Page 40 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

singing. I am ecstatic. As I look around at the fifty or so colleagues gathered

around me, they too are excited and awestruck. They wait for me to speak but I

am speechless, humbled, and incredulous. Many moments pass and finally I

say: “Well then...we must keep singing together”.

This dream suggests a paradigm shift that could be the medicine for our time. It

is a dream about kinship, not only amongst those in the white coats who, when

joined in song together, become the true medicine women and men of their

calling, but towards the poison itself—a profound teaching about right

relationship and how this might restore, diminish, or balance the damage we

have already caused. In the kinship of singing together, our hearts are opened

and love becomes, rightfully so, the center of our healing presences and

medicine bundles.

Right now, we are all endangered species. There has never been a time when it

was more urgent to restore a way of living that honors all life. A cultural meme of

our indigenous ancestors, “honor all life” is very different from “thou shalt not kill”-

- a religious commandment about individual responsibility with individual

repercussions for disobedience. “Honor all life” is explicitly about kinship, with

broad implications for taking care of and respecting all beings. It implies that we

are part of something larger than ourselves and as such, we must be

accountable to the larger community of life. Somewhere along the way we have

forgotten about this most basic and profound way of living.

To honor the guidance of the dream, what would it look like if we began to

incorporate kinship as a way of life and as a way of healing large and small?

Beyond simply utilizing natural and safer treatment options, to be in alliance with

all the life around us might be the essential change required. To be in

relationship with the infection, the cancer, the metabolic imbalance, the

technology that has come to show us the path toward healing. Or to choose a

treatment path that is not just best for self but takes into consideration where the

medicine came from and where it might go after it leaves the body. Offering