The way cannot be severed from the Goal. The spatial metaphor here may be misleading if taken superficially. It is not simply that there are different ways leading to the peak but that the summit itself would collapse if all the paths disappeared. The peak is, in a certain sense, the result of the slopes leading to it.

-R Panikkar

That the paths make the mountain brings up images of the games twister or jenga, and the brutal game of family life and my experience with Internal Family Systems work. We are connected, porous, and related, which is one reason why the war in the Middle East is so profoundly heartbreaking. We are neighbors, relatives — all children are our children. The saddest story I know is a story told to me by a Kashmiri friend who grew up not knowing if he was Sufi, Hindu, or Jain, and then awakening to his best friend's father, putting his father on a kill list. The same is true in reverse, of course. Just this morning, I read Baldwin's narration, in The Fire Next Time, of his father's question about young Jimmy's Jewish best friend: "Is he saved?" JB tells his father that his friend “Is a better Christian than you.”

I also think about the stone wall at the bottom of my land, keeping the earth in, but supported equally by the ivy that has grown through the cracks. Our ground itself is made from death and decomposing matter.

Are we saved? How can we find our way home from this dark wilderness of forgetting? This week in my Quaker Meeting, an elder testified with the question. When will a New, New Testament be written? I felt chills. What is a sacred text? I had images of shell mounds in Damariscotta, Maine, when she asked that question. I had visions of Sherrie Mitchell and Sharon Blackie; I saw wise crones and grandmothers and disabled and Black and queer prophets. Our prophets will be found in those with a relational theology. Our prophets will be grandmothers, always have been. Our sacred text is the text of our bodies? More mushroom than we may think. More bacteria and stars, and petrochemicals and microplastics…

Our lack of rootedness is problematic; our enclosed and encapsulated selves are also problematic.

In my work with clients, I draw on biomimicry quite a bit, finding solutions to psycho-spiritual dilemmas by looking to nature for framing, an approach, and even a solution, a way. More and more in my emerging theology ( a theology of the cracks), I turn to nature, and I'm considering continuing my studies in the field of Ecology and Religion for this reason. Nature-inspired strategies are the way forward for our world's problems, whether in the field of design, philosophy, the arts, or religion. We can call this return to nature indigenous.

Which is why I both endorse deep reflectivity around cultural-appropriation and simultaneously endource deep study of, knowledge with and respect for indigenous ways of living and healing. While I agree that the misappropriation of white sage is problematic and must be highlighted and confronted (believe me, I do), in a hierarchy of needs, I'd say that turning towards indigenous ways of knowing is wise and, of course, must be approached wisely and with reverence and care. Honor the wisdom keepers, support those that carry wisdom, and center the well-being of indigenous ways; this should be a universal doctrine and priority for governments, and houses of worship.

By returning to nature, we are returning to reality and returning to what Vajrayana Buddhists call Prajnaparamita, the mother. I see her as the Dark Mother—a place of profound transformational energy. There is a correlation between what I view as an urgent need to heal and honor BIPOC women and healing and honoring our earth. Perhaps I'm being too literal about the power of fertile darkness. Still, the brutal carceral system, the bombs in refugee camps, the destruction of the rainforest, the boarding school graves in Canada and the US, the crisis in Haiti, the desserts of Syria—and on and on, have one thing in common, a dishonoring of the dark mother, a fear of her power, destruction of the sacred knowingness that lives in the bodies of Black and indigenous women. I mentioned Sharon Blackie above to say that Irish wisdom matters and that all people are people of the earth who have a claim to a thread (or many) in this time of forgetting. A thread we must follow, back home to Mama. The Global Indigenous rights movement understands that tribes, communities and cultures are in dialogue and are connected, sometimes in unexpected ways.

This week is my Mama's death anniversary. I love that the festivals of our ancestors are here all over the world. I'm placing a garland of flowers over the heads of your ancestors today; may we become wise ancestors. May we direct all the marigolds, roses, dahlias, to our great Mother Earth, who contains the possibility for a better world within her body.

Religions are fertile swamps; religions are mountains; religions are gardens; religions are roses; religions are, it feels to me, a following thread in a dark cave that, if you trace, will lead you back to the source. The source is always the same: it is the dark mother, the fertile wound of creativity and possibility and life. You can find her in your body, in the body of the earth, in the text of the body, in the body of the text.

A Thread to Follow