The Star Compass In My Bones
The Star Compass in My Bones
My journey back to the wisdom of the earth began with the arrival of a gift. It was a book called “The Womenʻs Spirituality Book” by Diane Stein. Layered between the pages was a deep remembrance of what it feels like to live in relationship with nature, her cycles and intelligence as sacred.
My whole body was vibrating as I savored each word. This, THIS is the world I want to live in; a world where the natural is the embodiment of the Divine, our map and guide. It is a worldview with the intelligence to understand that nature is a being to be in relationship with, not a thing to exploit. Somewhere deep in my bones arose a resounding YES. It was a story older than Christianity, one where the feminine and her embodiment in the land, waters and seasons was revered.
My first steps on the path were oneʻs of creating ceremony for the seasons, for myself and my community of sisters. We called them “Goddess Circles” and drew upon the wisdom of our European ancestors. I come from the great diaspora of Europeans who immigrated to Turtle Island (North America) in the late 1700ʻs. My ancestors are from Germany and Poland.
Germany was a center of the witch trials that took place in Western Europe from 1450 to 1750, with 75% of all trials happening in the country. 40,000-60,000 people were murdered, 80% were women.
Herbalists, wise women, nature lovers, healers, forest priestesses, queer folks, undomesticated and unmarried women; my ancestral wisdom was burned at the stake.
My bones remember.
I am my ancestors wildest dreams.
My soul sisters and I read books and crafted ceremony.
We were reaching out to nature and our ancestors for magic and connection. Our ancestors, names and faces long forgotten, answered back. The solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter days became our holidays, imbuded with natural intelligence. We learned the transits of moon and sun and how the waxing and waning of the heavens was mirrored in our bodies, minds and spirits as well as the waters and our gardens. Our alters were bedecked in the abundance of the season. We participated in the turning of the seasons through songs and stories, prayers and intentions.
I remember vividly one particular Hallowʻs Eve of ceremony; candles burning, incense smoke, mirrors for scrying, red flowers and bird feathers. We were so unskilled in protocol and how to hold a worthy container for the power we were invoking. Our intentions were good but we lacked mentors, cultural practices and appropriate context for our magic. Our friends wandered in and out, alcohol in their hands. I shutter at the rememberance of how sloppy we were.
After everyone had left I entered the ceremonial space – candles still smoldering, air heavy with incense and spirits. I looked into a mirror and saw the face of a woman, covered in black lace, a red rose behind her ear. She said to me very clearly, “you donʻt understand the power you are playing with”.
I needed a cultural container, mentors, and the wisdom that is held in the community.
Through a deep shamanic initiation that felt like a personal catastrophe, Spirit guided me to to a master of the Lakota sweatlodge – a mexican man who had learned the Sweatlodge ceremony from his teacher, an elder in the Lakota nation. The signs along the path were so loud, imbuded with Native wisdom in paintings and tepees – everywhere was synchronicity. There is no question, I was guided. I spent 7 hours in sweatlodge ceremony and emerged forever changed.
Through his guidance and teaching I had a full body experience of what it feels like to participate in ceremony in a manner that is held in a cultural practice. It deepened my experience with the sacredness of nature. I learned ceremonial songs that still live in my blood and my bones. I was gifted visions and experienced deep intergenerational healing. The medicine wheel became my map and my guide, woven with the transits of sun and moon. He guided us to build a sweatlodge on the property I stewarded with my ex-husband. We learned the medicine of tobacco and were introduced to the path of the pipe. We breathed together in the old way.
Yet, I was not Lakota and my home was not on Lakota land. My teacher was not Lakota. I always struggled with the feeling that I didnʻt have permission to be on this path, but who was going to give it to me? How was I, a white woman in Utah, whoʻs family immigrated to Virginia, East Texas, Louisiana and then Utah, to find my way back to the practices and ancestral wisdom of the earth? My ancestors had uprooted and moved, time and again. Some of the cultural practices of Germany followed, but they were not rooted in land.
“Can Americans, as a nation of immigrants, learn to live here as if we are staying? With both feet on the shore”?
- Kimmer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Canada, Milkweed Editions 2013, pg 207
The land where my ancestors settled in Texas was Caddo and Tonkowa territory. The people were forcibly removed from the land by my ancestors. This is a deep wound in my psyche.
