The Great Awakening
Transcript from Podcast Episode, The Great Awakening. Also available as video on YouTube.
I received a message yesterday from a podcast listener about an experience that she had with the bee and the land. I won't tell her story, but it was so clear to me, in the message that she was remembering how to listen, how to feel, how to be present for the way that the land is speaking to us and it is doing this all the time. Our relationship as bipedal mammals, with the earth, with the trees, with the soil, with other nonhuman and more than human creatures is a relationship of revelation. Parts of ourselves are being revealed to us through that relationship. Truths about what it means to be human in a body, truths about the patterns and framework of existence are being revealed to us all the time through our interactions with the natural world. This is something that was known and that we still know and that powers of this world, this human made world have worked really hard to keep us distracted from and to keep us from connecting to. And I think that there's a really good reason for that when we are all living in a direct relationship based on revelation. Revelation of truth, revelation of knowing, revelation of what is in alignment with life and what is not in alignment with life. We are our own sense of authority. Authority comes to us directly from this relationship, from this deep knowing of how we are accountable to the rest of our community of the world, the rest of the humans that we're in relationship with, the trees that we're in relationship with, the water that we're in relationship with. We are in a community of accountability and that is who we are giving our failty to. That is who we are in allegiance with our community of accountability which has revealed to us over and over and over again. And that does not serve the architects of power who want us to give our failty to them, who want us to look to them in their authority to tell us what is right and what is wrong.
If we are our own seat of authority, our own sovereign being, we don't need them to tell us what to do, what is right and what is wrong. And so these ways of knowing and these ways of being in relationship have been systematically and efficiently destroyed all over the planet.
But they're inherent. I've heard it said they are our birthright as humans to be in these kinds of relationships of revelation, of accountability, of belonging, of community. It is our birthright to be in relationship with the oak tree and to understand what it needs from us and to understand what we can learn from it and what it gives to us in terms of food and shelter and inspiration. It is our birthright to understand our accountability to water, what it needs from us to stay healthy and clear and what it will give to us in return. This is the original blueprint of being a human, for us to understand the rules, to understand the relationships, to understand our accountability. And this is the wisdom that the First Nations people are stewards of in Canada, in the United States, in South America, in Africa, in Australia, in Europe. The people who came up out of place understood the covenant. They understood the relationship. And because it was so important, they spiritualized it. They knew that the health of the river was intimately and deeply connected to the health of their children and themselves. And so the river became their mother, became their lifegiver, that which brings life and takes away that which has died or that which is in need of regeneration.
And so a framework of mythology and spirituality and religion was built around these covenants, these agreements between human and more than human members of a community. And that covenant was broken by the architects of power, by empire, who said, your responsibility is not to the river. Your responsibility is to pay your taxes to the emperor. They worked to put a wedge between the people and where they looked for sustenance. Don't look to the river to protect you, look to your king. Don't seek wisdom from the mountain who's been standing for billions of years. Seek wisdom from your hierophant.
And so our relationship was broken, and with it our spirit was broken because we were cast into forgetting, into forgetting that we belong here. We were cast into forgetting our innate and inherent power, because our power comes from accountability in relationship, which is something that the hermits understood. One of my favorite books to read and reread and reread is Khalil Gibran's The Prophet, about a hermit mystic who lives above a town and watches them and interacts with them from a distance. And then right before he leaves the town, he reveals to them what he has seen, the wisdom he has gleaned from being with them and slightly apart from them, so that he could fully integrate the community inside himself. That is the role of the hermit, the monk, the wise one, the sage, the spirit worker, the one who removes themselves slightly to connect themselves fully. It's not a moving away from relationship, it's a moving into deeper relationship. This is the role of the hedgewitch that we separate together ourselves closer, because through that slight distance we are able to see the greater patterns at work. We are able to make ourselves accountable to the whole and villages of people. Before our relationship was broken, before we started to look to our hyperphones and our kings and our emperors, we would look to the one who integrated the whole, who went away slightly so that he or she could experience the patterns that were working themselves out through our community, digest them and feed them back to us as wisdom in conjunction with the more than human beings with whom we were in relationship with. So the person who slightly distanced themselves to digest the pattern was also watching the movement of the reindeer, was also watching the buffalo, was also connecting to the salmon, watching the stars. Digesting all of these patterns, not just human, but more than human. And that is our birthright. And more and more people all over the world are waking up and remembering that and feeling this call to the mystic, to the hedgewitch, to the spirit worker and knowing that this is the way forward. To see the bigger patterns, make ourselves intimate with them, digest what we are learning from those patterns and make ourselves accountable to them. And then invite our human brethren into that accountability, because that is wisdom. Wisdom is knowing what is going on around us and applying that knowing to how we take action.
