A Water Prayer for Standing Rock

I feel so present at this time to all the peoples gathering together at Standing Rock. That place feels so very far away from where I am, the landscape and people so different in so many ways, and yet I feel a resonance of hope and truth, reverberating across the planet to rest in my faraway heart, from that potent impulse to gather and protect, that is happening there as a stand against the proposed oil pipeline. This action stands as a symbol for all people, the people of Earth, standing up across borders and boundaries and speaking with deep strength, power and love to the destructive paradigm of futile hunger and ravaging greed, which would desecrate our sacred Earth, plundering her resources for the benefit of an elite and the detriment of an entire ecosystem. 

There are a thousand ways we could all be standing and joining together in this way, in each and every country to put our collective voice to this story, of the ancient and wise people who listen and honour their Earth, threatened by the mindless consumption of a brutalising and disconnected force of consumption. My own country has its own vast history of persecution of its First Nations people, desecration of their sacred sites and ceremonial lands, and brutalisation of the environment we all share. 

In my dream last night I received a teaching about water. In the dream I was struggling to carry a very heavy object which held within it a great knowledge, a precious but somehow impenetrable information that the people who had gathered upstream required for their council. The object was far too heavy for me to lift, or push or roll, across the muddy ground, up hill and down, across the land that stretched out vast and immeasurable before me. But in the dream I realised, in a euphoric epiphany, that I just had to get it down to the river, down to the water's edge that nestled in the valley below, and that from there the knowledge and information would be received by everyone through the water. Once the knowledge was in the water, it would touch every living thing on the planet. 

On waking I thought about this conductive quality of water, about its connectivity and the way it has no boundary, that it permeates and cycles and transcends separation. Water has no territorial boundary, it is always in deep communication with itself and with all life, the ocean with the cloud, the river with the sea, the mist and the dew, the lake and the rain, the tear and the blood. It is everywhere, and essential for our survival and it communicates and responds to the forms of our thoughts and our prayers. 

And so today I descended from my hilltop to the valley and the river's edge, and I sent a little woven offering, of grasses and blooms, feathers and butterfly wings, a raft of my prayers upon the river of my far away home, to the people gathered at Standing Rock across the globe, across deserts and cities and forests and prairies, across oceans and skies, and also to the people and the land and the water and the creatures of my own country and every country. I send a prayer in gratitude for your work of protecting our planet, in solidarity for your integrity as a people working so deeply with the harmony of Earth and its mystery, giving thanks for your courage and honour. I send a prayer that the mindless desecration may cease to be the dominant paradigm in this world so on the edge of itself, a species so close to losing its own magnificence. 

Standing Rock, I add my voice to yours through the ever present alchemy of our shared water in this vast biosphere. I trust that my prayers will be heard, in the lapping of your rivers or springs, or in the settling of the morning dew upon the gentle Earth, as she cradles your feet, or the curve of your resting cheek, as the sun rises on another day together on this planet. Blessings.