Page 147 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue2

“If you allow us to help you, we might be able to turn you into a true human being.” I say this in a half-­‐

joking manner, but I am serious. This community of people who know how to take care of the earth,

who have learned not to do any unnecessary harm, are his best hope for healing his angry, wounded

heart.

My understanding of our global culture at this time is that it is predominantly shaped and controlled by

an immature wounded masculine energy. We humans are not grown up yet, do not know how to live

wisely and compassionately with our resources and one another. Some people know more about what

might be possible than others, and much of this knowledge seems to be held by certain elders and

communities who are committed to guarding the earth. Communities can do what individuals cannot,

as this dream suggests. Communities can heal individuals who are doing harm to others due to their

own unhealed trauma. Communities can stop fracking and block the Keystone pipeline. Communities

can heal our poisoned waters, lands and air, by holding companies accountable for the effects of their

actions, by refusing to allow them to continue environmentally unsound practices. Communities can

stop our politicians from sacrificing our long-­‐term future for short-­‐term benefits for the extremely

wealthy minority.

I also believe that the spirits, who have been with us since the very beginning of our human journey,

offering to teach us how to live in right relationship to our ecosystems and other species, are essential

to whatever possibilities might emerge. Corrective visions, such as the one I had on Joseph Mountain,

have come for centuries to communities and their seers, shamans, and medicine people, when people

were no longer living in right relationship to the earth. Black Elk, the famed Lakota medicine man,

shared such a vision from his time about how European life practices would destroy indigenous ways of

living harmoniously with the plants and animals.

There once was a Lakota holy man, called Drinks Water, who dreamed what was to be; this was long

before the coming of the Wasichus (Europeans). He dreamed that the four-­‐leggeds were going back

into the earth and that a strange race had woven a spider web all around the Lakotas. And he said:

“When this happens, you shall live in square gray houses, in a barren land, and beside those square

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