I hear from a lot of you about your dreams, your hopes, your fears, your experiences with the plants. And I know that this awakening is a mass awakening and a real awakening. There is nothing contrived about this. You are truly and deeply remembering that we are not alone as humans, that there are other beings that are communicating with us and revealing the truth to us all the time.
And of course, I can hear in the back of my mind what are the implications of this, Erin? Everyone is their own expert? Does that mean no one should be an expert in anything? Just go to the plants and they'll teach you how to run your electricity? They'll teach you how to fix your plumbing? There's always a reductionist argument for things like this, and so I will address that here. We will always need experts in all of the things that we use and do as humans because we rely on technology to survive. We don't have claws, we don't have fangs, we don't have fur, we don't hibernate. We can't fly away. We have to use technology. And because we have to use technology to survive, we have to have specialists in that technology. And we have to trust them. We have to trust our plumbers, we have to trust our electricians, we have to trust our healers, we have to trust our politicians, we have to trust our scientists. And the only way we can trust them is to bring them back into the web of accountability, into community, into wisdom. And so when our experts are not acting in accountability, in alignment to what we know is true, based on our digestion of the patterns that we see, we have to hold them accountable. Just sitting and watching is not enough. We have to take action. We have to hold ourselves accountable. And we have to hold our experts accountable collectively. One of us doing that makes a difference. Many of us doing that changes the world. And each of us has a call, something that is deep and dear to our hearts, a place where we can hear the world speaking to us. We can hear the voices of the more than human beings that are being affected or the human beings that are being affected. We are an expert. You are an expert. What is the part of the world that you are accountable to? Is it the water? Is it the children? Is it the developing technologies and putting some bumpers around that to protect people? Is it new building products? Is it consumer capitalism? Is there some way that you clearly can see that we can do this in a way that internalizes the costs to the environment? Is there a way that you can see that we can start to tally and keep track of the cost to the environment for what we produce and consume so that capitalism can be more whole and less disjointed? What is your call, your gift, your prophetic wisdom to bring us in accountability to and in alignment with?
Last week when I talked about the question of evil, I talked about the fertile ground of creation that we experience when we come into contact with that which is opposite us, that which carries the polar expression, the polarity, the duality of our accountability, our integrity. What we feel rising up in us, what we feel, the way we digest the patterns and the wisdom that we carry is not to be confused with Godlike omnipotence or omniscience. We are human. So the way that that wisdom rises up in us is not infallible. We are not hierophants. It is our particular digested wisdom that may need to be tempered, by the digested wisdom of someone who sees it differently. We may carry the polarity for someone else. And together, through struggling, through that tension, we birth something that neither one of us could have seen alone. That is the alchemical process of human creation. So I feel like if we're in a place where we feel like we have stepped back, we're answering the call of the mystic. We're a hedgewitch. We can see so much and we start to believe that we are infallible. I can see it all. I know the way. I am the one with the answers. Follow me. You have been duped. It doesn't work that way. We don't get to hold that kind of infallible wisdom. We are part of a whole, part of a collective. We may hold something really potently, true, but it has to be tempered and tested and molded and shaped by the rest of our community who we are accountable to.
I just want to thank all of you who share with me the details of your awakening, of your revelation, of your relationship and communication with other humans and more than human beings. To all of you who say to me, I have no one else to tell this, will you please listen? It is such an honor to hold your stories in my heart and to bear witness to the transformation that I know is happening in the world and that you are a part of. So thank you for taking the time to share that with me. Thank you for being available to that kind of information, that kind of awakening. Thank you for remembering and for showing up and for believing that another way is possible. It is being born. I can see it. I can feel it. And you are a midwife of that birthing, so thank you.
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