I was blessed to live most of my life in the gorgeous and ancient beauty of Utah. Utah is home of the Ute, Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute and Dineʻ people. She is a land of high alpine forests scented with pine and the fluttering with aspens around the most crystal clear and icy cold mountain streams. She is home to mighty snows that transform the land into a quiet, crystal, enchanted world where we were fortunate to wander and dance upon our skis.
The desert of southern Utah feels as ancient as the land, literally hundereds of millions of years old. As we drop down into Cottonwood bedecked canyons, flowing with precious water from the high mountains where it was gathered as snow, I feel the voices of our ancestors calling us. “Wake Up, wake up”, they say. “Listen, listen”. It is a holy place.
I ask the stone cliffs, the canyons and rivers, “What is your name? Your true name”? I feel the echo of the people here, calling me to remember. I listen with all of my heart.
Have you ever sat trying to communicate with someone who speaks another language? You may gesture, nod, talk more loudly and get the gist of the message, but much is missing when we are not speaking a shared langauge. Music, dance, chanting and art help us to bridge the gap.
Yoga entered my life in my early 20ʻs and it has taught, and continues to teach me, much about embodiment and the sacred. The path of yoga that I most commonly practice is Anusara, which is from the non-dual, Tantric tradition. Anusara invites us to align ourselves with the wisdom of nature, to embody the sacred, to put ourselves into the shapes of the Gods and Goddesses, to learn the myths and mantras that hold wisdom for how to live in right relationship. It has moral and spiritual principles for guidance. Practicing with others provided a sense of community. I continue to practice to this day. Yoga has taught me the power of discipline and persisence over time. A little bit every day.
Yoga has taught me the practice and precision of chanting as a path to transforming consciousness. I learned to chant in Sanskrit, the language that Jesus Christ spoke. I love yoga and how it makes me feel and the teachings it provides for how to navigate the challenges of life.
My yoga life is one of community, of Spirit and embodiment. It is a home for me and my body to return to again and again. I feel better, more grounded, flexible, present and connected. There are altars and intentions, much like our Goddess circles and Sweatlodge ceremony. Life is a prayer and an offering to the sacred. I am grateful to all my yoga teachers.
Yet, I donʻt live in India or identify as Hindu and neither do my yoga teachers. The mountains and rivers of the stories are far away and not known to me personally. My Sweatlodge teacher was not Lakota. There were pieces here for me to learn from and grow from, but I did not feel integrated in a way I knew was possible. There was still this divide, this separation that my bones are yearning to knit together into a cohesive whole.
I yearn to be indigenous to a place.
Author Robin Wall Kimmer says, “For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your childrenʻs future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual depended upon it”.
- Kimmer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Canada, Milkweed Editions 2013, pg 9
Indigenous to me feels like worthiness and belonging; that my connection to land is something I can claim and participate in, one I can offer my whole heart to. It is a connection which no one can take away from me, where I canʻt be burned at the stake, ostracized, othered, doubted, excommunicated or shunned.
I want to belong to the land.
“I want to stand by the river in my finest dress. I want to sing, strong and hard, and stomp my feet with a hundred others so that the waters hum with our happiness. I want to dance for the renewal of the world”.
- Kimmer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Canada, Milkweed Editions 2013, page 251
In 2004 I began studing within a school of Shamanism, rooted in the Andean tradition. My study over the next 13 years took me deep. Again, I found a community on a spiritual path. What I appreciate about the Andean cosmology is the balance of masculine and feminine, left side and right side, gold and silver, Incari and Qollari wisdom. My Goddess practices had come to feel too one sided, and they were. This same wisdom of complementary opposites reverberates in the intelligence of the Sweatlodge, the Sacred Pipe and Yoga.
I was initiated in ceremony as an Earthkeeper. We created our medicine bundles known as Misha or Mesa. I love the translation of Misha to “knot of light”.
I loved the ceremony, when the candle light was low and we gathered in community to invoke the Divine. It felt like magic opened in those spaces. We journeyed through drums and rattles to the realms of our ancestors to listen to their wisdom. We journeyed to the realms of the nature beings and were offered medicine and council. We committed ourselves to our own healing journey and to becoming our ancestors wildest dreams. We shared with each other in a manner that felt as deep and rich as any community I have been a part of. We built our medicine bundles, connected to our healing journey, to the lineage of Earthkeepers and to the land.
