On Monday morning I awoke before dawn and somehow managed to crawl out of bed, fumble my jeans and boots on, and sling my drum and backpack – the one that has become the indefinite home for my first aid kit, a patchwork bag of herbal tinctures, a squirt bottle half-full of milk of magnesia, a bottle of bubbles, and some lavender essential oil – over my shoulder.

As I checked my back pocket one more time for my ID and locked the back door, the clock on the microwave read 5:08 AM. By 5:39 AM, I was snaking through the dark streets of West Oakland in what seemed to me to be a much-too-small crowd, mostly quiet except the occasional heartbeat of a lone drum or the sleepy but hopeful cheer that rose up as we passed under the overpass of Mandela Parkway. It was somehow comforting to hear our own voices echoing off the walls – it helped us remember our power.

You better believe I was asking myself the same questions that CNN, the Huffington Post, the BBC, and Mayor Quan had that morning: Why on earth are we doing this? Are you absolutely out of your gourd, trying to shut down all of the major ports on the West Coast?

I led a nature divination workshop in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum a few years ago. I asked the group first to ground and center, then remind themselves of their oracular question, and then simply look around at the marshland where we had gathered. One woman decided to ask two questions rather than just one.

She stationed herself on a boardwalk overlooking the marsh, closed her eyes and asked: “How can I find the time and energy to enjoy my life, given the fact that I am extremely busy with work right now?” When she opened her eyes, she immediately noticed the swaying grasses and rushes in front of her and realized that she, too, could be flexible like these plants. She could go with the flow and fit pleasure into the small cracks in her work life.

Then she closed her eyes again and asked: “What should I do about my nephew?” Opening her eyes on the same scene less than a minute later, she noticed a large tree in the middle distance that appeared sturdy and deeply-rooted. Yes, she thought to herself, I could provide this teenager with the kind of stability this tree represents if I open my home to him.

My student’s experience exhibits the extent to which her insight depended on her own perception. Because she was looking for different types of feedback, at the same place and at almost the same time, she noticed two very different images.

To see more divination cards, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.

This is exactly the type of experience I wanted to foster when several years ago I proposed a project to my daughter, the painter Linnea Vedder. My idea was a deck of divination cards that helps people access their own insight. Linnea illustrated the cards and I wrote the accompanying book. We call it The World Is Your Oracle.

Permaculture for Starhawk is a practical application of Paganism. This is the link that connects the Goddess(es) and our vegetable gardens. The Goddess, as we know her within Wicca and other forms of Paganism, represents the cycles of birth – growth – death – decay – and regeneration, exactly the cycles that permaculture deals with in a more pragmatic way.

To say that the Goddess is sacred doesn’t mean you have to believe in something outside of yourself, according to Starhawk. It simply means that you need to shift your attitude towards viewing these natural cycles as amazing, even miraculous. Spiritually, we need to pay attention to how they’re happening around us all the time. They are the ways we connect with each other most deeply and with all other life forms on the planet. If we approach them with awe, reverence, and respect, these natural processes will lead us into ways of living and working that will create more health, abundance, beauty, and biodiversity as well as more joy and freedom on the planet. And if we don’t, Starhawk admonishes, we’ll get the mess we’re in today.

Starhawk was generous with her time while she was here in Madison a month ago. She granted me two interviews, the first about Palestine and the second — which I will begin to post today now that I’m back from my vacation — about permaculture. For those of you who don’t know her, Starhawk is the best-known Wiccan author alive today. She’s published eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, which introduced many of us to Wicca. From the beginning of her career, she’s been very involved as an activist, and since the 1990s she’s been most active in promoting permaculture.

Star came to permaculture as a natural outgrowth of her Paganism. After many years in the Goddess movement — where we declared that the Earth was a sacred, living organism that manifests Herself in the cycles of birth, growth, death, and regeneration that occur in all of nature, including our own human culture — Star discovered permaculture. She soon realized it was a practical application of her spiritual path.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused Israel of increasing its arbitrary repression of Palestinian non-violent activism lately. Abdullah Abu Rahma’s arrest — which I reported on in the second segment of my interview with Starhawk — is part of this crack-down in Bil’in, Nil’in, and Ramallah, where grassroots demonstrations have begun to mobilize Palestinians, Israelis, and international solidarity against the wall being built between the occupied territories and Israel. According to HRW,

Israel is building most of the barrier inside the West Bank rather than along the Green Line, in violation of international humanitarian law. In recent months, Israeli military authorities have arbitrarily arrested and denied due process rights to several dozen Palestinian anti-wall protesters.

