Flight Maps of Stardust Voyagers

Sky Woman

This image was found on google, credited to greatpeace.org. In the Iroquois tradition, it is told there is a world that exists high above the world we know, where life is much as it is on earth. Sky Woman fell to earth from this Sky World, the first human being to live on earth.

Above, Sky Woman stands on the back of a giant Turtle, who provided his shell for her to rest.

This reminded me of a time, when I worked at a First Nations treatment center on an island just outside of Tofino, when as an exercise during group training, we were asked to write our own Creation Story. This is what I wrote. I miss those times. I so loved living and working among the First People, in our area called the Nuu Chah Nulth First Nations.

                                *****     *****     *****     *****

Out of swirling gases, spinning for eons, particles forged in a celestial furnace were puffed into being by the god of fire. Gathering substance as they swirled across a timeless sky, fire and gas clouds scattered fragments that through the ages, galaxy upon galaxy, glittered across the velvety black canopy. Over millennia, planets, stars, suns and moons slowly fell into ordered composition. One of these specks was Earth.

Over millions of years, Earth grew, from primordial ooze to a lushness of green that carpeted land masses slowly emerging from the swirling seas. These masses changed forms and locations over time and, under the water, the friction of the obsidian shelf pushed huge mountain ranges up into the sky.

From protozoa that crept out of the sea onto land, from ape to Cro-Magnon man to us, through millions of years of non-human development, to humankind's arrival, our story took millennia to develop. Only in the last hundred years, with ferocious determination and greed, have we managed to do harm to every species on the planet. At the same time, our seeking souls, knowing we have lost our way, still look skyward, singing.

In my heart and through my being, Sky Woman sings, a song of the sea, a song of the sky, inspiration to keep looking up, to envision the world as it is meant to be and to live towards that truth and that vision.

I believe in everything: the Big Bang theory, evolution and creation. Because of the intricate beauty, precision, and interrelation of everything in the cosmos, it feels to me divinely guided, provided by an intelligence vaster than our human minds can comprehend. Every scientist, trained in facts, I am certain, must feel the touch of this mystery.

Primitive people felt the Presence of this force, and paid homage. The human spirit is designed to question, to seek the meaning of life. When we listen to it, it is this inner voice that yearns towards a higher purpose for our brief time on this earth, this lifetime that is our spirit's classroom.

I find no conflict between evolution and creation. The creation story in Genesis was interpreted according to the understanding of the people of those ancient times in language they could grasp. The "seven days of creation" easily might have been seven million years in the unfolding. 

We carry within us flight maps of stardust voyagers. It is in our DNA. This keeps us yearning towards the nighttime skies. It is what makes us strive for meaning with which to fill our empty spaces. We are all star travelers here, arriving on the planet still bemused by the Mystery.

We understand more easily the earthly component of the paradigm. I believe there are no limits to the possibilities, that there is so much more to us than this one lifetime in our earthly bodies.

We have been Sky Woman, we have been trees, we have soared with eagles, and sung with whales. We are singing still, that mournful song of living on this planet in a way that has strayed so far from the teachings of the Old Ones. Our prayers rise on the Old Ones' breath, to the listening ears of whatever gods may be, Wakan Tanka among the First People.

There is room for it all - by many roads we travel to the same source, which is called by many names. This same Intelligence which set sun and moon and earth spinning in their orbit, programmed into the DNA of every cell the unslakable desire to develop. To us was added the free will to reason our way through all the possibilities, and to choose our pathway through this life according to our highest truths.

Without belief, what would give our lives and our deaths meaning? If we were only living, like every other cell, would the ordered beauty of the world be enough to accept the pain and struggle of being here? Does a simple cell feel joy or despair? What gave us reason and intelligence and choice, and why were we given it, if not to somehow prove ourselves worthy of the gift?

When I look up at the stars, I feel connected, some of their dust light-years ago somehow having become incorporated in my being.

My belief in this Intelligence helps me view myself and my fellow travelers with compassion, knowing whatever our fates on this plane, there will be a balancing out on the scales of a much truer justice than we find here, so that no one's life and death is meaningless.

I dont use one word to name whatever set the thousand galaxies spinning; I only know something cannot come from nothing, that before the swirling gases had to be the space they traveled in.

Looking inward at the teeming life of a single cell, its structure is too perfectly ordered to be random. Looking outward exponentially, spiraling across time and space on a cosmic journey, each star, each galaxy, with its programmed pattern, I believe all theories contain some truth. The only theory I find difficult to understand is that all life is random, that we live, we die, and it means nothing. I cant find anything in the human experience to support that.

Traveler, there are no limits to the possibilities, only perhaps in our capacity to understand them. I believe the soul is part of the story of creation, that it does not die, and that "there is a landscape larger than the one we see," and so much more than to survive that we are meant to do.

The Tree of Peace

I found this back in the archives of 2011, and am posting it for the Poetry Pantry at Poets United

this week.