Traditional Ceremony: Tending People and Nature

We as human beings have this incredible power of unification and connection amongst ourselves, and with nature. And why do we have this ability? If we really question, why do we have this ability and what could it do for the world around us, it quickly becomes apparent that we have an ability to actually help nature in a very profound way.

I understand  that every being in nature has a function to fill. And every being except humans is filling that function. Nature is changing and its moving energy - creating balance when it's all coordinated. The insects are moving through the soil and creating nutrients in the soil. Then that energy becomes, let us say a bird who is now attending the trees and moving upon the land. The birds are helping plants to grow and trees to grow, even by eating the berries and then releasing dropping that come out of it. Life is moving and it is creating this kind of mosaic of energy. Because of that, there's abundance and health - and there's balance in the system.

But then you put human beings in the mix. Human beings come along and they start changing things. They start cutting down the trees and they start determining this animal is bad and this animal is good. We like these ones. We don't like those. So we'll kill those off. And it creates an imbalance because we do not know what our relationship to these beings are.

But there's older stories. You hear indigenous stories where human beings very much knew what their place was in the world. That human beings place was regulators of energy. They were, they were tenders of the land. They were keepers of the relatives. The indigenous people used the stories and used their unity to help one another to make the world a better place and to make more abundance in the world.

In North America, you could say it was one of the last places that was really strong in this way of life. In the area that I live right now, there was over 60 million bison. It is said that this was the biggest concentration of life ever to exist on this earth. These huge, massive herds of millions moving across the land. And it was in balanced and was healthy because it was being tended by the native peoples. They had well-developed stories to unify around what supports life, not just as individual tribes, but as entire nations and between nations too.

So, they collectively made the environment a priority to make sure that the land was healthy, and they knew how to tend themselves to do that. They knew how to make sure that they, as human beings were in good alignment with their connected inner nature. Because of this, they did not have a group breakaway, or a person try to take power and control - and start dominating. Well, how did they do that? They did that through ceremony!

But, what ends up happening is that when people of get off kilter - when they get out of balance? Whether that's as individuals or as a group, they start changing their story. And that story becomes one that isn't in alignment with nature. It is in out of alignment with the source of nature - spirit. As that happens, people become more and more dysfunctional. As people move further away from the natural world, it does not stop people from doing what we do, which is create an effect. We still cause an effect on nature, cause effect on one another and cause an effect on the animals. We start having a negative effect on the world around us. This had become the story of the modern world.