In my early years learning and praciticing the Andean path, none of my teachers were from ʻQeros or Peru. It was all coming through a filter rather than through direct lineal ties. Very, very occasionally, Andean Masters were brought to the U.S. from Peru for a short experience. I also traveled to Peru twice. In Peru I felt the deep resonance of home, of connection of people, culture, spirit, food and language. The experience was profound but difficult to integrate in a meaningful way in Utah. The Ute and Shoshone have been so forcefully removed from the land, the food ways destroyed and spiritual practices colonized. It feels like a tearing, a void, a vacancy on the land.
My journey took an even deeper dive in 2020 when I had the opportunity to attend classes in the heart of the computer with 8 ʻQero masters. What they gave to me is immeasurable. They showed me, through their consciousness, how to belong to the Earth, to make offerings from the heart.
This was the most direct teaching that I had from the actual indigenous people who carried the traditions in their language, families, food and culture. They live on the land and their ancestoral wisdom flows through them and every practice everyday. Their medicines grow on the land where they live, their clothing and adornment is directly tied to the environment. The chants, songs, seasonal celebrations are of the land and the people – inextricably tied together. We had an exquisite Quechua to English interpretor who poured forth the sumaq quasay, the delicious energy, of the teachings.
I had a number of revelations during this course of study.
The first was that to make offerings to the land from my heart, gather from the land. There is no need to go to the store. Up until that moment I had been attempting to replicate the offerings I had seen in Peru and in my classes; full of corn, quinoa, sugar candies, carnations. They are beautiful, truly. My ʻQero masters invited me into deeper relationship with the land where I am, not simply mimicking, copying their connection to their land. I gathered acorn and pine nuts, watercress and mosses. My offerings brought me closer to the land, which is the whole point.
The second revelation has to do with calling to the nature beings through a practice the ʻQero call Waqariquy. Again, in the school of Andean Shamanism where I studied, we mimicked and copied our teachers and called to the mountains sacred to the ʻQero; Asungate, Sulkantay, Wamanlipa. We called to the nature beings of Peru, siraquenti, otorongo, apucheen. I will always hold dear the thunderous wisdom that poured forth from my ʻQero masters, “donʻt call our mountains, call your own.” Seriously! Of Course!! Call my own mountains, my waters, the nature beings all around me.
The third revelation is related to worthiness and permission, permission for me, a white woman from Utah, whoʻs family immigrated from Virginia, East Texas, and Louisiana to find my way back to the practices and ancestral wisdom of the earth. One of my ʻQero teachers said (through our interpretor), “I donʻt know who youʻre waiting for to give you permission, but if you need it, I give it to you. Go forth, call to your nature beings, make offerings from your heart, speak in your own language. Love the land and receive her wisdom. Give wholeheartedly and receive wholeheartedly. This is our one and only Law, the law of ayni” (sacred reciprocity).
Belonging to the earth is my birthright.
Yet, what to call my nature beings? I did not know their names, so thoroughly they had been colonized; Prospector Hill, Silver Creek, Poison Creek, Ensign Hill, Jupiter Peak, Mount Olympus, Castle Valley. I would gather and make offerings to the land and waters and call in my own language to them. They would respond with so much love and delight that someone remembered. The response would come in the wind, in the fluttering of leaves, in shells and bird flight and the animation of the natural world. I felt it deeply in my bones.
Robin Wall Kimmer shares a similar experience, a sadness in having lost her Potawami language of animacy.
“As a young person, I spoke to him with a heavy heart, lamenting that I had no native language with which to speak to the plants and the places I love. “They love to hear the old language,” he said, “itʻs true.” “But,” he said, with fingers on his lips, “You donʻt have to speak it here.” “If you speak it here,” he said, patting his chest, “they will hear you.”
- Kimmer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Canada, Milkweed Editions 2013, pg 59
It is through a language that arises from the environment that we can feel most connected to the land and the Gods and Goddesses who have chosen to become embodied therein.
“But to become native to this place, if we are to survive here, and our neighbors too, our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy, so that we might truly be at home”.
- Kimmer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Canada, Milkweed Editions 2013, pg 58
A friend of mine desired a house and land blessing, preferrably from a person who is a lineal descendent of the land in northern Utah. I had met a Ute elder and ceremonialist on a Zoom call and we had become Facebook friends. I reached out to him and he agreed to come – to travel 2 hours to meet us and offer a blessing as a pure gift. What an incredible act of generosity he gave to us.
We sat in a circle in the drying autumn grass, underneath the Cottonwood trees along the Weber river (named for the fur trapper, John Weber – sigh...).
