I am letting go of everything unnecessary from my life

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am Ito be, brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabalous? Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world there's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us; It's not just in some of us It's in EVERYONE! And as we let our own light shine We unconcsiously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear our presence automatically liberates others! (Nelson Mandela,1994 Inaugural Speech)

: "In the midst of war and tragedy, I walk the rocky hillside sowing clover." (In a dark time, the eye begins to see) Wendell Berry It is the small things that we're all doing that is making a big difference -we're weaving a new fabric. The key is to be able to take in the pain and the tragedy and all the problems we see and not be paralyzed by it; not to shut it out. The enormity of the task can serve to motivate us to move to new levels of commitment and action. To be people of hope is to give the greatest gift we have to our children. Having a positive image of the future is critical to being able to act. If we have only a negative image of the future then we become paralyzed. We must sow the clover - the seeds of hope - in our children. Story: A lady in the arid east planted a date tree seed at age 80. It was a profound act of hope. It takes 80 years +or a date tree to grow and develop to the point that it produces even a single date. If you don't understand that process then there is no way you could plant such a seed. You wouldn't understand what is happening to the tree. Most of the 80 years the tree looks like it's dead. You might cut it down if you didn't know. You must understand that the process involves breakdown and suffering and death. Many are looking at the problems around the world and saying that all these problems are due to greed and materialism and sin and evil, or saying "we are an inherently aggressive or evil people. We're a mistake. We're condemned." If we try to sustain our energies out of guilt or out of this overwhelming sense of defeat then we won't make it for the long haul. Thomas Berry has tried to explain why we see so much breakdown. He says that there is a crisis in our cosmology - our basic story about the nature of the universe. Every culture has such a story. This story shapes the identity of the culture and the social structures that the society creates. It is the source of meaning. Berry says that our cosmology in the 'West is outmoded and dysfunctional. Our whole way of viewing the universe is causing unprecedented destruction in our natural and human Environments. Our greatest task may be to reshape our cosmology. The cosmology of native people(peoples) is an example of how it can shape a whole society. They believed that the Earth was the Great Spirit. The Great Spirit lived inside the Earth. The Earth was made of spirit. Anything that lived and breathed was participating in the G. S. Their stories enabled them to understand the nature of the universe as being primarily spiritual. The Earth was the mother, it was alive, it was the womb. Everything that came out of the womb was a relative. That was their basic science. Their religion, ethic, economic and social system had to be consistent with this basic definition of the world. It never occurred to them to own property - to buy and sell the womb. They lived here for some 4,000 years. Their relationship to Earth was obviously different. They didn't develop the material world. They didn't regard the world as a thing. They spent their time developing the inner person. In the West, our cosmology, our whole structure of thought, our way of seeing the universe had a obvious impact upon what has taken place in western civilization. The West saw the divine as something out there or up there but not in this ordinary world - the spirit realm was in another place. The human was also spirit but he had to transcend the world in order to link up with the divine. The place where that divine human connection occurred was in a spirit realm. The world wasn't included in this picture. The world was alien to that connection. The world was seen as just -a material reality. The world was seen as just stuff, a place. That perception made us detached from the Earth. We were free to probe, explore and analyze it and rearrange it. We discovered things about the Earth's physical energies. The more we learned, the more we could apply them - more and more was revealed. This is the story of science and technology from the wheel to the computer. That perception enabled us to take what we thought was the last part of this great physical machine: the atom, and split it. Since that took place, the physicists have been talking about the inner spaces within that began to sound a lot like what the Indians were telling us. Science today tells us that all of the earlier assumptions about the separateness of all things no longer works. (from the fate of the earth) Sister M. McGillie My Note: Yes the Sacred Circle and all that it teaches shows us another way. so in small ways we weave a new fabric and a new hope. OOOOOOO