Ritual for the Waters - Saturday, March 22

This Ritual for the Waters has been inspired by the Dagara tradition of Burkina Faso as taught by Malidoma Somé, and is being hosted on World Water Day, March 22. Meet at noon at the fire rings on Ocean Beach (between stairs 15-20, opposite The Beach Chalet).

Why This Ritual, and Why now?

In recent months, we have felt ourselves concerned by the pollution and the radiation flowing into the "blue heart of the planet"; by its exploitation and declining health; by the disappearing plant and algae, fungi, microbial, animal species; by the collapsing marine ecosystems. We have felt ourselves angry and indifferent and confused and despairing and heartbroken.

In the Dagara cosmology, actions we take in this world are reinforced and energized when taken in right relationship with the other worlds -- when the other worlds are on our side.

This ritual intends to recall and regenerate our relationship with the other worlds, as also with the waters. Through this ritual for the waters, we seek to offer those ones the depth of our emotions -- our waters -- in this moment of planetary crisis; we seek to bring forth the clarity of heart and vision that will enable us -- as children of this planet, as interdependent and interexisting living beings -- to ask that the ocean bring forth healing.

Through this ritual, we ask that love may undergird every interaction we have with the waters on this planet.

Join Us

We invite those who resonate with this intention to join us, in person or wherever you are (tuning in via a body of water, a bowl of water), and we ask you to invite others who may also feel called to join.

We will connect our intentions with other healers, eco-activists, and elders who are also on this day, in these times, asking for the healing of our relationship to the waters of the planet -- outside and within us.

Details

Please bring sound/rhythm instruments and prayers; your grief and complex of emotions; pictures or images of ancestors; red cloth.

Zayin Cabot and Monica Mody are your point people to contact and to look for at the ritual.

Please write to Zayin at westcoastmalidoma@gmail.com or Monica at monica.mody@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Book Review: Wild Earth, Wild Soul

In modern culture, when we have forgotten the ways that once the ancients knew, we need books such as Wild Earth, Wild Soul: A Manual for an Ecstatic Culture to help us remember. I am reading this book through a second significant summer spent in India, the land of my birth, and have again and again found myself feeling utterly grateful to have such a wise, clear-eyed companion on my journey, a companion of the sort that urges us to form deeper relationships with all we encounter and with ourselves even as we traverse worlds, landscapes, cultures. It has reminded me that no matter where I am, I am not far from the medicine of Earth. 

Manuals for good living--with their pragmatic approach--make up a distinct genre, pointing to the values that are important for a cultural moment. Bill Pfeiffer's visionary manual is not just a delineation of exercises and activities for an ecstatic culture--although it is that too; rather, it is helping co-create, usher in the very world it is dreaming about. This manual does not want to tie its co-dreamers down to a particular way of doing things; rather, it is an invitation to participate, to play. It is an invitation to acknowledge the tremendous grief that so many of us feel on account of being disconnected from nature, from our indigenous selves. It is an invitation to compost this grief into the possibility of creating a life-sustaining culture.

The Wild Earth Intensives (WEIs) that Pfeiffer has been facilitating over the years model a contemporary rites of passage, and this book is almost an alchemical container where the principles, philosophy, structure, and practices comprising these workshops, which Pfeiffer beautifully elucidates, come together to become a powerful remembering of our interconnectedness with nature and with each other, of the sacrality of nature and of each other. 

This is a book that trusts our innate capacity to co-create with the creative intelligence of the cosmos--it trusts in our capacity to yet transform the stultifying, often violent dominant paradigm with its allegiance to rationalism, mechanism, and global capitalism. I am grateful to Bill Pfeiffer for having written this book--for having enough optimism and faith in human beings to have written this book--and I am grateful to all his teachers, all his communities, all his relations for having accompanied him in all that led to the creation of this book.

We are all cognizant of the urgency. Here are our edges. We need wildness, we need profound love, if we are to continue dancing on this planet. We need guides to help us find our way out of the morass of industrial culture. Here is a guide I will turn to over and over again.

Get it on Amazon