I remember him calling to the directions and the nature beings – in Ute. How long has it been since they were called by their TRUE names in the Rhodes Valley of Utah? Too, too long. They responded in thunderous fashion, waves of energy arising and moving over the land, an upwelling in the heart. Our circle became a temple of trees, and the Divine that is embodied in all things, answered, and joined us. I heard the deep gratitude of the land in my heart, “Thank you for bringing him here. Thank you for calling us in the language of the land. Peendooweep – Mother Earth.”
This is what it feels like to have language, people, culture and land connected together. This is the power the colonialists sought to break through removal and boarding schools and genocide and the destruction of the buffalo.
My bones know this level of connection. They remember.
I had felt this before, in Peru and in Hawaiʻi, where the people, language, culture, food and spirituality are still cohesive, despite the efforts of colonization.
People ask me why I chose to move to Hawaiʻi and this essay is a long way of answering that simple question.
I had the incredible fortune of visiting Kauaʻi over the course of my life with my parents and others who would join us on various vacations. What I remember is that I had never felt more like myself than when I was in Hawaiʻi. When I met my husband, we starting traveling to Hawaiʻi Island (also known as Moku o Keawe and the Big Island). We came every every year, sometimes more often. Anytime we had the time and money to come, we would. About 3 days into our visit I would start to feel a sadness, “oh no, Iʻm going to have to leave”. We would book our next trip before we left because I couldnʻt bear to get on the plane without knowing Iʻd be back. I would dream about Hawaiʻi and ache to be here. It became stronger and unrelenting. I made offerings to this place and asked for her blessing to move here.
Our move in 2023 was a glide-path with so much ease it felt like the hand of the Divine was orchestrating every move.
Back in 2004, in my studies of Andean Shamanism, I was guided on a journey to find my guiding star. I do not come from a star oriented culture. The more that Utah has developed, the less I could see of the night sky. I went outside at night and looked up. There, off the handle of the Big Dipper, was a bright, twinkling star. She shimmered gold and green and blue and pink. “That is my star!” I didnʻt know her name. A dear friend, who is a stargazer said, “that is Arcturus”. Wherever I am in the world, I look up and recognize Arcturus as a guiding force.
Since my move to Moku o Keawe, Hawaiʻi Island, I have been devouring books on Hawaiian culture. I am simply voracious in my desire to read, learn, practice and integrate. Hawaiʻi is a star culture. Stars guide the timing of everything; agriculture, fishing, ceremony, seasons and voyaging. As above so below. I read an amazing book about the Hōkūleʻa called Hawaiki Rising by Sam Lowe. It is a story about the revitalization of the Hawaiian culture in the 70ʻs and the importance of the building and journeying of a traditional voyaging canoe.
“Embedded in the story of Hōkūle’a and the culture that created her is the story of a 2000-year-old relationship with special islands and the sea. It is a story that was almost lost, and was close to extinction. But ultimately it is a story of survival, rediscovery, and the restoration of pride and dignity. It is a story of a society revaluing its relationship to its island home. It is a story that is crucially important as the world’s populations struggle with the ability to live in balance with our island that we call Earth. It is a story that is still being written for our children and all future generations”.
- https://worldwidevoyage.hokulea.com/voyages/our-story/
Imagine, if you will, the energy that ran through my system when I read that Hōkūle’a was named after the star that sits right over the island of Hawaiʻi. It is the star that guided the first voyagers to this place 1,000 years ago. Another name for Hōkūle’a is Arcturus.
I hope you can feel, dear reader, the fullness of Spirit that lives in me through my experience of living in Hawaiʻi. It is such a privilege to learn the place names and to be able to call them and develop a relationship, to learn the oli (chants) and mele (songs) and look out my window and see the very nature beings for which these oli and mele were written. It is such a privilege to meet people who have generational ties going back 17, 30 generations to the land, to know the growers who grow our food, to grow my own food. I attend community gatherings and performaces where everyone holds hands and sings in Hawaiian together. I attend panel discussions where the whole room rises and chants together. Tears stream down my face with the incredible beauty of it all.
At my sonʻs school they have a series of events called Wā Pilina. They are designed to weave connections between people, land and culture. They have been incredibley helpful for me to learn how to integrate and resonate with the people, practices and land. The very first event was about place names – true names, Hawaiian names. Now I greet the hills, mountains, streams, anchiliene ponds by their names; Hōkūʻula not Buster Brown, Kalāhuipuaʻa, Waikoloa, Puʻu Ohu, Pua Kailima o Kawaihae not LSD. Proper names are important. The hydrology, geography, history and agricultural systems are all intertwined with the place names. How glorious to live within a culture that values this intelligence.