Starhawk believes that the Israeli government fears this non-violent resistance more than the violent action they’ve contended with for years. Why? Because the government knows the movement’s power to shift public opinion and mobilize people against Israeli injustice. These grassroots efforts undermine several pillars of Israeli control in the occupied territories, according to Starhawk, and start to shatter the story that Palestinians are all evil terrorists.

Like most Jewish kids in postwar America, Starhawk grew up believing that Israel was the salvation of the Jewish people. She collected pennnies to plant trees in the Holy Land, learned Israeli folk songs and Israeli dances, and dreamed of going to Israel. At 15 she finally attended a Zionist program in Israel.

Star believes that she was raised with a compelling story — that Jews were kicked around for 2,000 years, almost exterminated in the Holocaust, and out of those ashes, finally got their own land again. “And by God,” she adds, “nobody’s going to take an inch of it away from us.” This is a persuasive story for many people, according to Starhawk. But unfortunately, the Palestinians aren’t in it.

For Starhawk, as for many American Jews of her age, it was painful to face the injustice that Israel was carrying out against the Palestinian people. Star senses that much of this injustice stems on a deep psychological level from an inability to see the Palestinian people as people — with their own humanity, their own rights, their own desires and flaws. Denying Palestinians that full range of humanity — and acknowledging that their ranks include the good, the bad, the vicious, the kind, the compassionate — is at the root of the unjust treatment they receive. Seeing every Palestinian as a suicide bomber who wants to kill an Israeli will not resolve this conflict. Nor will denying the existence of the Palestinians.

Starhawk hopes that another compelling narrative will begin to take the place of the one that she grew up with. This is a tale that’s very familiar to readers of Tikkun. It’s the story that Judaism stands for justice, for the regneration of the world, for tikkun olam. This, too, is a powerful story. And Star believes that if we can call people back to that story — as painful as it is to face the truth of what Israel has done to Palestine — then we can actually stop this injustice.

For those of you who don’t know her, Starhawk is the best-known Wiccan author alive today. She’s published eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, which introduced many of us to Wicca. And from the beginning of her career, she’s been very involved as an activist, most recently supporting Palestinians in the occupied territories.

After spending last week with Starhawk, I realized that she’s a “meta-activist,” a node of many different types of activism, and a font of knowledge about how to act most effectively when demonstrating, educating, and building a new world. She’s been active in the women’s movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, in creating greater sustainability and a permaculture for the Earth, as well as in supporting Palestinian non-violence for the creation of a Palestinian state. Fortunately for all of us, as an active workshop presenter, Star has been passing along what she’s learned in all these areas. I interviewed her about two of those movements, the two p’s: Palestine and permaculture, and want to share those interviews over the next few days, beginning with her thoughts about Palestine.

This past December, Star planned to participate in the Gaza Freedom March, a demonstration of 1,400 people from 38 different countries that included a large contingent from France. The purpose of this gathering was to bring in much-needed humanitarian supplies as well as to call attention to the inhumane conditions in Gaza after the yearlong Israeli blockade that followed their bombing of Gaza.

As you may recall, Israel attacked about a year ago in response to rockets that Hamas shot into Israeli settlements. As Star reiterated in her comments, the international demonstrators came to support Palestinian non-violent resistance to Israel, and in no way condoned Hamas’ hostility. But Israeli aggression a year ago worsened an already difficult situation in Gaza, killing 1400 people, destroying 4,000 homes and 88 public buildings. Since then the Israeli blockade has kept needed supplies from reaching Palestinians in Gaza, resulting in abject poverty, malnutrition, and bad drinking water, as well as a lack of building materials and equipment to rebuild the devastated area. The state of affairs has deteriorated to the point where Gaza has become essentially an open-air prison with little to keep it going.

