is by no means intended to diminish the losses on 9/11.  The suffering of the families is truly immeasurable.  My heart goes out to them.

And it is also true that there is so much more to remember. My heart is with them too.

Mitakuye Oyasin… all my relations.

My dear friend Carol and I were talking once, about what I cannot remember, in her silky wisdom she said the words, “love it into something new”.  These words have stuck with me.  I often come back to them when I am in need of a different perspective on things.

Today I read a post on FB that struck me dumb for a few moments.  The words and sentiment seemed so filled with hate.  My response was to send love to him – see his handsome smiling face in my mind and love him.  I had to ask myself though, was that love genuine?  Did I truly love him in that moment?  Was that earnest expression of love sincere when it was tainted by a sense of O!M!G! and incredulousness?  Not quite.  How do I defuse the sense of horror I feel so my love is indeed a salve?

I know he isn’t the hate.   What sits at the bottom of it?  What lays beneath it all?  That’s where the love needs to go.  It must.

What do I know of this darkness?  Yes, it is all those events – but it is also fear and I don’t feel like I “know” that.  So interesting how I can intellectualize it yet I do not feel it in my body or heart.  For this I am deeply grateful.   How am I in relation to this then?

I have certainly been is despair, in very dark fearful places  but they have been out self-loathing, not the hate of another.  One in the same.  Odd as it may sound, I learned the true depth of self-love from my Mother after her death.  Self-love is a practice.  A learned skill.  So this is how I love it into something new -love myself more.  More deeply with forgiveness for the times of self-loathing.  More sincerely.  More assuredly.  More fiercely.  For it is only self-love that fills the space once occupied by hate.

Pilamaya U.A. – I can truly send love to you now that I can understand and relate.   I see your handsome and smiling face and I love you, it heals me to do so.   Thank you.   Thank you.

Sincere true love.    Aho!

In the book The Sacred Pipe, Black Elk recounts the words of Kablaya, who had received the vision for the Sun Dance ceremony and describes the first time this rite was performed.  The retelling is quite beautiful.  I’d read this book years ago and just found a copy in a used book store and felt it would be well worth the read again – this time starting with the chapter Wiwanyag Wachipi: The Sun Dance

Kablaya then took the red paint, offered it to the six directions, and spoke again to the sacred tree: “O tree, you are about to stand up; be merciful to my people, that they may flourish under you.”  ” When we go into the center of the sacred hoop we shall all cry, for we should know that anything born into this world which you see about you must suffer and bear difficulties.  We are now going to suffer at the center of the sacred hoop, and by doing this may we take upon ourselves much of the suffering of our people.”  “O Wakan-Tanka, be merciful to me, that my people may live!  It is for this that I am sacrificing myself.”

I am in awe of those who make the commitment to dance.  It is a hard way to pray.  It is an honorable way.  And already, for weeks in fact, I can hear the whistles and the drum, the sacred songs.  I am pulled towards the Tree, towards the center of the Universe.  It seems surreal that I stand in my kitchen with a cup of coffee and laptop typing these words now when in a few short hours I will be on my communities land to bear witness to the suffering of men and women who will dance and pray in this old way.  I find this a remarkable juxtaposition as I bridge the modern with the ancient.

“By your actions today you have strengthened the sacred hoop of our nation,  you made a sacred center which will always be with you, and you have created a closer relationship with all things in the universe.”

I woke today to rain and the words willingness to gracefully transcend in my head.  The dance has begun.

May your own suffering be eased by your connection to all those who will dance in all the Sun Dance ceremonies around the country as we are all related in this way.

Aho Mitakuye Oyasin!