The second Wā Pilina event I attended was a Ti Leaf Lei making workshop – so we would know how to make offerings to sacred places, Wahi Pana, in the right way. At my childʻs school the PTO is putting on events to learn place names and how to make offerings – are you kidding me? I am in heaven, truly.
The third Wā Pilina event I attended was to a Wahi Pana in Waimea, known as Mana Ua. I was invited to attend. There is a cultural practice that I see visitors donʻt seem to understand, that I didnʻt fully understand until I moved here and got really curious and humble.
The Hawaiian way is to ask permission before entering a space; of both the nature beings and the people. We wait for an invitation from someone who has the pilina (connection) to the place to make an invitation for us to visit. Just like our homes, we wouldnʻt be ok if the public wandered in and out of our homes at will. It is respectful and decent to wait for an invitation. This is also true for special places in Hawaiʻi. There are places I want to go, that I have not yet gone, because I am waiting for the invitation to do so. It imbues the experience with so much meaning, energy and aliveness. I invite you to consider this if you choose to visit; especially places like Mauna Kea, Waipiʻo and Pololu Valley.
Remember, Dear Reader, that where you live is sacred and there is a manner of living that is whole, integrated, connected and honoring of the land, culture, people, language and food of the place.
“But to become native to this place, if we are to survive here, and our neighbors too, our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy, so that we might truly be at home”.
- Kimmer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Canada, Milkweed Editions 2013, pg 58
I am currently taking a hula course. It is not the hula of resort lūʻau, it is something much deeper and more powerful. It is the hula I first witnessed in 2019 at the camp to protect Mauna Kea from continued descecration through the development of the Thirty Meter Telescope. It blew my mind, “this is hula”? Hula as ritual, hula as activism, hula as power. It is stretching me in the best of ways. My Kumu Hula speaks often about resonating with a place – learning the language, practicing the protocols (appropriate behavior) so that we can be respectful to the land and the people. I am so grateful to my path that has laid a foundation that assists me in resonating with this place. I am a humble student of Hawaiʻi and she is teaching me a lot.
Wherever you are on our blessed Mother Earth, may you find your pathway to hear her voice, to love her as a relative, as kin. May all your relations know your care; waters, estuaries, gardens, hills, fields, parks and streams. May we find the ways in which to invite and make space for the indigenous people and their voices in our communities for they hold the worldview and the wisdom we need to connect with our environment so we can shift our course that has led to so much destruction. Every act, large and small, is felt. Go outside, greet the enviorment around you, make offerings from your heart with the materials at hand, try to learn the true names of the place that are held in the memory and culture of the lineal descendants of the land.
Things to Remember by Chris Taylor
you did not come here to pay bills and die
nor did you come to build the fortunes
of those destroying the Earth
Imagine instead
that you came to gather precious things
fallen from the pockets of Ancient Ones
as they fled the desert’s march -
each a reminder of something
they pledged never to forget
Things like
how to call birds by name with your whistle
which news to tell the bees
and which to share only with the moon
how to tell a parliament from a conspiracy
a colony from a convocation
Things like
Nature has no race or nation, class or creed
except when humans seek to deceive -
division designed to sever you
from kith and kin and buddha-mind
Things like:
the antidote to oppression
is not freedom but belonging
the opposite of domination is communion
the medicine you need
is always outside your door
and there’s likely a wise woman
two streets away
to show you how to use it
These things were left to help us remember
how each world before has ended
and how each death became a door to new life
and how this world wants to take you in her arms
and make of you a lover
and have you listen to the land
talk to the stream
find meaning in the silence of trees
and wisdom on the singing breeze
Listen awhile to discover
the right season for all the ten thousand things
the ninety-nine names we use for our own divinity
how to share power
so it cannot be captured by the vain and greedy
how to step into the flow of life
and make of the Earth a common treasury for all beings
how to map the stars
learn the lesson of each constellation
and still know there is more in heaven and earth
than any of us were ever meant to know
So fill your pockets as this world dies
knowing some of it will guide you to the next
and some will fall to the ground
in time to be found
by those who’ll bring the world back to life.
Chris Taylor, 1/1/24
With Heart,
Mary Christa
To my teachers, too numerous to name. Thank you.