Growing up I believed that you could get either love OR respect in life, but not both. This was my mother’s understanding of the way the world worked — one she taught me from day one — and maybe it was true for her or even for women of her generation. But over the years, I’ve discovered that without respect, love is a hollow sweetness, and that without love, respect can result in a distance that undoes its best intentions.

These insights came back to me Sunday at First Unitarian Society in Madison as I listened to our associate minister Karen Gustavson offer one of her best sermons ever. It was well-crafted, contained great stories and great intelligence, but I disagreed completely with what she had to say. The sermon was also about a topic that I care about with every cell in my body — about our need to love and care for the Earth. And so I feel compelled to present a different viewpoint.

We in the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) are considering changes in the language of our “Principles and Purposes,” the statements that guide our work together as an association of free, but interdependent congregations. Karen was responding on Sunday to the rewording of the seventh principle, a change that would substitute the word reverence for the word respect in the phrase “we covenant to honor and uphold … respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” She made an effective appeal for retaining the original language –respect — because she believes that to revere something implies a certain passivity — true for our fundamentalist brethren, but not for me and other people on the left hand of God — while respect indicates an active response. Obviously, this is not my experience.

What all Unitarian Universalists want in this rewrite of the seventh principle is language that reflects care for the Earth as a religious imperative, not an optional activity.

As many of my readers know, I feel incredibly lucky to live in Madison, where wild birds and animals are plentiful. In fact, my first post on this blogsite last summer concerned a mink I saw in my backyard. Lately I’ve been enjoying a gaggle of turkeys in our neighborhood (or a covey or flock — whatever it’s called).They sleep in the trees close to our house and feed on the nearby golf course during the day. I’ve never had any trouble with them, but some folks have recently found them aggressive. Four people out walking were chased by several, and a child walking to and from school was harassed as well. When a bird reaches the height of four feet with a six-foot wingspan, they can appear quite menacing. And since turkeys can run up to 25 mph and fly at 55 mph, they’re a force to be reckoned with.

One of the reasons for this problem is that some of my neighbors have been feeding them. This is always a mistake when it comes to wild animals. It’s not that they become domesticated; they just become dependent on our handouts, and lose their natural fear of humans, simultaneously becoming more belligerent. If people want to help turkeys survive our difficult Wisconsin winters, their best bet is to create sustainable habitats for them. When you think about it, this makes sense, since wild turkeys existed in the north woods way before people could think of feeding these birds in winter. In fact, research by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources indicates that even the toughest winter we’ve had in recent years (1995-1996) had a negligible effect on the turkey population. They add:

Turkeys can remain in roosting areas for up to two weeks during especially severe weather and can lose up to forty percent of their body weight before dying of starvation.

I’ve been organizing two Starhawk workshops here in Madison, so that’s why I haven’t been blogging recently. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that I hope to include an interview with her on this site in about two weeks. Who knows whether she’ll talk about Israel and Palestine, permaculture, the WTO, Wicca, or all of the above. She’s a multifaceted person, and the interveiw may be wide-ranging.

In other pagan news, many of you know that the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs had a problem with religious bigotry about five years back. Evangelical Christian cadets harassed other cadets who didn’t share their faith. There were anti-semitic slurs. And one of the chaplains claimed she was fired for criticizing the proselytizing that was going on. Even the Yale Divinity School issued a report on religious intolerance at the academy.

After much work to correct these problems, there seems to be greater openness in Colorado. In a few weeks, Earth-centered religions– including Wicca, Neopaganism, and Druidism — will dedicate their own worship space. This sacred site will increase the collection of worship areas at the academy that already includes Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist chapels. As opposed to the other indoor areas, the pagan site is a lovely stone circle on the top of nearby hill overlooking the academy. It was created by moving some large boulders that originally sat near the Visitor Center. Here’s what it looks like:

I guess I would have missed it altogether. I never watch the Super Bowl. I never watch TV. I don’t subject myself to its violence and idiocy. I get my information by reading, whether on the internet (more and more) or through print media.

But I’m on the NARAL list, so now I know that CBS is going to subject 100 million viewers to an ad from Focus on Family during the Super Bowl. Supposedly CBS has an advocacy ad policy, but when it comes to “the family,” they don’t seem to be abiding by it. If you don’t know about Focus on Family, they’re a right-wing, anti-choice, anti-birth-control, anti-sex-education, anti-gay organization. They’re against pretty much everything I stand for.

