Steeping in Global Indigenous Wisdom

last Mother Earth practice of the summer

Friends,

I led a beautiful little storytime yesterday at our local library, and the librarian said, “just a few more weeks of Summer left!” and I could hardly believe it. Time is so, so strange, isn’t it? It loops around us, it appears linear, we follow it as best we can, it gets away from us so quickly and feels like it’s slogging by all at once, and suddenly here we are, jolted to reality by a simple phrase, just a few more weeks or it’s almost autumn.

So it’s the perfect time to wrap up our summer series of Mother Earth Practices for Summer.

Let’s get a quick recap of what we’ve learned:

1. Practicing holistic connection: Everyone has an opportunity to practice reciprocity and care with Segmekwe. Everyone has the opportunity to create sacred space around this relationship.

2. Letting your relationship with Mother Earth drive your politics, social dynamics & beliefs, and not the other way around: whether we want to admit it or not, our connection to the living beings around us, to Earth, our Mother, absolutely matters in the world we find ourselves navigating today.

3. Grounding yourself in practices of sustainability: make the practice sustainable by embracing these 3 goals:

   tenderness

   a way to process anger

   land-based care

4. Embracing childlikeness: Our challenge is to disrupt the daily status quo of rush, stress, and fear to embrace the gifts of slowing down, playing, and embracing joy when and where we can.

And today, we are looking into the fifth practice:

Infusing spirituality into your daily life in respectful ways through Indigenous wisdom and earth-based care

Photo by Kier in Sight Archives on Unsplash

I want us to broaden our lens a little bit here. If, when you think of the term “Indigenous” you can only think of, “Oh, that’s Kaitlin Curtice!” I want you to broaden. If you think of only Indigenous peoples in what we now call the United States—broaden.

Keep broadening, across the world, across time, across cultures. Indigenous peoples globally are keeping us tethered to Mother Earth, to our bodies, to care, and always have been. Indigenous peoples globally have been part of the movement to sustain healthy relationship to the lands and waters around us for millennia.

So when we think about infusing spirituality into our daily lives in respectful ways by honoring Indigenous wisdom and earth-based care, I want us to keep broadening, keep stretching, keep expanding.

I want to explore this through 3 lenses:

1. loving ourselves

2. loving each other

3. loving Segemekwe

First, infusing spiritual practices rooted in Indigenous wisdom to love ourselves means honoring all of who we are, celebrating the season we find ourselves in, and making space for the coming season. A great book to help you through this journey is this one:

The Seven Circles by Thosh Collins & Chelsey Luger is a beautiful book, a guide, a keeper of history, a celebration of Indigenous wisdom.

From the book description:

The Seven Circles model comprises interconnected circles that keep all aspects of our lives in balance, functioning in harmony with one another. They are:

 Food

Movement

Sleep

Ceremony

Sacred Space

Land

Community

 In The Seven Circles, Luger and Collins share intimate stories from their life journeys growing up in tribal communities, from the Indigenous tradition of staying active and spiritually centered through running and dance, to the universal Indigenous emphasis on a light-filled, minimalist home to create sacred space. Along the way, Luger and Collins invite readers to both adapt these teachings to their lives as well as do so without appropriating and erasing the original context, representing a critical new ethos for the wellness space. Each chapter closes with practical advice on how to engage with the teachings, as well as wisdom for keeping that particular circle in harmony with the others.

The point is, make space for yourself. Show up with care and compassion, yes, especially when the world feels like it’s really, truly on fire. Honor where you are, and dream of where you want to be. This is sustainable, honoring to you and to others.

Photo by madison lavern on Unsplash

Second, when we love each other well, we are grounding ourselves in practices steeped in Indigenous wisdom. We do this through kinship.

