Connected

Photo by Rebecca Duke

­The path of transformation is ongoing. Who I was in my twenties expanded when I entered my thirties, and I like to remember each decade thereafter as having a theme of change and transformation of my knowledge, spiritual understanding and ability to love “greater.”

In my memoir Space Between the Stars: My Journey to an Open Heart, I wrote: “When I look back at my life and compare it to what I had imagined it would be, it has been a strenuous journey along a mountainous path with breathtaking views. I was taught to look toward heaven to find God, but I searched my own heart and found light, joy, and God’s breath of truth inside me. I believe in the connectedness of us all…”

I still believe we are all connected even though so much of today’s chaos gives us a much different message.

In my foreword to the 2018 anthology All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World—Essays on Equality, Justice and Freedom, I wrote: “DNA, the hereditary material in all humans and organisms, is made of more than three million chemical bases. More than 99 percent of these bases is the same in all people.”

I keep praying that we will understand there is more that unites us than separates us. We are more alike than we are different. We must find a common grace and compassion to dispel the separateness and hatred that is flowing freely through our country. Hatred cannot create peace, nor can any group survive when another group is decimated. A despot can fuel the fire of division, but a country cannot survive intact.

Now is the time to focus on transforming ourselves. The Covid 19 pandemic has caused us to re-think most structures and systems. We can organize around inclusive communities, welcoming ideas, constructs, and practices that are multifaceted and sustainable, and we can help our sisters and brothers who are struggling. Paula Gunn Allen wrote: “Where I come from, we like to think our god is a woman and her name is Thought. We believe that the entire cosmos is thinking—not the sort of blathering that we all do, subvocalization in our brains, all the blah, blah, blah—but something else, more like sorcery, like fragility, like transformation.”

Transformation is the act of making a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance. Transformation is examining what is not working in our lives and build a new road to healing.

I am consciously transforming myself –looking at how I fit into the infinite universe, how I was created from stardust and am actually quite small and humble – a speck-- within the cosmos. Why are we here for this short time, if not to learn to breathe deeply, invest in each other, and share the journey and joy of learning?

“We go off in search of the miraculous and yet we are it.” - Paula Gunn Allen

Paula Gunn Allen’s quotes are from She is Us: Thought Woman and the Sustainability of Worship in Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future, Edited by Melissa K. Nelson.