The only thing that made me smile about all of this is the following Youtube video from the Raging Grannies:

If you want to sign a petition protesting the Focus on Family ad, you can go to NARAL.

I have a friend who says that February is the longest month of the year. Even though this seems nonsensical, I know what she means. It’s still deep winter, but the holidays are over, the Yule lights have been put away — and there’s nothing much to distract from the bare, white winter landscape except for the frigid deep freeze. The cold keeps us inside more than usual, so many of us get cabin fever, that restless, bored, listless, frustrating desire for something you can’t find unless you flee Wisconsin for the southlands.

February is the fallow time of year, with bleak landscapes that can either be beautiful in their stark simplicity or deadly boring because of their lack of color and activity. No iridescent hummingbirds hover at our back window these days as they did in summer, and the chickadees, nuthatches, juncos and downy woodpeckers who keep me entertained when they come to our feeder are black-and-white just like the season. The occasional cardinal is the exception that proves the rule. As a result of this lack of warmth and color, it can be a long and difficult time until spring.

This is the season of Brigid or Imbolc, the traditional pre-Christian Celtic holiday for this time of year (February 1st or 2nd), a holiday which has come down to us as Groundhog’s Day when Sun Prairie Jimmy (or Punxsutawney Phil) sees his shadow in the sunlight (or doesn’t). Winter is half over (by the calendar at least), but it’s usually the coldest time of the year. Nature seems to be resting and preparing for the new life of spring. Covered with a blanket of snow, seeds that fell in the autumn are protected until spring when they begin to grow. All plant life seems to sleep in the death-like grip of winter, but the days are longer now, and the increasing sun promises the renewal of spring. Just like Jimmy, we emerge a little from our hibernation to look for the light.

Yesterday I posted some ecofeminist reflections on Avatar. Today I want to take on the racism issue that several Goddess Scholars as well as bloggers here at Tikkun Daily have raised. Originally I thought this movie was carefully crafted to bring the (mostly) white audience into an understanding that indigenous people already have — the importance, even sacredness, of their world ecology. The hero is Jake Sully, a human who becomes a Na’vi, thereby moving from one world to the other. He begins by betraying the people who ultimately become his own, so it’s not like his first actions are laudable — he’s actually an anti-hero in the beginning, not meant to be liked. But he realizes his mistake, and fights to rectify the situation.

This plot structure reminded me of one of the most subversive literary strategies I’ve encountered when it comes to women’s issues, used by Jean Auel in Clan of the Cave Bear. Every reader of this book has to identify with the female protagonist Ayla, even men, because she’s the only Cro-Magnon person in it; the rest of the characters are Neanderthals. As a result, men get to experience the degradation of rape, and hopefully understand it from a woman’s perspective.

I think the same sort of thing happens in Avatar. Indigenous folks don’t have any trouble identifying with the Na’vi, but for those white folks for whom that’s a stretch, they can identify with Jake, moving from invader to become a part of the land (indigenous). My first thought was that this narrative strategy might actually win us some allies in our environmental fights. And I recognized it as a part of the strategy that I use in my work — to invite people to become indigenous, i.e. a part of the land they inhabit, something we ALL need to do more of. Pat Monaghan on the Goddess Scholars list summarized this take on the the plot most succinctly by saying

A man, crippled because of his involvement with militaristic capitalism, is helped by five female powers (an Amazonian pilot, a sage scientist, a lover-huntress, a female shaman, and the Goddess herself) to discover that his culture is utterly wrong. Through them, he learns to give up the apparent privilege that comes with the culture and to literally become a being that was not only alien but defined as “enemy.”

I’ve really been enjoying the Avatar discussion, both here on Tikkun Daily and on the Goddess Scholars List I belong to. I waited until I’d seen the film to read any of the posts, because I didn’t want to prejudice my reaction to it.

The GoddessScholars’ discussion reminded me a lot of a Women and Science Fiction class I taught in the 1980s. In my classes I always had a check-in before we began (despite the fact that they were university courses), because then we had deeper discussions. One of the odd things about the Women and Science Fiction class that semester was that there was a sizable minority (about 7 women out of 24) who were big football fans. When they checked in they would say things like, “I’m doing great. The Packers won.” Or: “I’m really down. The Vikings lost.”

