The unwinding has begun.  Ancient chains unbound.

Assignment from my Globalization 420 class. I timidly walked up to the counter and asked, “Tiene huevos”?  The man I spoke to looked horrified and I immediately felt sick and wondered what I had said to so offend him.  It was my first week in Barquisimeto, Venezuela where I lived in the early 80s. As it turns out, when you want to buy eggs, you don’t ask, “Do you have eggs”?  You should say, “Are there eggs”? I had just asked this man if he had ovaries. Living in Venezuela in my early twenties was my first real experience with cultural differences. Even though the people I met there were wonderful (some are still friends to this day), it was a shocking realization for me to see how very different that culture was from mine. In the article, "Culture and Globalization" by the Suny Levin Institute it states, "The fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among human kind and th...

I frequently listen to recorded books.  Last week I was browsing for a new book to “read” when Spirit lead me to Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer.  I had just listened to another book of hers called, Braiding Sweetgrass. This is an excellent book that I recommend. I particularly like the concept of the Honorable Harvest.   Kimmerer speaking on the Honorable Harvest I’ll admit that I was confused when Spirit dropped the Gathering Moss book in my lap and said, “This is next.”  Kimmerer’s first book was a no-brainer as I have a long and loving connection with sweetgrass which I use for prayer and ceremony, but moss?  Frankly, I’d never really thought about moss other than, “Don’t slip on it when you’re hiking.” Yep, that was the extent of my relationship with moss.   Kimmmerer, who is a scientist, has an amazing way of bringing science and Spirit together. She reveals that nature is not ...

As words come tumbling out of my mouth with rote and certainty, I ask myself, “Whose words are those?”  Whose voice is in my head that demands absolute obedience to that statement? Horrified, I realized that sure enough, the voice is not my own.  Rather, it belongs to various authority figures of my past. “Horrified” because those people were abusers or those with belief systems I can no longer abide.  How to combat such a conundrum? I question and examine and investigate. What is truth? Who says so and why? If I’m listening to a voice (new or old) I scrutinize the speaker.  Are they kind? Are they knowledgeable on the subject on which they speak? Have they given me advice in the past, and how did that turn out? I look back and I look at outcome. It so clearly tells me who to listen to and who to trust.