I want to remind us of how I think of kinship, written in my book Living Resistance:

Kinship can feel like a very abstract thing, but imagine it like this: I have a string attached to my body, to my heart center, and it goes directly from my heart to yours, and to every other living creature on this planet, to Mother Earth herself. Whatever I do with this heart, with this body, affects you; it travels across that thread and finds its way to you. And whatever you do or embody travels to me, to the ants, to Grandmother Moon, to someone across the world we’ve never met.

Kinship starts in our hearts. It starts with acknowledging that thread, acknowledging that the choices we make and what we choose to embody affects others, all of our relatives, the entire world.

That’s not meant to be a burden, or to terrify us into feeling like we’ll do it all wrong. We will make mistakes as humans. We will send things across that thread that we didn’t mean to, like trauma, hate, prejudice, greed. But we remember, we return to belonging, and we try again. We tend to the thread, to our connection with one another.

Begin today with kinship, with one text, one phone call, one check-in. And go from there.

We begin by asking questions of how we view one another, and we break down the ways we’ve been programmed for hate and prejudice. We honor the work and we do it together.

Photo by Wayne Lee-Sing on Unsplash

And last, we infuse spirituality into our life that is steeped in honoring global Indigenous wisdom by loving Mother Earth.

Wow, do I feel like I am constantly repeating myself here. Does it ever get old, though? I feel like the deepest spiritual lessons we learn are the ones we have to keep repeating, the verses and messages we have to keep reading, the lines we have to tell ourselves again and again to remember why we believe, why we have hope.

It’s the same with our relationship to Segmekwe. When I forget, when I feel a little lost or disconnected from my body or from others or from the land, I return. Yesterday it was taking a moment to sit in my garden and write, to actually pay attention to the moment I was in and the beings around me.

Tomorrow it will be another lesson. We constantly need to learn, re-learn, unlearn, practice, practice, practice.

Autumn is coming. It’s the time of harvest, the time of gathering in. On September 22nd we will ask what the season is bringing to us.

I encourage you to make a plan now. Set intentions, dream, carve out at least part of that day on your calendar, making room for moments to connect with the earth, with the world around you.

Lay down in the grass and dream ahead. Sit in your favorite chair and dream ahead. Put your hands over your heart and dream, dream, dream with the earth.

Honoring the seasons, the four directions, the gifts that Mother Earth gives, is everything. It grounds us to everything, to our very bodies, to our souls, in sustainable ways that keep us going.

Photo by Jasper Garratt on Unsplash

My friends, thank you so much for joining me this summer. I’ve got some plans for this fall, including an opportunity to write some poetry together, and new ways to celebrate my children’s book series.

Please be thinking of me from now until October, when my fourth book is due!

And if you’d like to become a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to writing sessions 2x a month, where we work on whatever projects we are holding in community. If that sounds like something you need in your life, I hope you’ll join us!

And I want to share one more wonderful opportunity for all my writers/aspiring writers out there:

My friend Krissy Kludt has an incredible group called Writing the Wild, and they’ve got a one-year cohort beginning soon! This community is absolutely beautiful, and I love being part of it whenever I can.

More about Writing the Wild:

If you’re looking for a way to get deeper into your own writing practices with an incredible group of folks and teachers, join Writing the wild:

• Create a habit of writing by practicing creativity most days in playful, embodied ways

• Discover your own rhythm of writing, including seasons of input and output, productivity and rest

• Learn with and from our many wonderful guests through books, broadsides, workshops and conversations

• Come away with a renewed sense of yourself as a holistically creative being, inextricably entwined with the wild Earth

• Create a body of work that moves you closer to the mysteries of these connections

• Cultivate rhythms and connections that will continue to support your writing journey beyond the cohort’s timeframe

The cohort is designed for both new and established writers to learn from and alongside one another. We play at the edges: of art and writing, of the personal and ecological realms, of the literary and mainstream worlds. Like an ecotone—a borderland between distinct habitats—we aspire to be an in-between place where a unique diversity of life flourishes.

Learn more & Sign up here!