The discussion I remembered as I was perusing the GoddessList concerned the subgenre of Sword and Sorcery. This subgenre is a lot like Dungeons and Dragons — magic is real, and life is more or less medieval, and battles take place with swords and magic (and battles take place pretty frequently). When I asked whether the class thought Sword and Sorcery was amenable to a feminist message, there was a clear split between the football fans and the rest of the class. The fans were sure this subgenre could be used to send a feminist message, while the others were astounded that anyone could hold such an opinion when the writing was rampant with violent images of battle.

Like my students, some of the women on the GoddessScholars list believe (as I do) that feminism is only compatible with pacifism, while others think that there are situations where war may be necessary and (perhaps) just. Some of the women on the list are also survivors of interpersonal violence (as I am, as a rape survivor) and didn’t want to submit themselves to film violence that might trigger post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As a result, some of the GoddessScholars have avoided Avatar despite its Goddess content.

I actually hold a different opinion than these polar opposites. Although I’m a pacifist, I believe there can be anti-war literature and films that involve warfare, for e.g. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. War is shown as so horrifying that almost any reader or viewer, even those who started out believing in the possiblity of a just war, ends up repudiating that view.

I’ve been reading the GoddessScholars list and surfing the web looking for eulogies of Mary Daly, the radical feminist theologian (from theos, ancient Greek for God) who made thealogy possible (from thea, ancient Greek for Goddess). And in reading through several of them, I’ve been remembering how important she was to me in the early 1970s. At that point in time, I could buy every book on feminism that came out, and I did. But not each one opened up my mind like Beyond God the Father.

I can tell from my notes that although it was published in 1973, I must have read it in 1974. At that time I was a graduate student in the German Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a founding member of the Feminist Criticism Collective. Feminist literary criticism didn’t exist at that time, so we were creating it as we went along.

Here are just a few of the important ideas I found in Beyond God the Father:

1) That women had “the power of naming stolen from them, and that the liberation of language is rooted in the liberation of ourselves” (p.8)

2) That in the women’s movement, “[W]omen are hearing ourselves and each other, and out of this supportive hearing emerge new words” (p. 8). I guess I must have forgotten that Daly originated this thought, because a couple of years later Nelle Morton said it again as a slogan, and that’s when it stuck for me. Morton said femininst “women were hearing each other into speech.”

3) That we needed to overcome “methodolatry” (p. 11).

Newspaper Vendor

My newspaper this morning gave me hope. And brothers and sisters, that doesn’t happen very often. On the front page, taking up about one third of the sheet, there was an article entitled “Trying to open the ‘inner eye.’” It was a piece that described the new Center for Conscious Living, an offshoot of the Church of Religious Science, which the pastor said is “reinventing the idea of church, with ‘stand you up music,’ meditation, singing, chanting and ‘an inclusive message of self-empowerment.’” Above this article, the top story was about our governor’s clean energy plan, in which 25 percent of the Wisconsin’s energy must come from wind, solar, biomass, or other renewable sources by 2025. My friend Jack Kisslinger, whose website is called Planet for Life, tells me that 25% might be a good number, but it has to be 25% of reduced overall energy consumption. So the governor’s goal is at least a step in the right direction. These days we’re at less than 5%!?! But the miracle is that some of Wisconsin’s business leaders are lining up behind the governor, including executives of Johnson Controls, an auto parts and building products manufacturer. All of this combined with the EPA’s stricter standards for smog-causing pollution made me ebullient.

I’ve been really angry at the Obama administration lately, so it was nice to agree with them for the first time in what seems like months. The last straw for me was Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, coming right on the heels of his announcement about expanding the war in Afghanistan. Until then had I tried to see his incrementalism as “realism.” But Rabbi Michael Lerner‘s editorial in the latest Tikkun, “Afghanistan: Obama Capitulates to the War Makers,” says it all. I agree with Rabbi Lerner that Obama’s announcement represented “a decisive endorsement of the strategy of domination.” And then Obama’s Nobel Prize speech tried to justify his decision by saying that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes, that “Evil does exist in the world.” When Obama used that final phrase, I stopped listening to him. Christopher Hedges‘ article in the same Tikkun, “Celebrity Culture and the Obama Brand,” describes the shift in my opinion at that point: “President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another.” I stopped believing in Brand Obama.

It’s hard to be optimistic given the world situation these days. But I believe that the three stories that filled me with hope today are related in a way that may not be immediately apparent. Without more spiritual exploration, people in this country will have trouble opening their minds to the changes in store for us. And those changes are going to be very fast, whether for the better or for the worse. As I said in a post several months ago,

In 1993 representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church publicly pulled out of the Parliament of World Religions (PWR) to protest the inclusion of “godless” Pagans. They haven’t come back. But that may change if Angie Buchanan has her way.

Angie, as well as two other Pagans — Andras Corban Arthen and Phyllis Curott — are on the 35-member Board of Trustees of the Council of the Parliament of World Religions. They’ve worked diligently to build bridges to other faith traditions since they were elected to the Board — Angie in 2002, Andras in 2006, and Phyllis just this year. As a result of their efforts, Pagans (in which I include Wiccans like myself) are finally coming into our own. I know it’s been a difficult road, and there’s still room for improvement.

But when people develop meaningful personal relationships while working together — as Angie, Andras, and Phyllis have with the Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, American Indians, Protestants, Jains, Baha’is, Zoroastrians, etc. on the Parliament’s Board — they begin to see each others’ religions through the lens of their respect for that other person. That’s a very good thing for Pagans, since so many misconceptions and prejudices exist about us among mainstream religions.

In the past the spectrum of disrespect for Paganism has extended from branding us as Satanists to dismissing us as superstitious. From the perspective of Abrahamic traditions, Paganism has essentially been viewed as a heresy. Thus the Greek Orthodox walk-out. But at this Parliament, Pagans made it very clear that we’re aligned with other indigenous religions. Wiccans and Pagans practice the remnants of the pre-Christian, indigenous religions of Europe. Like other indigenous religions, we practice an Earth-based Nature religion. And like other indigenous religions, ours was persecuted by conquerors, who forced us to go underground during the Christianization of Europe.

Goddess of Willendorf, 22,000-24,00 BCE

I’m surprised that almost none of us blogged about the Parliament of World Religions (PWR) in Melbourne, Australia (12/3 – 12/9). I realize that the US Congress was still discussing the health care bill, Obama had just given his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and the Copenhagen Climate conference was underway. So we all have good excuses.

Here at Tikkun Daily, we heard from Dave Belden, who wrote about Rabbi Michael Lerner’s workshop on the spiritual progressive movement. And Rabbi Lerner also wrote about the great disappointment world spiritual leaders at the PWR felt at Obama’s speech in Oslo. But otherwise, there wasn’t a peep about this important gathering that happens every five years.

For members of my religion — both feminist pagans and members of the Goddess Movement across a variety of faiths — it seems to have been a very exciting experience. From what I’ve read, both the Goddess movement and paganism were well-received, something that has rarely happened before. In fact, Phyllis Curott was quoted on the Women at the Parliament blog site as saying that back in 1993 she had difficulty finding anyone else who would appear on a panel about the Sacred Feminine and very few attended. She went on to say that

Things certainly seem to have changed with this Parliament and the Sacred Feminine was clearly rising!

Every year at winter solstice, I perform in a Interfaith Yule celebration at First Unitarian Society in Madison. Every year I tell a story and sing a song. This year I told a T’salagi (Cherokee) tale explaining why some trees are evergreen. In the spirit of the season, I’d like to share it with you.

In order to really understand the Cherokee story, you need to know that the T’salagi or Cherokee people lived in the southern Appalachian mountains until they were forced onto the “Trail of Tears” by white settlers who wanted their land. This part of the world is extremely luxuriant. In fact, there are more plant species in the mountains of Georgia and the Carolinas than in all of Europe. As a result, the T’salagi — living as they did in harmony with the land — knew a lot about the flora of their native territory and respected its medicine. The evergreens were among the most sacred plants and were only harvested by a shaman for healing purposes.

Another fact also brings this story alive. When Cherokee children went through their rite of passage to adulthood, they participated in a vision quest, during which they were to stay awake for seven days and seven nights. Here’s my retelling of the story: